[Last Wednesday, February 1, the current occupant of the Oval Office, Donald Trump, commemorated the beginning of Black History Month, in part, by acknowledging his African American supporters and staffers like Omarosa Manigault as well as name-dropping a few of the better known names in black history like Rosa Parks, Harriet Tubman and the 19th century black abolitionist, woman’s suffragist, and former slave Frederick Douglass.
In acknowledging the contributions of Mr. Douglass, Mr Trump was derided for speaking of Mr. Douglass as if he were still living, saying that Mr. Douglass “is an example of somebody who's done an amazing job that is being recognized more and more.”
True enough, Mr. Douglass has been dead for nearly 121 years.
However, the utter gravity of Mr Douglass’ words, the moral clarity of his actions and his example of a life well-examined and lived should, indeed, continue to be alive and vibrant for all Americans, especially at this moment in the history of our democratic republic.
For that reason, I offer a revised (and slightly re-edited) version of my February 27, 2015 Daily Kos essay, What The Black Man Wanted.]
Last Sunday evening, I was treated to a black conservative creature feature.
First, there was Stanford professor Dr. Shelby Steele's appearance with The Atlantic magazine national correspondent Ta-Nehisi Coates on This Week, reported here at Daily Kos by Egberto Willis.
The most shocking statement from Shelby Steele occurred when George Stephanopoulos asked if government action is not the answer to solve the structural wealth disparity between blacks and whites than what is. "You don't close it," said Shelby Steele. "You don't do anything. You leave it alone. You practice as best as possible a discipline of freedom where your struggle is not for some sort of advantage. But your struggle is for freedom itself. That's what you do."
Pretty much at the same time, I was reading Juan Williams' pig-sh*t shoveling paean to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas published in the Wall Street Journal, which I diaried about in the Tuesday's Chile edition of Black Kos. I noted a quote by Black abolitionist/woman's suffragist Frederick Douglass:
In his dissent in Grutter v. Bollinger, a case that preserved the affirmative-action policies of the University of Michigan Law School, he quoted an 1865 speech by Frederick Douglass : “‘What I ask for the Negro is not benevolence, not pity, not sympathy, but simply justice.’ . . . Like Douglass, I believe blacks can achieve in every avenue of American life without the meddling of university administrators.”
Well...I doubt that Mr. Douglass was referring, specifically, to "the meddling of university administrators" in an 1865 speech; Mr. Douglass probably had more pressing matters that needed his attention. Nevertheless, I looked up the Douglass speech, What The Black Man Wants, and found a sentiment articulated by Dr. Steele on This Week and explicitly quoted in Clarence Thomas's Grutter v. Bollinger dissent:
Everybody has asked the question, and they learned to ask it early of the abolitionists, “What shall we do with the Negro?” I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are wormeaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! I am not for tying or fastening them on the tree in any way, except by nature’s plan, and if they will not stay there, let them fall.
The specific historical context of Frederick Douglass’ 1865 (impromptu!) speech before the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, What The Black Man Wants is, in part, the subject of this diary. The other subject of this diary is the use and abuse of the legacy of Frederick Douglass by modern conservatives (and, now, in 2017, by the current occupant of the Oval Office, Donald Trump).
The New York Times Opinionator Blog has had a fascinating series of posts on the American Civil War called Disunion, including two posts that pretty much go to the heart of the issues here.
By early 1865, reconstruction efforts were already well underway in Louisiana, under the leadership of General Nathaniel P. Banks, former Speaker of the State House and Governor of Massachusetts. Rick Beard's post, Louisiana's Stillborn Constitution elucidates two of the issues permeating in the air:
...On Jan. 29, 1863, he instituted a work program for enslaved blacks...
The program required that blacks sign annual contracts calling for 10-hour work days in return for a monthly wage of $3 or 5 percent of the yearly proceeds from the crop’s sale as well as food, shelter and medical care. The regulations protected the newly contracted laborers from physical punishment, but prevented them from leaving the plantations where they worked without the owners’ permission. Provost marshals monitored the program, capturing runaway laborers and subjecting “vagrant” blacks to involuntary public work.
At its peak, Banks’ system employed 50,000 workers on 1,500 estates....
The other issue surrounding General Banks’ (and ultimately, President Lincoln's) reconstruction efforts in Louisiana was the subject of black suffrage.
By 1863 the issues of emancipation and freedmen’s rights, especially the franchise, were uppermost in the minds of Louisiana’s political leaders. Led by former Representative Michael Hahn, Moderates enthusiastically embraced emancipation while opposing immediate civil or political rights for the freedmen. Thomas Durant and Benjamin Flanders controlled the Radical faction, which wanted to abolish slavery and give black males the right to vote. Durant and Flanders were both longtime New Orleanians, but most of the prominent Radicals were newcomers – Treasury officials (many beholden to Secretary Salmon P. Chase for their appointments) and Northern military officers. The third group, the Conservative Unionists — planters and businessmen who wanted to retain slavery — made up the least powerful political faction....
President Lincoln's plan, which he touted in his final public address, three days prior to his assassination, was harshly criticized by Radical Republicans in Congress and among abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass.
As reported by Erik J. Chaput in his The Reconstruction Wars Begin, the abolitionist community was divided into two factions:
At the Melodeon, [Wendell] Phillips, a Mayflower descendant and Harvard graduate, called for an expansive definition of freedom to take hold as the Union Army made its way to the Confederate capital at Richmond, Va. This included not just emancipation, but also economic independence, equality before the law and the right of suffrage, which was the only way, according to Phillips, to measure the “success or failure” of the Union war effort. Phillips wanted to conquer what his abolitionist friend Sallie Holley once labeled the “atrocious hatred of color.” Phillips was as passionate about suffrage reform as he was about abolition, and he pressured the White House to do more. Let “no negro’s hand drop the bayonet till you have armed it with the ballot,” read a line in a telegram written by Phillips and Frederick Douglass to President Lincoln just a few weeks before.
Not everyone agreed with Phillips’s strategy, though – most notably his friend the publisher William Lloyd Garrison. Although Garrison did not necessarily disagree with Phillips’s long-term commitment to enfranchising millions of former slaves, he did not want to see Phillips put the cart of political reform before the all-important task of ratifying a constitutional amendment ending slavery... he was focused exclusively on one issue: the complete eradication of slavery, everywhere and forever.
The Annual Meeting pretty much descended into what James McPherson, in The Struggle for Equality called "an orgy of name-calling" (McPherson 298)
And then it got personal. Real personal. Chaput explains:
In a stinging attack on the ex-slave and prominent abolitionist Frederick Douglass, another friend-turned-foe, Garrison asked how Douglass could equate freedom with suffrage. When he “fled from Maryland to the free soil of Massachusetts, where he found safety, protection, freedom of thought and speech,” did he not deem such freedom a “gift,” even if it did not include access to the ballot? asked Garrison.
After Garrison spoke, British abolitionist George Thompson took the stage and noticed Frederick Douglass in the crowd. He invited Douglass on stage to speak and Douglass reluctantly agreed to do so. So when Douglass says:
one of the reasons why I have not been more frequently to the meetings of this society, has been because of the disposition on the part of some of my friends to call me out upon the platform, even when they knew that there was some difference of opinion and of feeling between those who rightfully belong to this platform and myself; and for fear of being misconstrued, as desiring to interrupt or disturb the proceedings of these meetings, I have usually kept away, and have thus been deprived of that educating influence, which I am always free to confess is of the highest order, descending from this platform.
we know exactly who he's talking about.
And when Douglass goes on to say:
I went especially, however, with that word of Mr. Phillips, which is the criticism of Gen. Banks and Gen. Banks’ policy. I hold that that policy is our chief danger at the present moment; that it practically enslaves the Negro, and makes the Proclamation of 1863 a mockery and delusion. What is freedom? It is the right to choose one’s own employment. Certainly it means that, if it means anything; and when any individual or combination of individuals undertakes to decide for any man when he shall work, where he shall work, at what he shall work, and for what he shall work, he or they practically reduce him to slavery. [Applause.] He is a slave.
We know exactly what Douglass is talking about.
21st century conservatives, of course, excise the specific historical context of Douglass’ words; the Banks-Lincoln reconstruction policy in Louisiana, the Emancipation Proclamation, and black (male) suffrage and choose to run with the portion of the paragraph beginning with "What is freedom?" as a (conservative) justification of everything from the meeting of "freedom" to the demonization of all manner of social programs to the supposed pernicious influence and interference of government in people's lives.
When Justice Clarence Thomas used the Douglass quote in his dissent from the majority in Grutter v. Bollinger, he drained Douglass' statement to the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society of all meaning and context. Given what Thomas's ultimate dissenting argument is, given that Thomas makes repeated references to "racial discrimination" in his Grutter V. Bollinger dissent, Douglass' simple short statement in his 1866 Atlantic essay, Reconstruction, would have sufficed:
Fortunately, the Constitution of the United States knows no distinction between citizens on account of color.
And while that statement, too, would be taken out of context, at least it has the added value of actually being somewhat consistent with Douglass' views on the Constitution.
21st century conservatives seem to love Frederick Douglass.
And now, the current occupant of the Oval Office dares to utter Mr. Douglass’ name.
If Donald Trump Wants to utter Mr. Douglass’ name and if 21st century conservatives want to quote from What The Black Man Wants, then there needs be a reconciliation of Republican and conservative views with this statement from that very same speech:
I believe that when the tall heads of this Rebellion shall have been swept down, as they will be swept down, when the Davises and Toombses and Stephenses... there will be this rank undergrowth of treason...You will see those traitors, handing down, from sire to son, the same malignant spirit which they have manifested, and which they are now exhibiting, with malicious hearts, broad blades, and bloody hands in the field, against our sons and brothers. That spirit will still remain; and whoever sees the Federal Government extended over those Southern States will see that Government in a strange land, and not only in a strange land, but in an enemy’s land.
Not only has the “malignant spirit” of “this rank undergrowth of treason” been handed down through generations; it was harnessed in the ugliest of ways by the 21st century Republican Party and Donald Trump, so much and so effectively that what Douglass called this “undergrowth of treason” now occupies the White House in the 21st century.
And I don’t think that even Frederick Douglass could have admitted to the literal possibility that “this rank undergrowth of treason” would have included the giving and accepting of “aid and comfort” to and from a foreign power such that a foreign power could have any influence on this country’s national elections.
The story of our inferiority is an old dodge, as I have said; for wherever men oppress their fellows, wherever they enslave them, they will endeavor to find the needed apology for such enslavement and oppression in the character of the people oppressed and enslaved.
African Americans “living in hell” as they dodge bullets on the way to and from the corner store?
“Bad hombres?”
A “nasty woman?”
That playbook is old.
Let’s not forget the very specific subject matter of Douglass’ What The Black Man Wants speech; the connection between emancipation and suffrage.
I can well imagine Mr. Douglass’ own views to Mr. Trump’s megalomanical claims that millions of people (undocumented immigrants, dead, and otherwise) voted illegally or otherwise “hung out” on voter rolls as if they were a street corner and committed an almost nonexistent crime called voter fraud.
Of course, the 21st century Republican Party has been in the forefront of voter suppression campaigns in quite a few states throughout the country so, in the case of baseless voter fraud claims, the current occupant of The Oval Office has been more of a follower rather than a leader.
Yes, even the current occupant of Blair House can be criticized.
Many African Americans are (rightly in my view) criticizing Mr. Pence’s need to mention President Lincoln during Black History Month, at all.
While there are a variety of things, positive and negative, that one can say about President Lincoln, there is one fact about the 16th President of the United States that is irrefutable.
President Lincoln took an assassin’s bullet three days after stating, in his final public address, that blacks and Creoles in Louisiana should be given the right to vote; a proposal that, if followed upon and enacted, would have meant “nig*er citizenship” according to Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth.
21st century voter suppression has the backing of large majorities of white evangelical Christians like Mr. Pence; a first or second cousin of a brand of Christianity that Frederick Douglass recognized and criticized in his day:
What I have said respecting and against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the slaveholding religion of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper; for, between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest, possible difference--so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity. I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels.
Frederick Douglass, Appendix to Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Written by Himself (1845)
No amount of selective quotation by 21st century conservatives can minimize or alter the radical impact of Frederick Douglass's activism on the behalf of black American citizens (or all American citizens, for that matter) then or now.
I am pretty confident that were Frederick Douglass able to time travel into the 21st century and to look at the Republican Party, he wouldn't recognize it.
Frederick Douglass would recognize 21st century conservatives and Republicans exactly as they are.
Frederick Douglass would recognize the 45th President of the the United States as exactly who he is and would name it.
In fact, Mr. Douglass already named it. All of it. Long ago.