Reflection on Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight

              Blight’s biography of Frederick Douglass is a very thorough look at the life and times of the great American thinker, which is especially interesting in the times shortly before and after the Civil War, when Douglass’ influence was greatest and his ideas tested. Going in, I knew that Frederick Douglass was a great thinker, but I didn’t realize that he was really more of an orator than anything else. He gave legendary speeches across the nation rallying Americans to the abolitionist cause. He was a deeply religious man who took great inspiration from the Old Testament, so much that I frequently consulted my bible to find the passages he referenced. Douglass was pretty radical and came around to support a violent end to slavery a few years before the Civil War. I was impressed by the fact that as a young man he was sent to be “broken” by a slave master and instead of being broken, he beat and strangled the man, humiliating him. The man, embarrassed, sent him back to his master without revealing what happened.

              As a young man, Frederick Douglass (then Frederick Bailey) was taken away from his family and sold to a couple in Baltimore, where the wife made the mistake of teaching him how to read. Her husband ordered her to stop, but Douglass found ways to get more books and information and became a rebellious, unmanageable teenage slave. His master was cruel, but not cruel enough to send him to the deep south when he was caught leading a group of runaways at 18 years old. That gave him enough time to plan another attempt, and he finally made it north in 1838, at 20 years old. Douglass went with his new wife, Anna (who we never hear much about), to Massachusetts, where he was discovered by abolitionists in 1840. By 1841, Douglass’ occupation in the town directory was changed from “laborer” to “reverend,” and he gained fame as an orator. He ended up getting to know the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and working with him. Garrison seems kind of condescending and patronizing in this book though, and I didn’t love that about him.

              As a Garrisonian, Douglass denounced political participation from 1841-1851 and argued that all forms of participation in American government were corrupt. However, in the 1850s, Douglass decided to accept working within the system. He also gave up on non-violence, deciding that violence could be acceptable as a means to end slavery. In fact, Douglass met with John Brown before his famous raid in Harper’s Ferry bringing him money and a recruit. That said, Douglass was not a warrior. He did not participate in the struggle at Harper’s Ferry and was not ready to die at 41. With a young family, that was definitely the right choice.

              It must have been incredibly disappointing for Douglass to see so much progress erased for African Americans after the Civil War. In the 8-1 ruling in United States v. Stanley, the court held that the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment “applied only to states and not to individual acts of discrimination by a person or business establishment,” as Blight explains. This legalized discrimination against blacks and paved the way for Jim Crow. Through the end of the 19^th century, the Supreme Court consistently found in favor of states’ rights and helped solidify the racist and evil system of the South at that time.



Miscellaneous Facts:

• Frederick Douglass was a feminist and forcefully endorsed the right to vote for women at the Seneca Falls Conference
• Douglass had two white mistresses (Julia Griffiths and Otillie Assing) over the course of his life who regularly visited his and his wife’s house and sometimes stayed for extended periods of time. I can only imagine how terrible it was to be Anna Douglass, who it seems like Frederick did not really treat very well.
• Gerrity Smith, an associate of Douglass, wrote a book called “Heads of the Colored People,” which must have inspired “The Heads of Colored People” by Nafissa Thompson!
• Douglass despised colonization schemes designed to liberate the slaves and send them to Africa or anywhere far from the United States. 
• Despite being an anti-racist, Douglass had pretty bad things to say about Native Americans and often compared blacks to them to show how much better blacks were.
• Douglass wrote three autobiographies, later deemphasizing slavery and emphasizing his ascendance as a great man.
• After his wife Anna died, Douglass married a white woman, Helen Pitts, and that was very controversial among all races. 
• Douglass climbed the Great Pyramid of Cheops at Giza at 69 years old. 
• Douglass became the US Ambassador to Haiti towards the end of his life.
• In his autobiography, Douglass writes of his father, “I say nothing of father…. Slavery does away with fathers as it does away with families.” His father was truly his mother’s white overseer, but his quote gets at a really important truth of slavery that affects the USA to this day—slavery worked by destroying family bonds over decades and centuries. That sort of evil cannot be overcome for several generations.