Frederick Douglass

Dzieła

• 1845Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (Opowieść o życiu Fredericka Douglassa, amerykańskiego niewolnika)

  Historia jego zniewolenia i ucieczki: jak czytanie otworzyło drogę do wolności i jak opór zmienił „niewolnika” w „człowieka”.

• 1852What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? (Czym jest dla niewolnika Czwarty Lipca?)

  Przemówienie w Rochester: zasady ojców założycieli są wielkie, a wielka jest też hipokryzja narodu, który świętuje wolność, trzymając miliony w niewoli.

Stanowisko

Douglass’s autobiographies and speeches contain an argument about freedom that political philosophy now reads closely. The Narrative describes slavery as a system that degrades enslaved and enslavers alike and keeps the enslaved ignorant on purpose; learning to read is therefore “the pathway from slavery to freedom”. The fight with Covey is its turning point: “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.” Self-respect is won through resistance, not granted by others. In an appendix he separated the “Christianity of this land”, which defended slavery, from the “Christianity of Christ”. As a Garrisonian he had held the Constitution to be a pact with slavery; by 1851 he concluded that, read by its text rather than by its framers’ intentions, it was an anti-slavery document. The Fourth of July speech of 1852 joins this reading to an indictment of American hypocrisy. Much remains contested. Garrisonians and many historians rejected his reading of the Constitution; in 1869 his support for the Fifteenth Amendment, which enfranchised Black men before women, divided him from Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony; and Angela Davis, returning to her lectures of 1969 in a critical edition of the Narrative (2010), pointed out that he tended to equate freedom with manhood. Du Bois called him “the greatest of American Negro leaders”; Charles Mills read him on “original intent” (1998), and Bernard Boxill and others treat him as a philosopher of self-respect.

Życie i kontekst

Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey was born into slavery in Talbot County on Maryland’s Eastern Shore in February 1818. His father was a white man, possibly his enslaver. As a boy in Baltimore he was taught the alphabet by Sophia Auld until her husband forbade it, and he taught himself the rest. In 1834 he was hired out to Edward Covey, a “slave-breaker”, whose beatings stopped when Douglass fought back. In September 1838, with a free Black sailor’s papers and with help from Anna Murray, a free Black woman whom he married days later, he escaped to New York; the couple settled in New Bedford under the name Douglass. From 1841 he lectured for William Lloyd Garrison’s Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. After the Narrative (1845) made recapture likely, he toured Ireland and Britain, where supporters bought his freedom in 1846. In Rochester he published The North Star from 1847, spoke for women’s suffrage at the Seneca Falls convention in 1848 and broke with Garrison around 1851. During the Civil War he recruited Black soldiers and met Abraham Lincoln. He later held federal offices, last as US minister to Haiti (1889–91). After Anna Murray Douglass died in 1882 he married the white feminist Helen Pitts in 1884. He died at his home in Washington on 20 February 1895, after speaking at a meeting of the National Council of Women.

Dalsze główne dzieła

• Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845)
• “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” (speech, 1852)
• The Heroic Slave (novella, 1853)
• My Bondage and My Freedom (1855)
• Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881, revised 1892)