Bernier underlines the collaborated work of the Douglass family freedom struggles with the publication of the North Star and Black enlistment in the Civil War.
Celeste-Marie Bernier, author of "If I Survive" and co-author of "Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century's Most Photographed American" with John Stauffer and Zoe Trodd, begins with Frederick Douglass's first trip to the British Isles in 1845. In Scotland he rails against the religious hypocrisy in a "Send Back the Money Campaign" written on Salisbury crag overlooking Edinburgh.
Next Douglass journeys to England where anti-slavery advocates purchase his freedom from the Aulds. After his manumission, Frederick returns to the United States and moves his family to Rochester, New York from Massachusetts. Bernier, a world Frederick Douglass scholar, documents the Douglass family collective freedom fighter efforts. She illustrates how Anna Murray Douglass shepherded slaves through the Underground Railroad to their freedom in Canada burning while raising their children as Frederick continued his anti-slavery speaking engagements to far flung lyceums in the pre-Civil War era.
Two years after the Civil War outbreak, Douglass writes "Men of Color, To Arms." Bernier explains how each of the three Douglass sons answered their father's clarion call. She ends with a tribute to daughter, Rosetta Douglass Sprague, who counseled, "Read, reflect and act."