Growing up, Nettie Washington Douglass was always somewhat of an oddity. Strangers wanted to touch her. Crowds strained to get a glimpse of her.

Read the name again, and you begin to understand why.

Elissa Eubanks / AJC (ENLARGE)

Nettie Washington Douglass, with grandson, Austin Morris, 5, has worked to instill a strength of character and an unassuming nature in her children and grandchildren.

(ENLARGE)

Frederick Douglass

(ENLARGE)

Booker T. Washington with sons Booker Jr. and Ernest.

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Nettie Washington Douglass, 65, carries the blood of two of the most important men in American history.

She is the great-great-granddaughter of abolitionist and orator Frederick Douglass and the great-granddaughter of educator and author Booker T. Washington.

If there were a Mount Rushmore of black leaders, Douglass and Washington would be carved on it.

"People ask me, 'When did you find out? Did you trace your roots?' No, I have just always known," said Nettie Douglass, who is also the great-granddaughter of Atlanta philanthropist David T. Howard. "My mother always told me that I was not special because of the people I was related to. I was special because I was me."

Nevertheless, her blood has made her a hot speaker, and she's used the platform to bring attention to the modern-day slave trade in Eastern Europe and Africa.

She's also used it to raise awareness of the contributions of Douglass and Washington, fascinating audiences across the country with family stories handed down from generation to generation.

"I am honored and feel it is a privilege to have been chosen for this ancestry," said Douglass, who moved to Atlanta in 1990 and took a job with the city working with senior citizens. "I hope in some small way, I make them both proud.''

Two views

Born 39 years apart in the 1800s, both Frederick Douglass and Booker Taliaferro Washington were former slaves who fought for equality and education.

But while those issues were important to both men, their methods were distinctly different.

Yale University historian David W. Blight said Frederick Douglass, whom he's written about extensively, was strongly in favor of immediate integration and felt the Constitution should apply equally to everyone. Washington, who in 1881 established Tuskegee University and entered the 20th century as America's leading black figure, favored a slower approach to equality.

Douglass died Feb. 20, 1895, seven months before Washington's famous Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition Speech.

"The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremist folly," Washington told a predominantly white audience. "Progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing.''

According to Blight, "Had Douglass read or heard that speech, I don't think there is any question that he would have profoundly disagreed."

In the speech, known as the Atlanta Compromise, Washington did not challenge segregation. He urged blacks to "Cast down your buckets where you are" and make progress as agricultural and industrial laborers.

Despite their philosophical difference, Washington admired Douglass, a key leader in the abolitionist movement. In 1904, Washington dedicated a dorm at Tuskegee in his honor and three years later wrote "The Life of Frederick Douglass."

Washington couldn't have known then that he and Douglass would become linked not only by a building and a book, but also by their descendants.

Families unite

As the story goes, Frederick Douglass III, the great-grandson of Douglass, was a handsome surgeon assigned to the Veterans Affairs hospital in Tuskegee in 1941.

Nettie Hancock Washington had already left Alabama to teach in California but came back to visit in the summer of '41. She was so striking that she was known around campus not just as Booker T.'s granddaughter but as the "Golden Goddess."

"Mom was like a model," Nettie Douglass said. "She was just this pretty thing walking across campus when she met my father."

By November 1941, three months after they met, Frederick Douglass III and Nettie Hancock Washington were married on campus in Booker T. Washington's historic home.

"It was the merging of two powerful families," said Frank L. Toland, a historian at Tuskegee. "... It was a powerful symbol."

But five months later, on April 10, 1942, Douglass III was dead from a suicide.

Nettie Washington Douglass, known as Honey or Nettie III, was born Oct. 10.

The suicide became a family secret — at least to Douglass. Until she was a teenager, she never knew about his depression. Never knew he was often too drunk to go to work at the hospital and too afraid of his mother, Fannie Howard Douglass, to go to rehab. Never knew the pressure Fannie put on him because of the famous name he carried.

Then at 16, while visiting Fannie in Atlanta, she overheard someone talking about her father's suicide.

"I ran onto the balcony and broke down hysterically. I thought he didn't want me," Douglass said. "Grandmother Douglass lived to be 102, and I never told her I knew."

But she told her mother, Nettie Hancock Washington, who assured her that

her father did love her, and it was the pressure of being

a Douglass that killed

him.

"My mother thought, if he couldn't handle it, how can you?" Douglass said."

Living with legacy

Nettie Hancock Washington always encouraged her daughter to downplay her famous lineage. Fame and trying to live up to a family name, she reasoned, could do strange things to a person.

But Douglass couldn't have escaped it — even if she had wanted to. So, she assumed the role expected of her.

She traveled to San Francisco once to present the great Joe DiMaggio with the first Booker T. Washington memorial half-dollar.

During Black History Month, she stays busy traveling the country for appearances or speeches. Crowds usually packed the room to see her, to thank her for her forefathers' contributions.

Everywhere she goes, everyone seems ready to remind Douglass that she had big shoes to fill.

Last June, in an effort to fill those shoes, she and her children formed the Frederick Douglass Family Foundation to fight against human trafficking, a natural extension of her ancestor's work.

According to the foundation, 27 million people are affected by the various forms of slavery, from debt bondage and sex slavery to the buying and selling of humans that's been reported in Darfur.

Already, the foundation has become a leading voice on the issue. Last October, Nettie Douglass' son, Kenneth Bruce Morris, was invited to speak about it at the White House.

Frederick Douglass' "goal was to end slavery, and slavery still exists," said Morris, the foundation's president. "Frederick Douglass was an American visionary. It was a given that the foundation would be about history, but we also had to think about the future.''

Next generations

Nettie Douglass looks almost exactly like her mother, who looked just like Booker T. Washington. But although she carries the face of Washington, her spirit is more aligned with Frederick Douglass.

"I have to pinch myself when I think that I am related to him," she said. "I spent every summer with Grandma [Fannie] Douglass, and she talked about him all the time.''

Perhaps she identifies with the sense of the loss.

When Frederick Douglass was a child, he was taken from his mother and sent to another plantation with his grandmother.

When he was 6, as he recalled in "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave," he was separated from his grandmother and never saw her again.

"But she gave him the strength of character and the will to go forth and achieve what he achieved," said Douglass.

Douglass is hoping she's handed down the same strength of character to her children and grandchildren, who she's raising to be unassuming just as her mother raised her.

Her son, Kenneth, lives in California, along with her daughter, Nettie IV. Her youngest son, Douglass Washington Morris, lives in nearby Stockbridge.

"When it came to my kids, I was trying to do the same happy balance," Douglass said. "I wanted them to know more than I did but not put any pressure on them to perform. I am just asking that you do the best you can.''