Be included among those Americans the modern theologian Donald W. Shriver Jr. has called honest patriots, those who manifest an ironic-tragic love of country by learning, narrating, and working throug...
He would have repeatedly encountered irresistible words such as freedom, liberty, tyranny, and the rights of man. 19 Well before he read any serious history, he garnered and cherished a vocabulary of...
Douglass found little encouragement in the behavior of the Northern public during the secession crisis. The bulk of white Northerners had always viewed abolitionists with suspicion or contempt, and wi...
By the Rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea! we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there, they that carried us away captive, required of...
Douglass played the prophetic role of the suffering servant with zeal. His famous statement about agitation, delivered in a speech in 1857, has stood the test of time and numerous protest ideologies:...
The Proclamation, even with its limitations (freeing slaves only in the Confederate states or in occupied areas), brought about a world-historical moment, a complete revolution in the position of a na...
When the Baptist meetinghouse in Ithaca threw the band of lecturers out of its evening session, they adjourned into God’s house—the open air—and held their impromptu meeting in the courthouse square....
Feminist Abby Kelley to the executive committee by a tally of 557 to 451.
Immigrant poor, said Douglass, that slavery is the only power that can prevent the laboring white man from falling to the level of the slave’s poverty and degradation.
Douglass told white northern voters that 'The blood of the slave is on your garments. You have said that slavery is better than freedom. That war is better than peace. And that cruelty is better than...
It is not well to forget the past, Douglass warned in a speech later in the 1880s. Memory was given to man for some wise purpose. The past is . . . the mirror in which we may discern the dim outlines...
Everybody in the south, wrote Douglass, wants the privilege of whipping somebody else.
I am no minister of malice, he said, I would not repel the repentant, but . . . may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I forget the difference between the parties to that . . . bloody conflic...
His wickedly selfish Americans loved to celebrate their own heritage, and on this condition are content to see others crushed in our midst.
Grafton, Massachusetts, in early 1842, while working solo, Douglass was met by mob hostility in addition to an unwelcoming clergy. So he went to a hotel and borrowed a dinner-bell, with which in hand...
It caused one of Douglass’s most challenging psychic dilemmas. He repeatedly faced the question of how uncompromising radicalism could mix with a learned pragmatism to try to influence real power, to...
This terrible baptism of blood and fire through which our nation is passing . . . not as has been most cruelly affirmed, because of the presence of men of color in the land, but by malignant . . . vic...
We can only guess at the thrill in Douglass’s heart, knowing that the cause he had so long pleaded—a sanctioned war to destroy slavery and potentially to reinvent the American republic around the prin...
Though I am not rich, I am not absolutely poor. . . . I am working now less for myself than for those around me. —FREDERICK DOUGLASS, MAY 6, 1868
All great autobiography is about loss, about the hopeless but necessary quest to retrieve and control a past that forever slips away. Memory is both inspiration and burden, method and subject, the thi...
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