[1][2] Rosetta was born to Anna Murray-Douglass and Frederick Douglass in 1839, in New Bedford, Massachusetts.

[3] In 1845, the Rochester Board of Education closed public schools to black students.

She also attended Oberlin College’s Young Ladies Preparatory and Massachusetts' Salem Normal School.

[2] Rosetta was a critical thinker like her father, but struggled against the demands of gender roles during her time.

[6] She wrote “The galling chain and merciless lash were the instruments used to accomplish humiliation and degradation of the African.

Avarice was the factor in the composition of the character of a large number of white men of America that wrought such ravishes in the well-being of the African.” She also wrote, “Allow the Negro two hundred and fifty years of unselfish contact to offset the two hundred and fifty years of Caucasian selfishness, and be as assiduous in his regeneration as you were in his degradation - then judge him.”[7] Douglass worked with her father, and had a keen sense of social justice issues.