Frederick Douglass: In Five Speeches (2022) Movie Script
I have no love for America.
As such, I have no patriotism.
I have no country.
What country have I?
The institutions of this country
do not know me,
do not recognize me as a man.
I am not thought of or spoken of
except as a piece of property.
Now,
in such a country as this,
I cannot have...
patriotism.
Imagine that you had
to dispel doubts
about your full humanity
every time you took to a stage.
Imagine you had
to refute doubts
about your own native ability
every time you picked up a pen.
Imagine having to fight to show
that you were as complicated
a human being
as any who walked
the face of the earth,
having to fight that battle
over and over every day.
That was the life
of Frederick Douglass.
He was the most
famous Black man
in the world in
the 19th century,
and he achieved that position
through one means...
His voice.
More than 20 years of my life
were consumed
in a state of slavery.
I grew up to manhood
eating the bread
and drinking the cup of slavery
with the most degraded
of my brother bondmen,
and sharing with them
all the painful conditions
of their wretched lot.
In consideration
of these facts,
I feel that
I have a right to speak
and to speak strongly.
Yet, my friends...
I feel bound to speak truly.
The power of Douglass' words,
the way that he wielded
language, was undeniable,
and is still undeniable.
He could take you,
in a single sentence sometimes,
inside of a crisis
and say, "Here's
what it's doing to us."
"Here's what it's doing to you.
Here's what it's doing
to the nation."
There can be no peace
to the wicked
while slavery continues
in the land.
It will be condemned,
and there will be agitation.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: He was
able to realize from his own experience
that an arbitrary system
had been created,
designed to reinforce
the sense of inferiority
of every Black person.
A system that was designed
to make them believe
that nature had made them
inferior to white people.
And his job
was to blow up that system.
The very first mental effort
that I now remember on my part
was an attempt
to solve the mystery,
why am I a slave?
Why are some people slaves
and others masters?
I could not have been more
than 7 or 8 years old
when I began to make
this subject my study.
It's a childhood where
he has to learn to survive.
He has to learn
to overcome his own fear.
He has to see brutality,
but live past it.
From my earliest recollection,
I entertained a deep conviction
that slavery would not always
be able to hold me
within its foul embrace.
The desire for freedom
only needed a favorable breeze
to fan it into a blaze
at any moment.
Kenneth B. Morris, Jr.:
There was one point in his life
that he described
as divine providence
in his favor,
and that was he was chosen
from among all of the children
on the plantation
on the Eastern shore of Maryland
to go to Baltimore
to be the house servant
for his master's family.
I left that plantation
with inexpressible joy.
Going to live at Baltimore
opened the gateway
to all my subsequent prosperity.
Baltimore made it possible
for Douglass
to dream and imagine.
He sees the world come into
the harbor of Baltimore,
this maritime capital,
and he can begin to imagine
that there's a world outside.
Morris, Jr.: But what
happened, most importantly,
when he got there,
his slave mistress
didn't know that it was
illegal to teach him.
She was just a kind,
Christian lady with this heart,
and there was Fred, you know,
bright and eager
and ready to learn,
and so, she naturally
began to teach him his ABCs.
He's in search of any kind of
adult loving figure
he can find.
He finds one in Sophia Auld.
She taught him his alphabet,
read out loud with him,
got him interested in language.
But alas, this kind heart
had but such a short time
to remain such.
Mr. Auld found out
what was going on,
and at once forbade Mrs. Auld
to instruct me further,
telling her
that it was unlawful
as well as unsafe
to teach a slave to read.
He would at once
become unmanageable
and of no value to his master.
These words sank deep
into my heart
and called into existence
an entirely
new train of thought.
From that moment,
I understood the pathway
from slavery to freedom.
And he would teach himself
to read and write.
He was very clever in the way
that he went about doing that.
He would carry bread
in his pocket,
and he would trade the bread
for reading lessons
with the poor kids.
He picks up scraps of the
King James version of the Bible
from gutters.
He dries them out,
and he sets them out nicely
so he can learn from them.
He was reading all the time,
and the fact that
he never had
one day of formal education
is just flabbergasting.
He tells us that he first sees
the word "abolition"
in a newspaper,
and then, again in a magazine.
We can only imagine our way into
a young boy's mind.
He's trapped in this world
of enslavement,
and now
he learns that up North,
they're organizing
to end slavery.
That's got to be
an amazing source of hope,
and by the time he's 18,
he's scheming to escape.
On Monday,
the third day of September 1838,
I bade farewell
to the city of Baltimore
and to that slavery
which had been
my abhorrence from childhood.
This is one of the most
unusual escape stories
in all of the literature
about slavery.
There are no bloodhounds
and no, uh, nights
hiding in the swamps.
Essentially, Douglass goes
to the Baltimore train station
and jumps on a train.
I was well on the way
to Havre de Grace
before the conductor
came into the Negro car
to collect tickets
and examine the papers
of his Black passengers.
This was a critical moment
in the drama.
Had the conductor looked
closely at the paper,
he could not have failed
to discover that it called
for a very different
looking person from myself.
The train was moving
at a very high rate of speed
for that time of
railroad travel,
but to my anxious mind,
it was moving far too slowly.
Minutes were hours
and hours were days.
He takes that train,
two other trains,
and three steamboats later,
in about 38 hours,
he arrived into lower Manhattan
at the base of Chambers Street.
I found myself in the big city
of New York,
a free man.
The bonds that had held me
to old master were broken.
No man now had a right
to call me his slave
or assert mastery over me.
Such is briefly the manner
of my escape from slavery
and the end of my experience
as a slave.
In the summer of 1841,
a grand anti-slavery
convention
was held in Nantucket
under the auspices
of William Lloyd Garrison
and his friends.
William Lloyd Garrison was
the most important
abolitionist in America
at the time Douglass met him.
He led a moral
suasionist campaign
to destroy slavery.
I attended this convention
never supposing
I would take part
in the proceedings.
I was not aware that anyone
connected with the convention
even so much as knew my name.
I was, however, quite mistaken.
He says he didn't intend on
speaking at the convention.
He was just there to listen.
But once asked to speak,
he got up and simply told
his personal story
from his slave youth.
I feel greatly embarrassed
when I attempt to address
an audience of white people.
I'm not used to
speaking to them.
And it makes me tremble
when doing so
because I have always
looked up to them with fear.
My friends, I've come to tell
you something about slavery.
What I know of it...
as I felt it.
When I came North,
I was astonished to find
that the abolitionists,
they knew so much about it.
They were acquainted
with its deadly effects
as well as if they had lived
within its midst.
But although they can
tell you its history,
though they
can depict its horrors,
they cannot speak as I can,
from experience.
They cannot refer you to a back
covered with scars as I can.
For I have felt these wounds.
I have suffered under the lash
without the power of resisting.
Yes!
My blood has sprung out
as the lash embedded
itself within my flesh.
Yet my master has the reputation
of being a pious man
and a good Christian.
I'm not from any of the states
where slaves are said to be
in their most
degraded condition,
but from Maryland,
where slavery is said to exist
within its mildest form.
Yet, I can stand here
and relate atrocities
that would make your blood boil
at the thought of them.
I lived on the plantation
of Colonel Lloyd
on the Eastern shore of Maryland
and belonged to
the gentleman's clerk.
He owned probably not less
than a thousand slaves.
And I mention
the name of the man
and also the persons
who perpetrated the deeds
of which I am about to relate,
running the risk of being hurled
back into interminable bondage,
for yet, I am a slave.
Yet for the sake of the cause
of the sake of humanity,
I will mention the names and
glory in running the risk of it.
For I have the gratification
to know that if I shall fall
by the utterance of the truth
in this matter,
that if I shall be
hurled back into bondage
to gratify my slaveholder,
to be killed by inches,
that every drop of blood
I shall shed,
every groan which I shall utter,
every pain which
shall rack my frame,
every sob which I shall indulge,
shall be the instrument
under God
of tearing down
the bloody pillar of slavery
and of hastening the day
of deliverance
for three millions
of my brethren in bondage.
What's interesting
is I feel like
there's been individuals
over time
who have had to do great things
at a much younger age.
In his early 20s,
having to deliver this,
again, in front of a body
of white people,
must have been like terrifying.
But at the same time, too,
like, he's already suffered
so much terror,
what more does he have to lose?
You can feel his passion.
You can feel it
within the words.
You don't even have to see it.
It was just like
his soul transcended.
It was like something
entered his body,
and then just like
he was channeling through.
It was so compelling, however,
this personal story,
this, this personal witness,
that they invited him to
speak again the next morning.
And with that,
a phenomenon was born.
Once William Lloyd Garrison
hears Douglass
deliver his address
in Nantucket,
he is enraptured with
Douglass' abilities
and his skills and his gifts.
The Massachusetts
Anti-Slavery Society
hired him
to go out
on the circuit that fall.
Much interest was awakened.
Many came,
no doubt, from curiosity
to hear what a Negro
could say in his own cause.
Fugitive slaves were rare then,
and as
a fugitive slave lecturer...
I had the advantage
of being a brand-new fact.
The first one out.
Audiences loved this.
He had a gift as a storyteller.
He had an unforgettable voice.
What Douglass has that
no white abolitionist had
was the ability
to tell his story
from the perspective
of an enslaved person,
and because of
that authenticity
and because of the skills
that he developed
to communicate
that authenticity,
the sky was the limit for
Douglass' ambitions and aims.
He wanted to defeat slavery,
but I think he also has
that young man's ambition
to defeat those around him
who were doing
the same thing he was,
and he just wanted to do it
better than they did.
"Tell your story, Frederick,"
would whisper my revered
friend Mr. Garrison
as I stepped
upon the platform.
I could not always
follow the injunction
for I was now
reading and thinking.
New views of the subject were
being presented to my mind.
It did not entirely satisfy me
to narrate wrongs.
I felt like denouncing them.
He's beginning
to kind of burst out
of the strategic straitjacket
that the Garrisonians
had put him in.
The Garrisonians
wanted to control
the sound of
Frederick Douglass' voice.
"Just stick to the facts, Fred,"
you know, um, you know,
"You're speaking
kind of white, Fred.
"Put a little plantation
in your voice, Fred.
"Nobody's going to believe
that anyone who sounds
"as white or as educated as you
"was really an enslaved person,
so remember your role, boy."
And he goes, "Ah, remember
my role, huh? I'll show you."
Without question,
Frederick Douglass
wrote himself into history
with his autobiography.
His book is not only a testimony
about the experience of
a sensitive enslaved person.
It is an act of language.
Douglass creates a work of art.
The publishing of my narrative
was regarded by my friends
with mingled feelings of
satisfaction and apprehension.
I became myself painfully
alive to the liability
which surrounded me.
It was thus I was led to seek
a refuge in England.
Morris, Jr.: When Frederick
Douglass had to escape to Europe,
he was a fugitive slave
at the time,
and the notoriety of having
a best-selling book
threatened his freedom,
so he would flee to Europe
for a couple of years
as a cooling-off period
and speak about
the abolition of slavery.
He spoke in some
hundred and some venues
all over the British Isles.
The red carpet is essentially
rolled out for him,
and he begins to realize,
"In England,
"I'm treated with respect
and with dignity,
but in America,
I'm treated as property."
And he could, for
the first time, as he says,
feel like a man,
by which he meant a human being
and not a Black man.
Not a Black human being.
And that, everybody...
I experienced that.
I experienced that
the first time I went to Europe,
and certainly the first time
I went to Africa,
and that is a,
a deeply affecting experience.
When Douglass returned
from England
in the spring of 1847,
he returns both
an inspired young man,
but he also returns
extremely angry.
This is a much
more militant Douglass
as an abolitionist,
and when he returns,
he goes out
on the circuit immediately,
speech-making,
but in those speeches,
he starts with lines like,
"My country hates me.
I hate it back."
He was young,
he was outraged,
he was powerful,
and he wasn't
gonna take it anymore.
He was just all fire.
I have no love for America.
Such...
I have no patriotism.
The only thing that links me
to this land
is my family
and the painful consciousness
that here,
there are three million
of my fellow creatures,
groaning beneath the iron rod
of the worst despotism
that could be devised
even in pandemonium.
That here are men and brethren,
identified with me
by their complexion.
Identified with me
by their hatred of slavery.
Identified with me by their love
and aspirations for liberty.
Identified with me
by the stripes upon their backs,
their inhumane wrongs
and cruel sufferings.
This...
and this only...
attaches me to this land,
and brings me here
to plead with you
and with the country at large
for the disenthrallment
of my oppressed countrymen
and to overthrow
this system of slavery,
which is crushing them
to the earth!
But it is asked...
"What good will this do
or what good has it done?
"Have you not irritated,
"have you not annoyed
your American friends
and the American people
rather than done them good?"
I admit we have irritated them.
They deserve to be irritated!
I am anxious to irritate
the American people
on this question!
As it is in physics,
so in morals.
There are cases
which demand irritation
and counter-irritation.
The conscience
of the American public
needs this irritation.
And I would blister it all over,
from center to circumference,
until it gives signs
of a pure and a better life
than it is now
manifesting to the world!
This was the speech in which
we were closest in age.
Frederick is 30 years old
in this moment,
and I'm 31 years old
in this moment.
When he says...
that it's crushing
them to the earth,
that, that's when I went,
okay, well that's...
that's Brother Floyd.
You know, that is that image.
And it's not a new thing.
Just made me want to
say those words
to people, uh, for
the people who couldn't.
He was so angry,
so you can begin
to see it right there.
Now, he's going to plow
this new energy, of course,
into a newspaper.
He wants to create
his own kind
of anti-slavery movement,
apart from the Garrisonians.
Nothing more dramatic
could have recalculated
their relationship
than for Douglass
to establish
a parallel publication.
Garrisonians will be
extremely angry about this.
It's as if he thought about
it while he was in England.
"How can I declare
my independence?
How can I show I'm a man?"
And now, the fame grows
ever, ever, evermore.
As the fame grows,
the invitations to speak grow.
It became a kind of
an American phenomenon
to see Douglass.
"Did you see Douglass?
Let me tell you the time"
"I first saw Douglass,
I first heard Douglass."
"Well what did he sound like?"
Newspapers are full of this.
This was, as many
journalists had put it,
a volcanic, magisterial orator.
He could command
crowds of thousands.
And from that point on,
all the way to 1877,
he will never make a living
any other way
than with his voice and his pen.
He wrote millions of words,
but Douglass will
not tell us anything
about his private life,
especially his marriage.
He hid everything he could
about his marriages,
relationships, his children.
His relationship
with Anna Douglass
is an enigma,
a, a, a puzzle,
and I think
he wanted it that way.
Frederick Douglass
had a wife? What?
Why don't we know anything
about her? Who was she?
Who would be married
to Frederick Douglass?
While he was traveling
around the world,
speaking out against slavery,
you know, she would
take care of the kids.
She would take care
of the finances.
She would press his clothes
so that he
would be looking sharp.
She met Harriet Tubman,
Sojourner Truth, John Brown,
anybody who was anybody
in the anti-slavery movement
came to her house.
But she tended to stay
in the kitchen area
or out in the garden,
or, you know, in spaces
where she was comfortable.
His marriage to Anna is
both the center of his life,
the heart of his family,
but it also became
increasingly, no doubt,
what we moderns would call
a difficult marriage.
There's one letter he writes
to a friend, a woman friend,
he had lots of women
correspondents,
and he just unloads about
how Anna has just read
the riot act to him.
If I should write down
all her complaints,
there would be no room
to put my name at the bottom.
And by the time I am home,
a week or two longer,
I shall have pretty full
learned in how many points
there are needs of improvement
in my temper
and disposition as
a husband and a father.
They were married 44 years,
and I was angry at him
after seeing the extent
to which Frederick Douglass
ignored her
and her contributions
to his life and his writing.
But, you don't do
the kinds of things
that Frederick Douglass did
without some substantial
ego going on.
As to the whole
question of fidelity,
I, I can only, uh, say
that it's much disputed.
Too many times, scholars,
both Black and white,
have felt it necessary
to remove the warts
from prominent figures
in African-American history.
Douglass had his flaws.
He had his weaknesses.
I think the more human
we make our heroes,
the more noble they become.
There's always
a poignant contrast
between Douglass' private
and public lives.
That same virile Douglass
that we have a visual image of
also collapsed into depression.
Collapsed into...
almost incapacity,
at times, under the pressure.
The demand upon my time
and attention
by my books and papers
and by visitors are incessant.
I am beginning
to look upon a journey
as a potential misfortune.
In the early 1850s,
it's clear to me
he had what we would sometimes
call a nervous breakdown.
He kind of fell to pieces.
But even in this moment,
'51, '52, '53, '54,
he does some of
his greatest work.
In the summer of 1852,
when he was 34 years old,
Douglass wrote what's probably
his most famous speech.
Morris, Jr.:
He was invited to speak
at the Ladies'
Anti-Slavery Society
about Independence Day.
Big, big event.
Corinthian Hall
in Rochester, New York.
"Douglass says," Okay.
"I'll give
a Fourth of July speech.
"But, I'm going to speak
beyond Corinthian Hall.
"I'm going to speak
beyond Rochester.
I'm going to speak
to the country."
He worked on that speech
for at least three weeks.
He tells us that in a letter,
and, man, does it show it.
It would go down in history
as the oratorical masterpiece
of the entire
abolitionist movement.
Mr. President,
friends, and fellow citizens.
He who could address
this audience
without a quailing sensation
has stronger nerves than I have.
I do not remember ever
to have appeared as a speaker
before an assembly
more shrinkingly
nor with greater distrust
of my ability
than I do this day.
The papers and placards say
that I am to deliver
a Fourth of July oration.
Fact is, ladies and gentlemen,
the distance
between this platform
and the slave plantation
from which I escaped
is considerable.
And the difficulties
to be overcome
in getting from the latter
to the former
are by no means slight.
I liken the speech
to a symphony
with three movements.
The first movement,
fairly short,
is Douglass putting
his audience at ease
about the glories
of the Founding Fathers,
the glories of the Declaration
of Independence,
and it is beautiful,
and the audience
must have felt like, "Wow.
Frederick's going
to lift us up today."
Fellow citizens,
I am not wanting in respect
for the Fathers
of this Republic.
The signers of the Declaration
of Independence were brave men.
They were peace men.
But they preferred revolution
to peaceful submission
to bondage.
And then, the whole
middle movement of the symphony
is like a hail storm.
It's the physical horror
of slavery.
He wrecks upon his audience.
"You invited me here
to sing for you,
but I'm not going to sing.
I'm going to make you hurt."
Mark.
Mark the sad procession
as it moves wearily along
and the inhuman wretch
who drives them.
Hear his savage yells
and his blood-chilling oaths
as he hurries
on his affrighted captives.
Attend the auction.
See the men
examined like horses.
See the forms of women rudely
and brutally exposed
to the shocking gaze
of American slave buyers.
Do you mean,
citizens, to mock me
by asking me
to speak here today?
What do I or those
I represent have to do
with your national independence?
Are the great principles
of political freedom
and natural justice
embodied in that declaration
extended to us?
What to the American slave
is your Fourth of July?
I answer a day
that reveals to him,
more than any 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.
The existence of slavery
in this country
brands your humanity
as base pretense,
and your Christianity as a lie.
Had I the ability and could
I reach the nation's ear,
I would today
pour out a fiery stream
of biting ridicule,
blasting reproach,
withering sarcasm,
and stern rebuke.
For it is not light
that is needed,
but fire.
It is not the gentle shower,
but thunder.
We need the storm,
the whirlwind,
and the earthquake.
The feeling of
the nation must be roused.
The propriety of the nation
must be startled,
the hypocrisy of the nation
must be exposed,
and the crimes
against God and man
must be proclaimed
and denounced.
And he stops.
You can sense a pause
in the rhetoric.
It's as though
the storm is over.
The audience has felt in pain
for 10 pages of this text,
and then, he lets them back up.
The last short movement
of the speech,
he says,
"But your nation is still young.
"It is still malleable,
"but you're on the precipice
of self-destruction.
"If you can't solve
this problem of slavery,
there will be no America."
I do not despair
of this country.
There are forces in operation
which must inevitably work
the downfall of slavery.
I therefore leave off
where I began.
With hope.
We don't hear
a lot about people
who, um, weren't allowed
to have an education,
and who got this far, had such,
you know, eloquent language
and such an intention.
You know, he's a Black man
in that period,
or even in this period, um.
He has to be extremely savvy
about getting people's attention
and disarming people,
and then figuring out
how to, how to get in there
to really change
people's thinking.
And he does it really
effectively and beautifully.
Douglass knew that an argument
had to be eloquent
to be persuasive.
That you had to appeal
to the mind,
but through the emotions.
And, he knocked it
out of the park.
The Civil War began
when Douglass was
43 years old.
So, he was too old to fight
but he wasn't too old
to deliver his speeches,
his writings,
to the American people
who he felt needed to hear it.
The war brings about
a personal recreation
and transformation.
Douglass saw it as finally,
finally,
the coming of what
he had most hoped for.
During all the winter of 1860,
notes of preparation
for a tremendous conflict
came to us on every wind.
The South was mad and would
listen to no concessions.
They had come
to hate everything
which had the prefix "free."
Free states,
free schools,
free speech,
and freedom generally,
and they would have
no more such prefixes.
This haughty
and unreasonable attitude
of the imperious South
saved the slave
and saved the nation.
From the first, I, for one,
saw this war
as the end of slavery.
In the first year
or two of the war,
he's still
very much an outsider.
He's on the circuit speaking,
but he's just writing
in his newspaper,
month after month after month,
especially criticisms
of the Lincoln administration.
He's trying to light fires
under Republicans,
but he has no access to them.
He's not an insider at all.
The first of January 1863,
was a memorable day
in the progress of American
liberty and civilization.
This proclamation
changed everything.
Abraham Lincoln issues
the Emancipation Proclamation
in part to allow
African Americans
to join the Union cause.
They couldn't up until then.
Not only did it change
the nature of the war,
but it gave Black men,
for the first time,
the legal right
to kill white men.
- And then, he did what.
- Douglass always did.
He went to his desk,
he wrote a new speech.
In that speech,
he famously says,
this proclamation
has the opportunity now
to free us all from the past.
There are certain
great national acts,
which, by their relation
to universal principles,
properly belong to
the whole human family,
and Abraham Lincoln's
proclamation
of the 1st of January, 1863,
is one of these acts.
But I hold that
the proclamation,
good as it is,
will be worthless,
a miserable mockery,
unless the nation shall so far
conquer its prejudice
as to welcome into the army
full-grown Black men
to help fight
the battles of the Republic.
That paper proclamation
must now be made iron,
lead, and fire
by the prompt employment of
the Negro's arm in this contest.
I know it is said
the Negroes won't fight,
but I distrust the accuser.
I know the colored men
of the North.
I know the colored men
of the South.
They are ready to rally
under the stars and stripes
at the first tap of the drum.
Give them a chance.
Stop calling them niggers,
and call them soldiers.
Stop telling them
they can't fight,
and tell them they can fight
and shall fight,
and they will fight
and fight with vengeance.
Give them a chance.
Away with prejudice.
Away with folly.
And in this
death struggle for liberty,
country, and permanent security,
let the Black iron hand
of the colored man
fall heavily on the head
of the slave-holding traders
and rebels and lay them low.
Give them a chance!
Give them a chance.
I don't say
they are great fighters.
I don't say they will fight
better than other men.
All I say is give them a chance.
The moment you read
Frederick Douglass' words,
you think that
they were written
yesterday, literally,
especially dealing with
all the upheaval
that we have in our country.
A lot of people don't know
a lot about him,
but, I mean, that's just
American history, period.
You know we don't know
a lot about ourselves.
That's also the trick
of this country,
to try to make us forget
and have amnesia.
So, I think the more
that we, uh, put
Frederick Douglass'
words on stage, now,
as we interrogate
the soul of America,
the better for all of us.
I love the attack
that he has with it
because he's, he's
so intelligent and strong,
um, that you can't deny
whatever he's saying.
It's very spirited,
and he's trying to really
get people going
and move the crowd to think.
Frederick Douglass
sees Black soldiers
wielding rifles
as one of the clearest
and most profound expressions
of American citizenship.
He begins to transition
from America being
about you and yours
to America being
about we and ours.
Douglass believed
that if Black men
comported themselves
nobly and heroically,
demonstrating bravery
on the battlefield,
then, certainly,
Americans would say,
"You deserve all the rights
"inscribed in the
Declaration of Independence
and the Constitution
of the United States."
Unfortunately, he was wrong.
I had assured colored men
that once in the Union army,
they would be put on an equal
footing with other soldiers,
that they would be paid,
promoted, and exchanged
as prisoners of war.
But the government
had not kept its promise
or the promise I made for it.
I was induced to go
to Washington and lay
the complaints of my people
before President Lincoln.
I was an ex-slave identified
with the despised race,
and yet, I was to meet
the most exalted person
in this great Republic.
He goes to Washington
in August 1863
with no appointment.
He just goes
and gets in line
at the White House, says,
"I wanna speak to the
President," and Lincoln lets him in.
I shall never forget my first
interview with this great man.
There was no vain pomp
or ceremony about him.
I at once felt myself in
the presence of an honest man.
Proceeding to tell him who
I was and what I was doing,
he promptly, but kindly,
stopped me, saying,
"I know who you are,
Mr. Douglass."
- Without a doubt,
- Abraham Lincoln
matured in his ideas
about Black people,
who and what a Black person was,
and there's no doubt that
Douglass played a key role
in that transition.
When Douglass meets Lincoln in
the White House, it's a bridge.
It's a first step for Douglass
to begin to enter into
higher orders
and levels of power.
Now, he has a role.
He has the role of
being recognized by
the President of
the United States
as the spokesman
of Black America.
He is, as he loved
to say himself,
the representative-colored man
in the United States.
I think Douglass thought
that he single-handedly
was charged with
the task of refuting
every racist stereotype
about Black people,
but also,
his ego was healthy enough,
and big enough, that he thought
he was up to the task.
And that's, of course, where
the photography comes in.
He is one of the most,
if not the most, photographed
American in the 19th century.
He was profoundly insightful
about the potential uses
of photography
to refute stereotypes,
the caricatures
about Black people.
These photos were taken
so that people could see
this intelligent,
learnd Black man
as an equal.
He's not casting his eyes down
as slaves were told to.
He's looking you directly
in your eye,
so that's a challenge
and a provocation in itself.
It's important to understand
when thinking
about Frederick Douglass
that there is no model
for who he is
at this period of time
in American life. None.
He has to invent himself
effectively.
He has to will himself
to be seen in a way
that no one in society
was ready to see a Black man.
There's one image that
I love that shows Douglass
as a homeowner
with his children
across the two brownstones,
townhomes,
that he owned
in Washington, DC.
They're defying every
possible convention
about what it means
to be a Black family
and a Black man
in American life.
He was really
an A-list celebrity,
what we would call
an A-list celebrity today.
Especially after he appeared
on the cover
of "Harper's" in the 1870s.
Once you're on the cover of
"Harper's," that was like.
"Time" magazine and Google
put together back then.
But being such a national
or world symbol,
of course, is both
a pleasure and a peril.
Douglass' extended family
become the Black First Family,
and they're
constantly in the press.
Fame was such a double-edged
sword for Douglass
because, on the one hand,
it's personally fulfilling
and very lucrative,
but, on the other hand,
it's exhausting,
and it's alienating.
He had some internal struggles
with relevancy
and how he will
maintain his status
as a man of consequence
after the Civil War.
When the war for the Union
was substantially ended
and peace
had dawned upon the land,
when the gigantic system
of American slavery
was finally abolished,
a strange,
perhaps perverse,
feeling came over me.
My great and exceeding joy over
these stupendous achievements
was slightly tinged
with a feeling of sadness.
The anti-slavery platform
had performed its work,
and my voice
was no longer needed.
He thought, "Well, who'll wanna
hear from me anymore?
Slavery's ended."
What is his personal role now?
But all he had to do,
someone could go back in time
and say, "Fred, don't despair."
"You know, hang around.
White supremacy's just asleep,
and it's not going to be
asleep for very long."
The Emancipation Proclamation
had given slavery
many deadly wounds,
yet it was, in fact,
only wounded and crippled,
not disabled and killed.
Though slavery was abolished,
the wrongs of my people
were not ended.
Though they were not slaves,
they were not yet quite free.
I therefore soon found that
the Negro had still a cause,
and that he needed my voice
and my pen
to plead for it.
It is Reconstruction
and its decline and defeat
that now causes Douglass
to find a new voice,
a new role, if he can.
Reconstruction is arguably
the most hopeful period
of Douglass' life.
It is a legal, constitutional,
political revolution,
and a new United States
is being made out of that.
There's a time there
when he holds
these two appointive
positions in Washington,
and he's part of
the federal bureaucracy.
He wanted to have enough money
to take care of his family.
He wanted to be respected.
He wanted to get
government jobs that affirmed
his own idea of his importance.
Douglass is a classic
example of
an old, radical outsider
who becomes, with time,
a political insider.
There are many, now,
next generation Black leaders
who are now his rivals.
He's frequently
referred to as the old man,
particularly by young Turks
out to slay him,
out to take his position.
They're all 20 years
younger at least.
They're all college-educated,
free-born,
and he gets into very public
disputes with them in the press.
- I need not tell you,
- Mr. Editor,
that no man is safe these days
from the attacks of
anonymous falsifiers.
If my record of more
than 40 years of service
to the colored race
does not protect me
from violent sinuations,
nothing I can now say
will silence them.
He was a very
hyper-sensitive man
as he got older.
He liked being on a pedestal.
He didn't like
being knocked off.
When Anna died in '82,
after a long illness,
Douglass came apart.
I think he had another,
at least temporary, breakdown.
But, within about 15 months,
he married Helen Pitts.
She was a white woman,
and she's 20 years younger,
and it became
the most scandalous marriage
of the 19th century.
The uproar from
the Black community
and the white community
is enormous.
For months,
it was in the press,
but they basically
just consistently said,
"We'll marry whom we wish."
I have had very little sympathy
with the curiosity of the world
about my domestic relations.
What business has the world
with the color of my wife?
So, imagine that
you're Frederick Douglass,
and what you really want to do
is read novels
and travel around the world.
And yet, once in a while,
there's an issue
that just brings him
back to the fore.
Black men in the former
Confederate states
get the right to vote two years
after the end of the Civil War,
and that right is greeted with
terrorism, threats,
repression, violence,
rape, uh, lynching.
Reconstruction is full of
mob actions, mob violence,
massacres of people.
It's just the destruction
of life out of fear
and the feeling of the threat
to the social
and political order
as white people wished it.
Soon, Reconstruction is over,
and we see the formalization
of Jim Crow white supremacy.
So, it's in the early 1890s
that he has to speak out more.
He writes his final speech
in 1893,
then he begins to
take it on the road.
He's also growing old.
He's not well.
He is constantly complaining
about his hands shaking.
He's complaining
about chest pains.
He's complaining
about incredible weariness.
But, he's always
drawn back into combat.
The war is never over
because white supremacy
is the beast that
won't be defeated.
Friends and fellow citizens,
strange things have
happened of late
and are still happening.
Some of these tend to dim
the luster of the American name
and chill the hopes
we once entertained
for the cause
of American liberty.
Principles, which we all thought
to have been permanently settled
by the late war,
have been boldly assaulted
and overthrown
by the defeated party.
When the moral sense
of a nation begins to decline
and the wheel of progress
to roll backward,
there's no telling
how low one will fall
or where the other may stop.
I have waited patiently,
but anxiously,
to see the end of the epidemic
of mob law and persecution
now prevailing in the South.
Our newspapers
are daily disfigured
by its ghastly horrors.
It's commonly thought
that only the lowest
and most disgusting birds
and beasts such as buzzards,
vultures, and hyenas
will gloat over
and prey upon dead bodies.
But the Southern mob,
in its rage,
feeds its vengeance by shooting,
stabbing, and burning
when their victims are dead.
Their institutions have taught
them no respect for human life,
and especially
the life of a Negro.
But, my friends, I must stop.
Time and strength are not equal
to the task before me.
But could I be heard
by this great nation,
I would call to mind the sublime
and glorious truths
with which, at its birth,
it saluted a listening world.
It announced the advent
of a nation
based upon human brotherhood
and the self-evident truths
of liberty and equality.
Apply these sublime
and glorious truths
to the situation now before you.
Put away your prejudice.
Banish the idea that one class
must rule over another.
Recognize the fact that the
rights of the humblest citizen
are as worthy of protection
as are those of the highest,
and your problem will be solved.
And whatever may be in store
for it in the future,
whether prosperity or adversity,
whether it shall have foes
without or foes within,
whether there shall be
peace or war,
based on the eternal principles
of truth, justice, and humanity,
your Republic will stand
and flourish forever.
This "Lessons of the Hour"
is a speech that resonates now
because in some ways, we're
revisiting a similar cycle.
He represents what we miss
and how we are weakened
as a society
if we are making it
our institutional business
to suppress certain voices,
talents, certain minds,
certain, certain bodies.
How can we,
how can we as a people
not know of a man
like Frederick Douglass?
All of us, whether we be Black,
white, or otherwise or...
immigrant or, you know,
uh, 10 generations here,
he's a, you know,
he's an exemplar American.
This is a man
who lives, essentially,
the whole trajectory
of 19th-century America.
Slavery to freedom
to the betrayal
of that freedom,
but still trying to hang on
to some kind of philosophical
and principled hope.
There's still hope,
but we still have to fight.
We all tend
to romanticize the way
that Douglass bounced back
and the way
he refused to be daunted.
I find it enormously depressing
that he had to bounce back.
You see the Civil War won.
You see the 13th,
14th, and 15th Amendments.
And still,
on the eve of your death,
having to give a speech saying,
"If I have to leave
this world behind
"with three words
echoing in your ears,
those words are..."
Hope, faith, and charity? No.
We will overcome?
No.
Agitate. Agitate.
Agitate.
I have now brought my readers
to the end of my story.
I have written out
my experiences here,
not in order to exhibit
my wounds and bruises
and to awaken and attract
sympathy to myself personally,
but as a part of the history
of a profoundly
interesting period in
American life and progress.
My part has been to tell
the story of the slave.
The story of the master
never wanted for narrators.
Forty years of my life
have been given
to the cause of my people,
and if I had 40 years more,
they should all be sacredly
given to the same great cause.
Taking all the circumstances
into consideration,
the colored people
have no reason to despair.
Notwithstanding the great
and all-abounding darkness
of our social past.
Notwithstanding the clouds
that still overhang us
in the moral and social sky.
It is my faith
that a better and brighter day
will yet come.
As such, I have no patriotism.
I have no country.
What country have I?
The institutions of this country
do not know me,
do not recognize me as a man.
I am not thought of or spoken of
except as a piece of property.
Now,
in such a country as this,
I cannot have...
patriotism.
Imagine that you had
to dispel doubts
about your full humanity
every time you took to a stage.
Imagine you had
to refute doubts
about your own native ability
every time you picked up a pen.
Imagine having to fight to show
that you were as complicated
a human being
as any who walked
the face of the earth,
having to fight that battle
over and over every day.
That was the life
of Frederick Douglass.
He was the most
famous Black man
in the world in
the 19th century,
and he achieved that position
through one means...
His voice.
More than 20 years of my life
were consumed
in a state of slavery.
I grew up to manhood
eating the bread
and drinking the cup of slavery
with the most degraded
of my brother bondmen,
and sharing with them
all the painful conditions
of their wretched lot.
In consideration
of these facts,
I feel that
I have a right to speak
and to speak strongly.
Yet, my friends...
I feel bound to speak truly.
The power of Douglass' words,
the way that he wielded
language, was undeniable,
and is still undeniable.
He could take you,
in a single sentence sometimes,
inside of a crisis
and say, "Here's
what it's doing to us."
"Here's what it's doing to you.
Here's what it's doing
to the nation."
There can be no peace
to the wicked
while slavery continues
in the land.
It will be condemned,
and there will be agitation.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: He was
able to realize from his own experience
that an arbitrary system
had been created,
designed to reinforce
the sense of inferiority
of every Black person.
A system that was designed
to make them believe
that nature had made them
inferior to white people.
And his job
was to blow up that system.
The very first mental effort
that I now remember on my part
was an attempt
to solve the mystery,
why am I a slave?
Why are some people slaves
and others masters?
I could not have been more
than 7 or 8 years old
when I began to make
this subject my study.
It's a childhood where
he has to learn to survive.
He has to learn
to overcome his own fear.
He has to see brutality,
but live past it.
From my earliest recollection,
I entertained a deep conviction
that slavery would not always
be able to hold me
within its foul embrace.
The desire for freedom
only needed a favorable breeze
to fan it into a blaze
at any moment.
Kenneth B. Morris, Jr.:
There was one point in his life
that he described
as divine providence
in his favor,
and that was he was chosen
from among all of the children
on the plantation
on the Eastern shore of Maryland
to go to Baltimore
to be the house servant
for his master's family.
I left that plantation
with inexpressible joy.
Going to live at Baltimore
opened the gateway
to all my subsequent prosperity.
Baltimore made it possible
for Douglass
to dream and imagine.
He sees the world come into
the harbor of Baltimore,
this maritime capital,
and he can begin to imagine
that there's a world outside.
Morris, Jr.: But what
happened, most importantly,
when he got there,
his slave mistress
didn't know that it was
illegal to teach him.
She was just a kind,
Christian lady with this heart,
and there was Fred, you know,
bright and eager
and ready to learn,
and so, she naturally
began to teach him his ABCs.
He's in search of any kind of
adult loving figure
he can find.
He finds one in Sophia Auld.
She taught him his alphabet,
read out loud with him,
got him interested in language.
But alas, this kind heart
had but such a short time
to remain such.
Mr. Auld found out
what was going on,
and at once forbade Mrs. Auld
to instruct me further,
telling her
that it was unlawful
as well as unsafe
to teach a slave to read.
He would at once
become unmanageable
and of no value to his master.
These words sank deep
into my heart
and called into existence
an entirely
new train of thought.
From that moment,
I understood the pathway
from slavery to freedom.
And he would teach himself
to read and write.
He was very clever in the way
that he went about doing that.
He would carry bread
in his pocket,
and he would trade the bread
for reading lessons
with the poor kids.
He picks up scraps of the
King James version of the Bible
from gutters.
He dries them out,
and he sets them out nicely
so he can learn from them.
He was reading all the time,
and the fact that
he never had
one day of formal education
is just flabbergasting.
He tells us that he first sees
the word "abolition"
in a newspaper,
and then, again in a magazine.
We can only imagine our way into
a young boy's mind.
He's trapped in this world
of enslavement,
and now
he learns that up North,
they're organizing
to end slavery.
That's got to be
an amazing source of hope,
and by the time he's 18,
he's scheming to escape.
On Monday,
the third day of September 1838,
I bade farewell
to the city of Baltimore
and to that slavery
which had been
my abhorrence from childhood.
This is one of the most
unusual escape stories
in all of the literature
about slavery.
There are no bloodhounds
and no, uh, nights
hiding in the swamps.
Essentially, Douglass goes
to the Baltimore train station
and jumps on a train.
I was well on the way
to Havre de Grace
before the conductor
came into the Negro car
to collect tickets
and examine the papers
of his Black passengers.
This was a critical moment
in the drama.
Had the conductor looked
closely at the paper,
he could not have failed
to discover that it called
for a very different
looking person from myself.
The train was moving
at a very high rate of speed
for that time of
railroad travel,
but to my anxious mind,
it was moving far too slowly.
Minutes were hours
and hours were days.
He takes that train,
two other trains,
and three steamboats later,
in about 38 hours,
he arrived into lower Manhattan
at the base of Chambers Street.
I found myself in the big city
of New York,
a free man.
The bonds that had held me
to old master were broken.
No man now had a right
to call me his slave
or assert mastery over me.
Such is briefly the manner
of my escape from slavery
and the end of my experience
as a slave.
In the summer of 1841,
a grand anti-slavery
convention
was held in Nantucket
under the auspices
of William Lloyd Garrison
and his friends.
William Lloyd Garrison was
the most important
abolitionist in America
at the time Douglass met him.
He led a moral
suasionist campaign
to destroy slavery.
I attended this convention
never supposing
I would take part
in the proceedings.
I was not aware that anyone
connected with the convention
even so much as knew my name.
I was, however, quite mistaken.
He says he didn't intend on
speaking at the convention.
He was just there to listen.
But once asked to speak,
he got up and simply told
his personal story
from his slave youth.
I feel greatly embarrassed
when I attempt to address
an audience of white people.
I'm not used to
speaking to them.
And it makes me tremble
when doing so
because I have always
looked up to them with fear.
My friends, I've come to tell
you something about slavery.
What I know of it...
as I felt it.
When I came North,
I was astonished to find
that the abolitionists,
they knew so much about it.
They were acquainted
with its deadly effects
as well as if they had lived
within its midst.
But although they can
tell you its history,
though they
can depict its horrors,
they cannot speak as I can,
from experience.
They cannot refer you to a back
covered with scars as I can.
For I have felt these wounds.
I have suffered under the lash
without the power of resisting.
Yes!
My blood has sprung out
as the lash embedded
itself within my flesh.
Yet my master has the reputation
of being a pious man
and a good Christian.
I'm not from any of the states
where slaves are said to be
in their most
degraded condition,
but from Maryland,
where slavery is said to exist
within its mildest form.
Yet, I can stand here
and relate atrocities
that would make your blood boil
at the thought of them.
I lived on the plantation
of Colonel Lloyd
on the Eastern shore of Maryland
and belonged to
the gentleman's clerk.
He owned probably not less
than a thousand slaves.
And I mention
the name of the man
and also the persons
who perpetrated the deeds
of which I am about to relate,
running the risk of being hurled
back into interminable bondage,
for yet, I am a slave.
Yet for the sake of the cause
of the sake of humanity,
I will mention the names and
glory in running the risk of it.
For I have the gratification
to know that if I shall fall
by the utterance of the truth
in this matter,
that if I shall be
hurled back into bondage
to gratify my slaveholder,
to be killed by inches,
that every drop of blood
I shall shed,
every groan which I shall utter,
every pain which
shall rack my frame,
every sob which I shall indulge,
shall be the instrument
under God
of tearing down
the bloody pillar of slavery
and of hastening the day
of deliverance
for three millions
of my brethren in bondage.
What's interesting
is I feel like
there's been individuals
over time
who have had to do great things
at a much younger age.
In his early 20s,
having to deliver this,
again, in front of a body
of white people,
must have been like terrifying.
But at the same time, too,
like, he's already suffered
so much terror,
what more does he have to lose?
You can feel his passion.
You can feel it
within the words.
You don't even have to see it.
It was just like
his soul transcended.
It was like something
entered his body,
and then just like
he was channeling through.
It was so compelling, however,
this personal story,
this, this personal witness,
that they invited him to
speak again the next morning.
And with that,
a phenomenon was born.
Once William Lloyd Garrison
hears Douglass
deliver his address
in Nantucket,
he is enraptured with
Douglass' abilities
and his skills and his gifts.
The Massachusetts
Anti-Slavery Society
hired him
to go out
on the circuit that fall.
Much interest was awakened.
Many came,
no doubt, from curiosity
to hear what a Negro
could say in his own cause.
Fugitive slaves were rare then,
and as
a fugitive slave lecturer...
I had the advantage
of being a brand-new fact.
The first one out.
Audiences loved this.
He had a gift as a storyteller.
He had an unforgettable voice.
What Douglass has that
no white abolitionist had
was the ability
to tell his story
from the perspective
of an enslaved person,
and because of
that authenticity
and because of the skills
that he developed
to communicate
that authenticity,
the sky was the limit for
Douglass' ambitions and aims.
He wanted to defeat slavery,
but I think he also has
that young man's ambition
to defeat those around him
who were doing
the same thing he was,
and he just wanted to do it
better than they did.
"Tell your story, Frederick,"
would whisper my revered
friend Mr. Garrison
as I stepped
upon the platform.
I could not always
follow the injunction
for I was now
reading and thinking.
New views of the subject were
being presented to my mind.
It did not entirely satisfy me
to narrate wrongs.
I felt like denouncing them.
He's beginning
to kind of burst out
of the strategic straitjacket
that the Garrisonians
had put him in.
The Garrisonians
wanted to control
the sound of
Frederick Douglass' voice.
"Just stick to the facts, Fred,"
you know, um, you know,
"You're speaking
kind of white, Fred.
"Put a little plantation
in your voice, Fred.
"Nobody's going to believe
that anyone who sounds
"as white or as educated as you
"was really an enslaved person,
so remember your role, boy."
And he goes, "Ah, remember
my role, huh? I'll show you."
Without question,
Frederick Douglass
wrote himself into history
with his autobiography.
His book is not only a testimony
about the experience of
a sensitive enslaved person.
It is an act of language.
Douglass creates a work of art.
The publishing of my narrative
was regarded by my friends
with mingled feelings of
satisfaction and apprehension.
I became myself painfully
alive to the liability
which surrounded me.
It was thus I was led to seek
a refuge in England.
Morris, Jr.: When Frederick
Douglass had to escape to Europe,
he was a fugitive slave
at the time,
and the notoriety of having
a best-selling book
threatened his freedom,
so he would flee to Europe
for a couple of years
as a cooling-off period
and speak about
the abolition of slavery.
He spoke in some
hundred and some venues
all over the British Isles.
The red carpet is essentially
rolled out for him,
and he begins to realize,
"In England,
"I'm treated with respect
and with dignity,
but in America,
I'm treated as property."
And he could, for
the first time, as he says,
feel like a man,
by which he meant a human being
and not a Black man.
Not a Black human being.
And that, everybody...
I experienced that.
I experienced that
the first time I went to Europe,
and certainly the first time
I went to Africa,
and that is a,
a deeply affecting experience.
When Douglass returned
from England
in the spring of 1847,
he returns both
an inspired young man,
but he also returns
extremely angry.
This is a much
more militant Douglass
as an abolitionist,
and when he returns,
he goes out
on the circuit immediately,
speech-making,
but in those speeches,
he starts with lines like,
"My country hates me.
I hate it back."
He was young,
he was outraged,
he was powerful,
and he wasn't
gonna take it anymore.
He was just all fire.
I have no love for America.
Such...
I have no patriotism.
The only thing that links me
to this land
is my family
and the painful consciousness
that here,
there are three million
of my fellow creatures,
groaning beneath the iron rod
of the worst despotism
that could be devised
even in pandemonium.
That here are men and brethren,
identified with me
by their complexion.
Identified with me
by their hatred of slavery.
Identified with me by their love
and aspirations for liberty.
Identified with me
by the stripes upon their backs,
their inhumane wrongs
and cruel sufferings.
This...
and this only...
attaches me to this land,
and brings me here
to plead with you
and with the country at large
for the disenthrallment
of my oppressed countrymen
and to overthrow
this system of slavery,
which is crushing them
to the earth!
But it is asked...
"What good will this do
or what good has it done?
"Have you not irritated,
"have you not annoyed
your American friends
and the American people
rather than done them good?"
I admit we have irritated them.
They deserve to be irritated!
I am anxious to irritate
the American people
on this question!
As it is in physics,
so in morals.
There are cases
which demand irritation
and counter-irritation.
The conscience
of the American public
needs this irritation.
And I would blister it all over,
from center to circumference,
until it gives signs
of a pure and a better life
than it is now
manifesting to the world!
This was the speech in which
we were closest in age.
Frederick is 30 years old
in this moment,
and I'm 31 years old
in this moment.
When he says...
that it's crushing
them to the earth,
that, that's when I went,
okay, well that's...
that's Brother Floyd.
You know, that is that image.
And it's not a new thing.
Just made me want to
say those words
to people, uh, for
the people who couldn't.
He was so angry,
so you can begin
to see it right there.
Now, he's going to plow
this new energy, of course,
into a newspaper.
He wants to create
his own kind
of anti-slavery movement,
apart from the Garrisonians.
Nothing more dramatic
could have recalculated
their relationship
than for Douglass
to establish
a parallel publication.
Garrisonians will be
extremely angry about this.
It's as if he thought about
it while he was in England.
"How can I declare
my independence?
How can I show I'm a man?"
And now, the fame grows
ever, ever, evermore.
As the fame grows,
the invitations to speak grow.
It became a kind of
an American phenomenon
to see Douglass.
"Did you see Douglass?
Let me tell you the time"
"I first saw Douglass,
I first heard Douglass."
"Well what did he sound like?"
Newspapers are full of this.
This was, as many
journalists had put it,
a volcanic, magisterial orator.
He could command
crowds of thousands.
And from that point on,
all the way to 1877,
he will never make a living
any other way
than with his voice and his pen.
He wrote millions of words,
but Douglass will
not tell us anything
about his private life,
especially his marriage.
He hid everything he could
about his marriages,
relationships, his children.
His relationship
with Anna Douglass
is an enigma,
a, a, a puzzle,
and I think
he wanted it that way.
Frederick Douglass
had a wife? What?
Why don't we know anything
about her? Who was she?
Who would be married
to Frederick Douglass?
While he was traveling
around the world,
speaking out against slavery,
you know, she would
take care of the kids.
She would take care
of the finances.
She would press his clothes
so that he
would be looking sharp.
She met Harriet Tubman,
Sojourner Truth, John Brown,
anybody who was anybody
in the anti-slavery movement
came to her house.
But she tended to stay
in the kitchen area
or out in the garden,
or, you know, in spaces
where she was comfortable.
His marriage to Anna is
both the center of his life,
the heart of his family,
but it also became
increasingly, no doubt,
what we moderns would call
a difficult marriage.
There's one letter he writes
to a friend, a woman friend,
he had lots of women
correspondents,
and he just unloads about
how Anna has just read
the riot act to him.
If I should write down
all her complaints,
there would be no room
to put my name at the bottom.
And by the time I am home,
a week or two longer,
I shall have pretty full
learned in how many points
there are needs of improvement
in my temper
and disposition as
a husband and a father.
They were married 44 years,
and I was angry at him
after seeing the extent
to which Frederick Douglass
ignored her
and her contributions
to his life and his writing.
But, you don't do
the kinds of things
that Frederick Douglass did
without some substantial
ego going on.
As to the whole
question of fidelity,
I, I can only, uh, say
that it's much disputed.
Too many times, scholars,
both Black and white,
have felt it necessary
to remove the warts
from prominent figures
in African-American history.
Douglass had his flaws.
He had his weaknesses.
I think the more human
we make our heroes,
the more noble they become.
There's always
a poignant contrast
between Douglass' private
and public lives.
That same virile Douglass
that we have a visual image of
also collapsed into depression.
Collapsed into...
almost incapacity,
at times, under the pressure.
The demand upon my time
and attention
by my books and papers
and by visitors are incessant.
I am beginning
to look upon a journey
as a potential misfortune.
In the early 1850s,
it's clear to me
he had what we would sometimes
call a nervous breakdown.
He kind of fell to pieces.
But even in this moment,
'51, '52, '53, '54,
he does some of
his greatest work.
In the summer of 1852,
when he was 34 years old,
Douglass wrote what's probably
his most famous speech.
Morris, Jr.:
He was invited to speak
at the Ladies'
Anti-Slavery Society
about Independence Day.
Big, big event.
Corinthian Hall
in Rochester, New York.
"Douglass says," Okay.
"I'll give
a Fourth of July speech.
"But, I'm going to speak
beyond Corinthian Hall.
"I'm going to speak
beyond Rochester.
I'm going to speak
to the country."
He worked on that speech
for at least three weeks.
He tells us that in a letter,
and, man, does it show it.
It would go down in history
as the oratorical masterpiece
of the entire
abolitionist movement.
Mr. President,
friends, and fellow citizens.
He who could address
this audience
without a quailing sensation
has stronger nerves than I have.
I do not remember ever
to have appeared as a speaker
before an assembly
more shrinkingly
nor with greater distrust
of my ability
than I do this day.
The papers and placards say
that I am to deliver
a Fourth of July oration.
Fact is, ladies and gentlemen,
the distance
between this platform
and the slave plantation
from which I escaped
is considerable.
And the difficulties
to be overcome
in getting from the latter
to the former
are by no means slight.
I liken the speech
to a symphony
with three movements.
The first movement,
fairly short,
is Douglass putting
his audience at ease
about the glories
of the Founding Fathers,
the glories of the Declaration
of Independence,
and it is beautiful,
and the audience
must have felt like, "Wow.
Frederick's going
to lift us up today."
Fellow citizens,
I am not wanting in respect
for the Fathers
of this Republic.
The signers of the Declaration
of Independence were brave men.
They were peace men.
But they preferred revolution
to peaceful submission
to bondage.
And then, the whole
middle movement of the symphony
is like a hail storm.
It's the physical horror
of slavery.
He wrecks upon his audience.
"You invited me here
to sing for you,
but I'm not going to sing.
I'm going to make you hurt."
Mark.
Mark the sad procession
as it moves wearily along
and the inhuman wretch
who drives them.
Hear his savage yells
and his blood-chilling oaths
as he hurries
on his affrighted captives.
Attend the auction.
See the men
examined like horses.
See the forms of women rudely
and brutally exposed
to the shocking gaze
of American slave buyers.
Do you mean,
citizens, to mock me
by asking me
to speak here today?
What do I or those
I represent have to do
with your national independence?
Are the great principles
of political freedom
and natural justice
embodied in that declaration
extended to us?
What to the American slave
is your Fourth of July?
I answer a day
that reveals to him,
more than any 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.
The existence of slavery
in this country
brands your humanity
as base pretense,
and your Christianity as a lie.
Had I the ability and could
I reach the nation's ear,
I would today
pour out a fiery stream
of biting ridicule,
blasting reproach,
withering sarcasm,
and stern rebuke.
For it is not light
that is needed,
but fire.
It is not the gentle shower,
but thunder.
We need the storm,
the whirlwind,
and the earthquake.
The feeling of
the nation must be roused.
The propriety of the nation
must be startled,
the hypocrisy of the nation
must be exposed,
and the crimes
against God and man
must be proclaimed
and denounced.
And he stops.
You can sense a pause
in the rhetoric.
It's as though
the storm is over.
The audience has felt in pain
for 10 pages of this text,
and then, he lets them back up.
The last short movement
of the speech,
he says,
"But your nation is still young.
"It is still malleable,
"but you're on the precipice
of self-destruction.
"If you can't solve
this problem of slavery,
there will be no America."
I do not despair
of this country.
There are forces in operation
which must inevitably work
the downfall of slavery.
I therefore leave off
where I began.
With hope.
We don't hear
a lot about people
who, um, weren't allowed
to have an education,
and who got this far, had such,
you know, eloquent language
and such an intention.
You know, he's a Black man
in that period,
or even in this period, um.
He has to be extremely savvy
about getting people's attention
and disarming people,
and then figuring out
how to, how to get in there
to really change
people's thinking.
And he does it really
effectively and beautifully.
Douglass knew that an argument
had to be eloquent
to be persuasive.
That you had to appeal
to the mind,
but through the emotions.
And, he knocked it
out of the park.
The Civil War began
when Douglass was
43 years old.
So, he was too old to fight
but he wasn't too old
to deliver his speeches,
his writings,
to the American people
who he felt needed to hear it.
The war brings about
a personal recreation
and transformation.
Douglass saw it as finally,
finally,
the coming of what
he had most hoped for.
During all the winter of 1860,
notes of preparation
for a tremendous conflict
came to us on every wind.
The South was mad and would
listen to no concessions.
They had come
to hate everything
which had the prefix "free."
Free states,
free schools,
free speech,
and freedom generally,
and they would have
no more such prefixes.
This haughty
and unreasonable attitude
of the imperious South
saved the slave
and saved the nation.
From the first, I, for one,
saw this war
as the end of slavery.
In the first year
or two of the war,
he's still
very much an outsider.
He's on the circuit speaking,
but he's just writing
in his newspaper,
month after month after month,
especially criticisms
of the Lincoln administration.
He's trying to light fires
under Republicans,
but he has no access to them.
He's not an insider at all.
The first of January 1863,
was a memorable day
in the progress of American
liberty and civilization.
This proclamation
changed everything.
Abraham Lincoln issues
the Emancipation Proclamation
in part to allow
African Americans
to join the Union cause.
They couldn't up until then.
Not only did it change
the nature of the war,
but it gave Black men,
for the first time,
the legal right
to kill white men.
- And then, he did what.
- Douglass always did.
He went to his desk,
he wrote a new speech.
In that speech,
he famously says,
this proclamation
has the opportunity now
to free us all from the past.
There are certain
great national acts,
which, by their relation
to universal principles,
properly belong to
the whole human family,
and Abraham Lincoln's
proclamation
of the 1st of January, 1863,
is one of these acts.
But I hold that
the proclamation,
good as it is,
will be worthless,
a miserable mockery,
unless the nation shall so far
conquer its prejudice
as to welcome into the army
full-grown Black men
to help fight
the battles of the Republic.
That paper proclamation
must now be made iron,
lead, and fire
by the prompt employment of
the Negro's arm in this contest.
I know it is said
the Negroes won't fight,
but I distrust the accuser.
I know the colored men
of the North.
I know the colored men
of the South.
They are ready to rally
under the stars and stripes
at the first tap of the drum.
Give them a chance.
Stop calling them niggers,
and call them soldiers.
Stop telling them
they can't fight,
and tell them they can fight
and shall fight,
and they will fight
and fight with vengeance.
Give them a chance.
Away with prejudice.
Away with folly.
And in this
death struggle for liberty,
country, and permanent security,
let the Black iron hand
of the colored man
fall heavily on the head
of the slave-holding traders
and rebels and lay them low.
Give them a chance!
Give them a chance.
I don't say
they are great fighters.
I don't say they will fight
better than other men.
All I say is give them a chance.
The moment you read
Frederick Douglass' words,
you think that
they were written
yesterday, literally,
especially dealing with
all the upheaval
that we have in our country.
A lot of people don't know
a lot about him,
but, I mean, that's just
American history, period.
You know we don't know
a lot about ourselves.
That's also the trick
of this country,
to try to make us forget
and have amnesia.
So, I think the more
that we, uh, put
Frederick Douglass'
words on stage, now,
as we interrogate
the soul of America,
the better for all of us.
I love the attack
that he has with it
because he's, he's
so intelligent and strong,
um, that you can't deny
whatever he's saying.
It's very spirited,
and he's trying to really
get people going
and move the crowd to think.
Frederick Douglass
sees Black soldiers
wielding rifles
as one of the clearest
and most profound expressions
of American citizenship.
He begins to transition
from America being
about you and yours
to America being
about we and ours.
Douglass believed
that if Black men
comported themselves
nobly and heroically,
demonstrating bravery
on the battlefield,
then, certainly,
Americans would say,
"You deserve all the rights
"inscribed in the
Declaration of Independence
and the Constitution
of the United States."
Unfortunately, he was wrong.
I had assured colored men
that once in the Union army,
they would be put on an equal
footing with other soldiers,
that they would be paid,
promoted, and exchanged
as prisoners of war.
But the government
had not kept its promise
or the promise I made for it.
I was induced to go
to Washington and lay
the complaints of my people
before President Lincoln.
I was an ex-slave identified
with the despised race,
and yet, I was to meet
the most exalted person
in this great Republic.
He goes to Washington
in August 1863
with no appointment.
He just goes
and gets in line
at the White House, says,
"I wanna speak to the
President," and Lincoln lets him in.
I shall never forget my first
interview with this great man.
There was no vain pomp
or ceremony about him.
I at once felt myself in
the presence of an honest man.
Proceeding to tell him who
I was and what I was doing,
he promptly, but kindly,
stopped me, saying,
"I know who you are,
Mr. Douglass."
- Without a doubt,
- Abraham Lincoln
matured in his ideas
about Black people,
who and what a Black person was,
and there's no doubt that
Douglass played a key role
in that transition.
When Douglass meets Lincoln in
the White House, it's a bridge.
It's a first step for Douglass
to begin to enter into
higher orders
and levels of power.
Now, he has a role.
He has the role of
being recognized by
the President of
the United States
as the spokesman
of Black America.
He is, as he loved
to say himself,
the representative-colored man
in the United States.
I think Douglass thought
that he single-handedly
was charged with
the task of refuting
every racist stereotype
about Black people,
but also,
his ego was healthy enough,
and big enough, that he thought
he was up to the task.
And that's, of course, where
the photography comes in.
He is one of the most,
if not the most, photographed
American in the 19th century.
He was profoundly insightful
about the potential uses
of photography
to refute stereotypes,
the caricatures
about Black people.
These photos were taken
so that people could see
this intelligent,
learnd Black man
as an equal.
He's not casting his eyes down
as slaves were told to.
He's looking you directly
in your eye,
so that's a challenge
and a provocation in itself.
It's important to understand
when thinking
about Frederick Douglass
that there is no model
for who he is
at this period of time
in American life. None.
He has to invent himself
effectively.
He has to will himself
to be seen in a way
that no one in society
was ready to see a Black man.
There's one image that
I love that shows Douglass
as a homeowner
with his children
across the two brownstones,
townhomes,
that he owned
in Washington, DC.
They're defying every
possible convention
about what it means
to be a Black family
and a Black man
in American life.
He was really
an A-list celebrity,
what we would call
an A-list celebrity today.
Especially after he appeared
on the cover
of "Harper's" in the 1870s.
Once you're on the cover of
"Harper's," that was like.
"Time" magazine and Google
put together back then.
But being such a national
or world symbol,
of course, is both
a pleasure and a peril.
Douglass' extended family
become the Black First Family,
and they're
constantly in the press.
Fame was such a double-edged
sword for Douglass
because, on the one hand,
it's personally fulfilling
and very lucrative,
but, on the other hand,
it's exhausting,
and it's alienating.
He had some internal struggles
with relevancy
and how he will
maintain his status
as a man of consequence
after the Civil War.
When the war for the Union
was substantially ended
and peace
had dawned upon the land,
when the gigantic system
of American slavery
was finally abolished,
a strange,
perhaps perverse,
feeling came over me.
My great and exceeding joy over
these stupendous achievements
was slightly tinged
with a feeling of sadness.
The anti-slavery platform
had performed its work,
and my voice
was no longer needed.
He thought, "Well, who'll wanna
hear from me anymore?
Slavery's ended."
What is his personal role now?
But all he had to do,
someone could go back in time
and say, "Fred, don't despair."
"You know, hang around.
White supremacy's just asleep,
and it's not going to be
asleep for very long."
The Emancipation Proclamation
had given slavery
many deadly wounds,
yet it was, in fact,
only wounded and crippled,
not disabled and killed.
Though slavery was abolished,
the wrongs of my people
were not ended.
Though they were not slaves,
they were not yet quite free.
I therefore soon found that
the Negro had still a cause,
and that he needed my voice
and my pen
to plead for it.
It is Reconstruction
and its decline and defeat
that now causes Douglass
to find a new voice,
a new role, if he can.
Reconstruction is arguably
the most hopeful period
of Douglass' life.
It is a legal, constitutional,
political revolution,
and a new United States
is being made out of that.
There's a time there
when he holds
these two appointive
positions in Washington,
and he's part of
the federal bureaucracy.
He wanted to have enough money
to take care of his family.
He wanted to be respected.
He wanted to get
government jobs that affirmed
his own idea of his importance.
Douglass is a classic
example of
an old, radical outsider
who becomes, with time,
a political insider.
There are many, now,
next generation Black leaders
who are now his rivals.
He's frequently
referred to as the old man,
particularly by young Turks
out to slay him,
out to take his position.
They're all 20 years
younger at least.
They're all college-educated,
free-born,
and he gets into very public
disputes with them in the press.
- I need not tell you,
- Mr. Editor,
that no man is safe these days
from the attacks of
anonymous falsifiers.
If my record of more
than 40 years of service
to the colored race
does not protect me
from violent sinuations,
nothing I can now say
will silence them.
He was a very
hyper-sensitive man
as he got older.
He liked being on a pedestal.
He didn't like
being knocked off.
When Anna died in '82,
after a long illness,
Douglass came apart.
I think he had another,
at least temporary, breakdown.
But, within about 15 months,
he married Helen Pitts.
She was a white woman,
and she's 20 years younger,
and it became
the most scandalous marriage
of the 19th century.
The uproar from
the Black community
and the white community
is enormous.
For months,
it was in the press,
but they basically
just consistently said,
"We'll marry whom we wish."
I have had very little sympathy
with the curiosity of the world
about my domestic relations.
What business has the world
with the color of my wife?
So, imagine that
you're Frederick Douglass,
and what you really want to do
is read novels
and travel around the world.
And yet, once in a while,
there's an issue
that just brings him
back to the fore.
Black men in the former
Confederate states
get the right to vote two years
after the end of the Civil War,
and that right is greeted with
terrorism, threats,
repression, violence,
rape, uh, lynching.
Reconstruction is full of
mob actions, mob violence,
massacres of people.
It's just the destruction
of life out of fear
and the feeling of the threat
to the social
and political order
as white people wished it.
Soon, Reconstruction is over,
and we see the formalization
of Jim Crow white supremacy.
So, it's in the early 1890s
that he has to speak out more.
He writes his final speech
in 1893,
then he begins to
take it on the road.
He's also growing old.
He's not well.
He is constantly complaining
about his hands shaking.
He's complaining
about chest pains.
He's complaining
about incredible weariness.
But, he's always
drawn back into combat.
The war is never over
because white supremacy
is the beast that
won't be defeated.
Friends and fellow citizens,
strange things have
happened of late
and are still happening.
Some of these tend to dim
the luster of the American name
and chill the hopes
we once entertained
for the cause
of American liberty.
Principles, which we all thought
to have been permanently settled
by the late war,
have been boldly assaulted
and overthrown
by the defeated party.
When the moral sense
of a nation begins to decline
and the wheel of progress
to roll backward,
there's no telling
how low one will fall
or where the other may stop.
I have waited patiently,
but anxiously,
to see the end of the epidemic
of mob law and persecution
now prevailing in the South.
Our newspapers
are daily disfigured
by its ghastly horrors.
It's commonly thought
that only the lowest
and most disgusting birds
and beasts such as buzzards,
vultures, and hyenas
will gloat over
and prey upon dead bodies.
But the Southern mob,
in its rage,
feeds its vengeance by shooting,
stabbing, and burning
when their victims are dead.
Their institutions have taught
them no respect for human life,
and especially
the life of a Negro.
But, my friends, I must stop.
Time and strength are not equal
to the task before me.
But could I be heard
by this great nation,
I would call to mind the sublime
and glorious truths
with which, at its birth,
it saluted a listening world.
It announced the advent
of a nation
based upon human brotherhood
and the self-evident truths
of liberty and equality.
Apply these sublime
and glorious truths
to the situation now before you.
Put away your prejudice.
Banish the idea that one class
must rule over another.
Recognize the fact that the
rights of the humblest citizen
are as worthy of protection
as are those of the highest,
and your problem will be solved.
And whatever may be in store
for it in the future,
whether prosperity or adversity,
whether it shall have foes
without or foes within,
whether there shall be
peace or war,
based on the eternal principles
of truth, justice, and humanity,
your Republic will stand
and flourish forever.
This "Lessons of the Hour"
is a speech that resonates now
because in some ways, we're
revisiting a similar cycle.
He represents what we miss
and how we are weakened
as a society
if we are making it
our institutional business
to suppress certain voices,
talents, certain minds,
certain, certain bodies.
How can we,
how can we as a people
not know of a man
like Frederick Douglass?
All of us, whether we be Black,
white, or otherwise or...
immigrant or, you know,
uh, 10 generations here,
he's a, you know,
he's an exemplar American.
This is a man
who lives, essentially,
the whole trajectory
of 19th-century America.
Slavery to freedom
to the betrayal
of that freedom,
but still trying to hang on
to some kind of philosophical
and principled hope.
There's still hope,
but we still have to fight.
We all tend
to romanticize the way
that Douglass bounced back
and the way
he refused to be daunted.
I find it enormously depressing
that he had to bounce back.
You see the Civil War won.
You see the 13th,
14th, and 15th Amendments.
And still,
on the eve of your death,
having to give a speech saying,
"If I have to leave
this world behind
"with three words
echoing in your ears,
those words are..."
Hope, faith, and charity? No.
We will overcome?
No.
Agitate. Agitate.
Agitate.
I have now brought my readers
to the end of my story.
I have written out
my experiences here,
not in order to exhibit
my wounds and bruises
and to awaken and attract
sympathy to myself personally,
but as a part of the history
of a profoundly
interesting period in
American life and progress.
My part has been to tell
the story of the slave.
The story of the master
never wanted for narrators.
Forty years of my life
have been given
to the cause of my people,
and if I had 40 years more,
they should all be sacredly
given to the same great cause.
Taking all the circumstances
into consideration,
the colored people
have no reason to despair.
Notwithstanding the great
and all-abounding darkness
of our social past.
Notwithstanding the clouds
that still overhang us
in the moral and social sky.
It is my faith
that a better and brighter day
will yet come.