A descendant of two the most influential men in black Americans' struggle for racial advancement will visit Bermuda this week.

Nettie Washington Douglass -- great, great granddaughter of American abolitionist Frederick Douglass and great granddaughter of Tuskegee Institute founder Booker T. Washington -- will help Sandys Secondary celebrate its 70th anniversary.

The sought-after speaker will give the keynote address at the school's Heritage Day assembly on Friday morning. She is also scheduled to address the school's ex-scholars and guests that evening, following a school heritage parade in Somerset that will feature the visiting Frederick Douglass High School Marching Band from Atlanta, Georgia.

Principal Melvyn Bassett told The Royal Gazette he was pleasantly surprised when Mrs. Washington Douglass -- who was helping to organise the marching band's visit -- personally accepted his invitation to come to Bermuda.

Ms Washington Douglass will also address young people at a National Youth Concert, organised by the Bermuda National Education Council, at Bernard Park on Saturday. And she will be hosting a reception at the National Gallery on Sunday.

Ms Washington Douglass speaks to students throughout the US by giving living history performances and talks about her heritage.

Her parents, surgeon Frederick Douglass III and schoolteacher Nettie Washington, met at Tuskegee which was one of the first black learning institution in the US and founded by former slave Booker T. Washington in 1881.

The couple married in 1941, but Ms Washington Douglass never knew her father.

He killed himself three months before her birth.

"My mother never got over the death of my father,'' she told the Atlanta Constitution. "She always felt that being Frederick Douglass III had been a burden on him. From the time my father could walk, his mother raised him to be Frederick Douglass. That created a tremendous amount of pressure. My mother determined that I was not going to be affected by this double honour.'' Frederick Douglass, often referred to as "the father of the civil rights movement'' long before the 1960s, was a runaway slave who became a leader, journalist, and abolitionist in the mid-1800s.

He is particularly famous for his years in Rochester, New York where he published the "North Star'' newspaper and for his years in Washington D.C.

when he was an adviser to presidents and the spokesman for "coloured'' America. He was also US minister and consul general to Haiti.

Nettie Washington Douglass, descendant of two famous Americans, will deliver the keynote address at Sandys Secondary School's heritage day assembly this week.