‘Douglass’ explores thinker’s impact

Cary Fraser

Confronted from childhood with the insight that education “would forever unfit him to be a slave,” Frederick Douglass lived his life defined by the search to escape slavery, as both personal burden and as cultural and political pathology in American life.

In escaping slavery, however, Douglass discovered that the agonies of slavery left a legacy of race as an indelible marker of difference and a fundament of American life — a legacy that has yet to disappear even after the first Reconstruction of 1865-1876 and the Second Reconstruction of 1954-1969.

Myers’ exploration of Douglass’ thought, which emerged over the course of a life that straddled the American Civil War, seeks to establish the importance of Douglass as a tribune of American liberalism and its potential for progressive change in contemporary America.

Myers’ concern with reasserting Douglass’ voice and his intellectual example in African-American life is driven in part by a concern that “radical currents have gained such force among the generality of blacks as to threaten to displace the liberal mainstream of African- American political thought.”

From this point of departure, Myers explores the significance of rights for African-Americans.

In Myers’ view, Douglass’ challenge to slavery seems to have been motivated by a firm belief that divine Providence was opposed to slavery and, moreover, that the system represented a contradiction of natural law and stood against reason. Further, he embraced the idea that the slave had a right to revolt against the system; adopted the view that the Constitution was, at heart, a weapon to be used against slavery and its champions; and welcomed the advent of the Civil War to destroy a monstrous system and expunge the moral blemish that slavery embodied.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, Douglass’ concerns focused upon championing the full integration of African-Americans into the American political order and the development of a culture of self-reliance that could ensure African-American survival as a free people and provide a way out of poverty and the other legacies of slavery.

In addition, he inveighed against the proposals to expatriate African- Americans by way of colonization schemes and against the attempts to establish a racial caste system as the successor regime to slavery.

In effect, after the Civil War, Douglass was engaged in the challenge to prevent the creation of another racial hierarchy that would institutionalize African-Americans as a disadvantaged population — a challenge that continues into the present.

His life and work has served as precedent and parallel for other major African-American intellectual and political figures, such as Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, Martin Luther King Jr. and Barack Obama.

Myers’ exploration of Douglass’ life and thought reveals the enormous complexity of the man and his sophisticated appreciation of politics in 19th century America. Douglass was both catalyst and combatant in the search for an alternative American order that would transcend slavery and race as markers of African-American disadvantage.

On the issue of alienation among African-Americans in recent times raised by Myers, it will be the success of the Obama administration in the adoption of an American liberal agenda that will determine whether a new vision of inclusive politics will reframe the American democratic order and the role of African-Americans therein.

Cary Fraser is associate professor of African and African-American studies and history at Penn State.