The spirit of a free man

Public Interest, Summer, 2000 by Diana Schaub

THE life and writings of Frederick Douglass are far from forgotten. For the last 30 years, the figure of Frederick Douglass has been a textbook staple. Every schoolchild can be presumed to have heard the dramatic story of the runaway slave become abolitionist leader, to have gazed upon his leonine visage, and read at least a boxed excerpt from one of his three autobiographies. In the better high schools, Douglass's first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, is often assigned as supplementary reading (sadly, even when high schools assign primary texts, they are viewed as supplementary, not primary). Moreover, while it is fashionable to draw attention to the clay feet of other American greats (to the point of slinging mud onto them if need be), Frederick Douglass still receives the hero's treatment.

Yet institutionalized reverence, even when fully deserved, can be deadening. Douglass now has something of a George Washington problem. Students have heard the same old stories intoned piously year after year--a fact I learned when I started to give a talk on Douglass at a Baltimore public high school, only to be greeted with sighs and groans of "not him again." A century and more ago, the case was otherwise; then Douglass was encountered first by way of live testimonials. In "The Intellectuals and the Boston Mob," Booker T. Washington described the galvanizing effect:

Even before I had learned to read books or newspapers, I remember hearing my mother and other coloured people in our part of the country speak about Frederick Douglass's wonderful life and achievements. I heard so much about Douglass when I was a boy that one of the reasons why I wanted to go to school and learn to read was that I might read for myself what he had written and said.

Douglass, however, was not part of the curriculum. As Washington pointed out, "the stories we read in school were all concerned with the success and achievements of white boys and men." Regardless of race, Washington confessed that he always took "a great deal of satisfaction in the lives of men who had risen by their own efforts from poverty to success. It is a great thing for a boy to be able to read books of that kind." Nonetheless, the inspiration to be drawn from such stories was vitiated by racism and self-doubt. When the youthful Washington spoke of emulating white heroes ("what others had done some of us might also be able to do"), his schoolmates discounted the possibility, citing white hostility to black achievement. Washington's unanswerable rejoinder was Frederick Douglass.

Washington sought out Douglass's autobiography on his own and read it over and over. It had the power to offset all of the negative forces--forces that Washington in no way minimizes. Indeed, he insists on their deleterious impact:

It makes a great deal of difference in the life of a race, as it does in the life of an individual, whether the world expects much or little of that individual or of that race. I suppose that every boy and every girl born in poverty have felt at some time in their lives the weight of the world against them. What the people in the communities did not expect them to do it was hard for them to convince themselves that they could do.

With the weight of the world on one side of the scale and the example of Frederick Douglass on the other, the balance managed to tip toward self-confidence and hope.

W.E.B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington's rival for leadership in the early years of the twentieth century, agreed with Washington about at least one thing: the weightiness of Douglass. In his essay "The Talented Tenth," DuBois says:

There was Purvis and Remond, Pennington and Highland Garnett, Sojourner Truth and Alexander Crummel, and above all, Frederick Douglass--what would the abolition movement have been without them? They stood as living examples of the possibilities of the Negro race, ... --they were the men who made American slavery impossible.

This knowledge ought now to be the common possession of all Americans. The mainstream neglect of Douglass, typical of the historiography of the first half of the twentieth century, has been remedied. At mid century, when Philip S. Foner sought a publisher for his path-breaking multi-volume edition of Douglass's journalism, speeches, and letters, no university or commercial press was interested. International Publishers, the official Communist publishing house subsidized by the Soviet Union, brought the volumes out. Today, all three of Douglass's autobiographies are readily available in numerous editions and the Library of America has brought them together, as certifiable classics, in one well-produced volume. [ ]

Like the curricular inclusion of Douglass, this canonization represents both a great gain and a real danger--the danger of petrification. The Communist publisher, Alexander Trachtenberg, was wrong if he thought that Douglass could be mustered on the side of "Amerika," but he was right to feel the challenge in Douglass's words. The challenge is still there, in part at least because--despite the civil rights revolution--racial tensions, troubles, inequalities, and memories are still with us. As Douglass put it: "The destiny of the nation has the Negro for its pivot." So long as that remains true, knowledge of the principles and statesmanship of Douglass can serve as a standard by which to judge current policies and contemporary race leadership. Liberals, in particular, need to confront Douglass's astringent arguments against the cultivation of black race pride and his compelling insistence on the duty of self-emancipation and self-elevation. One shouldn't admire the life, and then dismiss as out-of-date the con victions that would make such a life achievable by others.