I answer, a day that reveals to him more than all other days of the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham…your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mock; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings…are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven who does not know that slavery is wrong for him For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder But they weren't his only activities.
He also published an abolitionist newspaper for 16 years A statue of Frederick Douglass on display in the U. Capitol complex. Born in Maryland in , Douglass, like many enslaved children, was separated from his mother at birth; he resided with his loving maternal grandmother until he turned seven. At the age of eight, he became a servant in the home of Hugh Auld in Baltimore. In defiance of the codes that explicitly forbade teaching enslaved people how to read, Mrs. Auld taught Douglass the alphabet, unlocking the gateway to education—which he would extol the rest of his life.
Over time Douglass surreptitiously continued to teach himself to read and write, all the while strengthening his resolve to escape the confines of slavery. He defied the law in not only learning to read and write, but in teaching other enslaved people to do so.
I know its value by not having it. In an effort to break his spirit, Thomas loaned Douglass to Edward Covey, a sadistic local slave master with a reputation for cruelty. Douglass shared his newfound knowledge with other enslaved people. Hired out to William Freeland, he taught other slaves on the plantation to read the New Testament at a weekly church service.
Interest was so great that in any week, more than 40 slaves would attend lessons. Although Freeland did not interfere with the lessons, other local slave owners were less understanding. Armed with clubs and stones, they dispersed the congregation permanently. With Douglass moving between the Aulds, he was later made to work for Edward Covey, who had a reputation as a "slave-breaker.
Eventually, however, Douglass fought back, in a scene rendered powerfully in his first autobiography. After losing a physical confrontation with Douglass, Covey never beat him again. Douglass tried to escape from slavery twice before he finally succeeded. Douglass married Anna Murray, a free Black woman, on September 15, Douglass had fallen in love with Murray, who assisted him in his final attempt to escape slavery in Baltimore. Murray had provided him with some of her savings and a sailor's uniform.
He carried identification papers obtained from a free Black seaman. Douglass made his way to the safe house of abolitionist David Ruggles in New York in less than 24 hours. Anna and Frederick then settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts, which had a thriving free Black community. There they adopted Douglass as their married name.
Charles and Rosetta assisted their father in the production of his newspaper The North Star. Anna remained a loyal supporter of Douglass' public work, despite marital strife caused by his relationships with several other women.
Pitts was the daughter of Gideon Pitts Jr. Their marriage caused considerable controversy, since Pitts was white and nearly 20 years younger than Douglass. At the same time, the characterization feels unkind toward Anna Douglass, who had taken unimaginable risks in order to help Frederick escape slavery. Though Blight is cautious about drawing firm conclusions, it seems clear that Douglass and Assing had an erotic relationship.
She brought poetry into his life in every sense—with the reading she shared but also through the rich fantasy she created in which they would start a free, itinerant life together in Europe.
The dream of escape to the Alps with Ottilie was something to be free for. He became, in one view, a conventional party politician. But there is a more positive way to see this migration from militancy.
He became a proud pillar of the Republican Party—essentially, the same baggy assemblage of minorities and progressives and city people and neoliberals that we find in the Democratic Party today. Even as Reconstruction failed and Jim Crow overtook the South—a reality that Douglass spoke up against as passionately as he had spoken up against slavery—he devoted most of his time to the construction of black institutions.
He received to the dismay of many black contemporaries a patronage post, as the U. Marshal of Washington, D. We would have liked the struggles against the subjugation of women and of blacks to swim along in tandem. And to some degree they did. Douglass was one of the few men present at Seneca Falls in , when Elizabeth Cady Stanton helped launch the modern American feminist movement. But, as the war ended and the eighteen-sixties progressed, there were deep differences between them, which, by our standards, were flattering to neither.
Douglass insisted that the Fifteenth Amendment and other protections of black suffrage were essential, even if they excluded women. Intersectionality having not yet arrived, neither Douglass nor the white suffragists talked much about the special predicament of black women. Stanton, like her fellow-campaigner Susan B. None of it is to our taste: Douglass insulted women, Stanton insulted blacks, and both felt free to insult the Irish. Yet we need to be charitable about the moral failings of our ancestors—not as an act of charity to them but as an act of charity to ourselves.
Our own unconscious assumptions and cultural habits are doubtless just as impregnated with bias as theirs were. We should be kind to them, as we ask the future to be kind to us. But the whalers participated in acts of unimaginable cruelty inflicted on creatures capable of feeling pain and fear—and future generations might well become as intolerant of cruelty to animals as we are of cruelty to people.
As for the ethnic joking that pains Blight, it was an assertion of Americanness: no longer an outsider, Douglass could make after-dinner jokes about the Irish, right along with the rest of his countrymen. Like Assing, she was fiercely devoted to him, and they did the world travelling that had been mere fantasy before.
But he never became morally inert. In , Douglass sought out Thomas Auld, who was dying, to forgive him. That the distinction seems less clear to us—what was Auld but the living face of slavery? For Douglass identified himself as a Christian throughout his life, and his gesture reminds us that slaves absorbed and reimagined the religion of their oppressors in their own morally original terms, as a permanent bulwark against persecution.
Even during the reign of white terror that replaced the plantation concentration camps, the black church became the chief reservoir of social capital, and remained so right through Dr. In the end, Douglass fascinates us because he embodies all the contradictions of the black experience in America.
A case can be made for him as the progenitor of the pragmatic-progressive strain that leads to Dr. King and, even more, to Bayard Rustin and Obama—disabused of illusions, but insistent that with time the Constitution can be realized in its fullness and that democratic politics are the way to do it.
This Douglass is the friend of Lincoln, the man who sustained the necessary relations with institutional power—as Dr. King would do, however guardedly, with Kennedy and then with Johnson. Douglass understood that African-Americans were too small a minority to act without allies. This site was updated on DateFormat Now. Frederick Douglass in his library. Frederick Douglass has been called the father of the civil rights movement.
Douglass served as advisor to presidents. Abraham Lincoln referred to him as the most meritorious man of the nineteenth century.
In his later years Douglass was appointed to several offices. He served as U. Marshal of the District of Columbia during Rutherford B. He was later appointed by President Grant to serve as secretary of the commission of Santo Domingo. Douglass had hoped that his appointments would open doors for other African-Americans, but it was many years before they would follow in his footsteps.
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