N ow everyone wants a piece of Frederick Douglass. When he died, an admiring obituary in The New York Times suggested that Douglass’s “white blood” accounted for his “superior intelligence.” After his death, his reputation declined precipitously alongside the general standing of African Americans in the age of Jim Crow. As a traveling evangelist for abolitionism, he was repeatedly ejected from whites-only railroad cars, restaurants, and lodgings. He fled to the “free” North, only to have his work as a maritime caulker thwarted by racist white competitors. As a slave, he suffered at the hands of a vicious “nigger breaker” to whom he was rented. Throughout his life, however, Douglass repeatedly fell victim to the brutalizations and insults commonly experienced by African Americans of his time.

“I cannot have any love for this country … or for its Constitution.” “I have no patriotism,” Douglass thundered in 1847. Hayes nominated him to be the marshal of the District of Columbia. He was the first black person appointed to an office requiring senatorial confirmation in 1877, President Rutherford B. The most celebrated black man of his era, Douglass became the most photographed American of any race in the 19th century. He also wrote three exceptional memoirs, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), My Bondage and My Freedom(1855), and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass(1881). He published many arresting columns in magazines and newspapers, including several that he started. He wrote analyses of court opinions that deservedly appear in constitutional-law casebooks.

To him, your celebration is a sham … your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery … There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.” What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? … a day that reveals to him … the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.

David blight frederick douglass review