Before the Games of 1908, Fred Grace, born in Edmonton, Middlesex in February 1884, had never won a significant title. A boxer at the Eton Mission Boxing Club, Grace beat Matt Wells, later to become British and European professional champion, in his Olympic quarter-final. After the Games, Grace went on to win four ABA lightweight titles between 1909 and 1920. However, boxing was banned from the 1912 Games in Stockholm and Grace was unable to defend his title. By 1920 he was 36 years old and at the Games in Antwerp he won just one bout before being eliminated by the eventual winner of the title, Samuel Mosberg, of the US. Grace worked as a heating engineer for most of his life and retired in 1949. He died on July 23 at Ilford, Essex, aged 80, after being struck by a car while out walking.
Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, who later became known as Frederick Douglass, was born a slave in Talbot County, Maryland near Hillsboro.
Thereafter, as detailed in his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (published in 1845), Douglass succeeded in learning to read from white children in the neighborhood in which he lived, and by observation of writings of the men with whom he worked.
Shortly after he returned home, Frederick Douglass died of a massive heart attack or stroke in his adopted hometown of Washington D.C. He is buried in Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, NY.
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