Senator Barack Obama has lately been heard using some variant of the expression "Don’t think for a minute that power concedes," as he did in Cincinnati Sunday. Some may recognize in those words an echo of one of our country's greatest African Americans, the former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who, in 1857 said:
If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
I first read those words nearly 50 years ago, and they and the man who spoke them have inspired me ever since. He’s one of my few heroes, an outstanding human being. Senator Obama couldn't have made a finer choice for someone to paraphrase.
Like all of us, he wasn’t perfect. Indeed, over the decades, reading every detail I could find, devouring the rare new book on some aspect of his life, I have learned of the flaws in both his personal and public life, particularly in his relationships with women, in general, and the feminist movement, in particular. But those flaws both humanize him and serve as warnings about how not to behave. All in all, Douglass, born into slavery of a black mother and her white master 190 years ago, was someone whose impact on our nation cannot be overstated. I have often looked to his choices for advice when making my own.
It started in 1960, the year I turned 14, when my probation officer required me to get a part-time job that would consume some of the free time I had for getting into more of the trouble that had landed me in reform school in Golden, Colorado. In those days, the job was what passed for an after-school program since the juvenile court had made me ineligible for sports for another year. When I lagged at getting hired, my P.O. secured a position for me – sweeping up and other chores – at a local weekly newspaper and combination print-shop.
My boss, Bob Thatcher, was as misplaced a man as can be imagined, a pink, bald, rotund armchair socialist of fiftysomething, an avid reader of history stuck supervising the printing of wedding invitations, covering city council meetings and writing editorials about the inadequacy of volunteer school-crossing guards. After I was on the job for three months of evenings and Saturdays, he introduced me to his office library. It was crammed with a chaos of ledgers, binders of printing invoices and U.S. history books. He told me: Pick a book, any book. You read it, then we’ll talk about it. I carefully selected the slimmest volume I could find. Good choice, he said.
It was a 1910 reprint of an 1845 autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written By Himself, which you can now find on line. In one sitting, I read what he’d written a century before I was born. And then I did what I’d never done with any other book – read it again.
Douglass was the kind of figure the dominant culture of 1960 America wanted to disremember. If you’ve ever seen a high school history textbook of that era, you know what a phenomenally good job of disremembering had been achieved. I took an instant liking to Douglass's self-described "restless spirit." My boss hadn’t been kidding. We did talk about the Narrative, about Douglass as hero, about the times in which he lived. Thatcher then lent me his copy of Philip Foner’s The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass.
"Hero" is a term diluted by promiscuous overuse nowadays, a far cry from both the Joseph Campbell model and those real-life women and men who made deep sacrifices, sometimes risking their lives for sticking to unpopular causes and principles. I suppose it’s too late to rescue the word from being reduced in meaning by being applied to sports personalities and its simultaneous dessication in the nasty process that author James W. Loewen calls "heroification." Still, Douglass remains a hero for me.
I suspect that for most readers who have slogged this far, Douglass isn’t the cipher he was for me and most Americans in 1960. Nowadays, the general trajectory of his life is widely known. Nonetheless, here’s the condensed version. Apologies to those who have heard it all before.
Douglass was born on Holmes Hill Farm in Maryland, in February 1818, according to his owner’s records. In the astonishingly naive parlance of today, Douglass might be characterized as "half-black, half-white," probably a son of his master, raised by his grandmother and left behind by her to begin his life as a slave at age 6, caretaker and companion to a white child at the Wye Plantation. He learned to read about age 12, from a new master’s wife and from trading food to white children so he could view their homework and have them teach him to read. At 13 or so, with money he had earned from errands, he managed to purchase a copy of The Columbia Orator, a book of speeches dealing with liberty, democracy and courage. This he memorized, and it had an impact on the rest of his life.
Twice he was beaten for trying to pass on what he had learned by teaching groups of young slaves how to read. At 20, after having learned the trade of ship caulking in Baltimore, he impersonated a sailor and escaped to the North (his second try), where he found freedom from shackles and whippings, but learned racism still bound most people’s minds. White ship caulkers refused to work with him and he had to take menial work. It wasn’t long before he discovered The Liberator, the abolitionist newspaper of "immediatist" William Lloyd Garrison, and the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. He soon came to the notice of both. At 23, in 1841, he was invited to speak at the society’s annual convention on Nantucket Island. He began, nervously, and then mesmerized the crowd for more than two hours with stories of what it meant to be a slave. His career as a professional Abolitionist began on the spot.
For the next two decades, he traveled broadly in the North, first lending his eloquence to the cause of freedom at the Hundred Conventions in 1843, a six-month tour of the Eastern and Midwestern states. So eloquent was he that his white abolitionist sponsors worried that he didn’t sound slave enough, authentically plantation enough, black enough for an uneducated man emerged from bondage only six years previously. His sponsors thought it best for him to keep to the slave stories he was so adept at telling and away from talking directly about anti-slavery tactics. It was the beginning of what were to be many clashes between the independent-minded Douglass and abolitionist factions. After the Narrative was published and he had made himself vulnerable to recapture under the Fugitive Slave Act, his friends urged him to spend some time in England and Ireland, which he did.
Rather than see him at risk when he returned to the States in 1847, two friends raised $710.36 (about $16,000 in 2008 dollars) and bought him from his owner, a move which angered some Abolitionists who argued that doing so legitimized the concept of slavery. Upon his return, Douglass moved to Rochester, N.Y., and began his own weekly newspaper, the famous North Star. Featuring black and white writers, it became a rival of other Abolition newspapers, particularly when Douglass broke with Garrison.
Their key contention was whether the Constitution was pro-slavery and had to be done away for slaves to be liberated, as Garrison believed and had at first convinced Douglass of, or pro-freedom and could be used to overturn slavery, which Douglass soon came to believe. With his rich baritone and cadenced oratory, his popularity as a speaker increased, and in 1852 he was invited by the leaders of Rochester to give an Independence Day speech. Alluring at first, then bitingly sarcastic, it remains among his most memorable.
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelly to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy - a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. 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 .... Allow me to say, in conclusion, notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented, of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country....
By the 1850s, speaking and writing at a furious pace, his home a center for fugitive slaves on the Underground Railroad, Douglass became convinced that pacific means of overturning slavery would not avail, that force would be required. Once again, this put him at odds with many abolitionists, many of whom were Quakers. He corresponded with and raised money for John Brown, a man who had not only decided that slavery would have to be overthrown by force and purged with blood but was preparing to turn his views into action. But when Brown urged him to join the assault on the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry in 1859, Douglass chose not to, believing it was a futile move that would hurt the abolitionist cause. Nonetheless, after Brown was tried for treason and quickly hanged, Douglass wrote:
Posterity will owe everlasting thanks to John Brown. Slavery is a system of brute force. It must be met with its own weapons. John Brown has initiated a new mode of carrying on the crusade of freedom.
With the Democrats split, Abraham Lincoln was elected president, and secession began by Southerners who perceived slavery to be imperiled. When Fort Sumter fell, Douglass was gleeful. For the duration of the Civil War, he held fast to the idea of "No war but an abolition war. No peace but an abolition peace." He began a first mistrustful, ultimately respectful to and fro with the President that you can read about in Paul and Stephen Kendrick’s Lincoln and Douglass: How a Revolutionary Black Leader and a Reluctant Liberator Struggled to End Slavery and Save the Union.
Initially, his repeated urgings that "Negro" regiments be raised were ignored, even by many abolitionists. "He who would be free themselves must strike the blow," he wrote, words that many free blacks and fugitive slaves took to heart. With casualties high, Lincoln finally agreed, including a paragraph in the Emancipation Proclamation opening military service to former slaves. With Douglass himself an authorized recruiter, some 200,000 black soldiers and sailors eventually joined the Union forces, nearly 10 percent of the total, playing a pivotal role.
Although tempted in 1864 to back a Radical Republican candidate for the presidency, Douglass supported the more tepid Lincoln, who he had come to believe would bring a complete end to slavery. Although Andrew Johnson tried to sabotage Reconstruction by putting power back into the hands of slave owners, an omen of what is come in a decade, Douglass’s dream of a free Union was achieved with passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments.
But when it came to his stance on that last Amendment, guaranteeing former slaves the right to vote, Douglass proved the cliché that even heroes can have feet of clay. He betrayed two of his close friends and allies, the feminists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.
It was their view and as well as that of other so-called "ultras" that the 15th Amendment should give suffrage not only to black men but to all women as well. It was, indeed, a shock for them when he took the stance that black men should obtain suffrage first because white women at least had the vote of their husbands to represent them. From any other man, they would have expected this, but Douglass had gone well beyond all but a few men of his day when he showed up at the Seneca Falls Convention on women’s rights in the summer of 1848. There, he had spoken eloquently in favor of a resolution for women’s suffrage, the only man, black or white, to do so. While all other 18 resolutions at Seneca Falls passed unanimously, this one, No. 9, was barely approved.
When the convention was subsequently ridiculed in the press, Douglass wrote in the North Star: "A discussion of the rights of animals would be regarded with far more complacency by many of what are called the wise and the good of our land, than would be a discussion of the rights of woman."
But in 1868 when Stanton and Anthony opposed the ratification of the Fourteenth and later the Fifteenth Amendments as injustices to women, favoring instead a more radical Sixteenth Amendment that would give suffrage and equal protection rights to everyone simultaneously, Douglass broke with them and the militant National Woman Suffrage Association. Like other abolitionists and not a few feminists, he felt the rights of African Americans – males, that is – had to be secured first. In one speech he said, "When women because they are women are dragged from their homes and hung upon lampposts ... then they will have the urgency to obtain the ballot."
The argument between Douglass and the radical feminists was both public and private, and the resentment caused hurt feelings on both sides that lasted for years. The worst aspect of the episode was that standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Stanton and Cady on women’s suffrage the way they had stood with him for abolishing slavery would have cost him nothing. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth would have passed despite his principled opposition, the Sixteenth would have no doubt failed even with his support. But he would have been on the right side of the issue.
Throughout the rest of his life, he never agreed that his stance had been mistaken. But immediately after the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment, Douglass resumed activism on behalf of women’s rights. He called for an amendment giving women the right to vote and, in October 1870, wrote an editorial supporting women’s suffrage titled "Women and the Ballot." He was tireless in this advocacy until his death. Eventually, he and Stanton reconciled and they spoke publicly with high regard of one other.
After the death of his first wife, Anna Murray, Douglass generated a national shriekfest when he married the radical white feminist Helen Pitts in 1884. Douglass wrote later:
No man, perhaps, had ever more offended popular prejudice than I had then lately done. I had married a wife. People who had remained silent over the unlawful relations of white slave masters with their colored slave women loudly condemned me for marrying a wife a few shades lighter than myself. They would have had no objection to my marrying a person much darker in complexion than myself, but to marry one much lighter, and of the complexion of my father rather than of that of my mother, was, in the popular eye, a shocking offense, and one for which I was to be ostracized by white and black alike. (Life and Times... p. 534.)
In defending Douglass and congratulating the newlyweds, ever with an eye to the politics of such matters, Stanton wrote:
In defense of the right to...marry whom we please -- we might quote some of the basic principles of our government [and] suggest that in some things individual rights to tastes should control. ... If a good man from Maryland sees fit to marry a disenfranchised woman from New York, there should be no legal impediments to the union.
As later became known, Douglass had carried on an affair with Ottilie Assing for 28 years while married to his first wife. When he didn’t marry her as she expected after his wife’s death, Assing committed suicide.
In their twilight days, Stanton and Douglass took to making speeches together again, both in favor of women’s suffrage and in opposition to the lynching culture that paramilitary white racists were establishing in the South as a consequence of the cowardly capitulation of 1876. The fight for women’s suffrage went on for another 25 years. Against lynching another 60. And for true black suffrage another 70. Neither Stanton nor Douglass lived to see those victories. Just as many activists today will not see all the fruits of their struggle but will know that, someday, as a result of forcing power to concede, the rightness of their cause will be acknowledged and codified.