frederick douglass essay about education

Frederick Douglass on Education

Frederick Douglass was a devoted adherent of the “Yankee” tradition of education , albeit an informal version of it. While Douglass was almost entirely self-taught, he followed this democratized classical model, which was designed to produce self-reliant and self-governing citizens. ( 1 ) Douglass knew from experience just how effective this model was in achieving this. ( 2 )

How did the young Douglass manage to educate himself while held in slavery by a man who forbade him from becoming literate? ( 3 ) First, by rushing through his errands so that he would have time left over to solicit reading instruction from white children playing in the streets of Baltimore. ( 4 ) Then, by getting his hands on a copy of a popular school reader called The Columbian Orator , written by teacher Caleb Bingham. Douglass, then in his early teens, was living in the busy city of Baltimore. ( 5 ) As his biographer David W. Blight describes the experience:

“That Douglass would embrace and later celebrate the language in this book is also not surprising. The Columbian Orator was much more than a stiff collection of Christian moralisms for America’s youth. It was the creation of a man of decidedly antislavery sympathies, one determined to democratize education and instill in young people  the heritage of the American Revolution, as well as the values of republicanism . Caleb Bingham’s eighty-four entries were organized without regard for chronology or topic; such a lack of system was a pedagogical theory of the time designed to hold student interest. It held [Douglass] in rapt attention. The selections included prose, verse, plays, and especially political speeches by famous orators from antiquity and the Enlightenment. Most of the pieces address themes of nationalism, individual liberty, religious faith, or the value of education. The reader as a whole reflected , as Bingham intended, New England’s long transition from seventeenth-century Calvinism to nineteenth-century evangelical, freewill doctrine, from Puritan theocracy to the Revolutionary era’s separation of church and state. As Douglass tackled the pages of The Columbian Orator in his early teens, whether he grasped the contexts or not, he would have repeatedly encountered irresistible words such as “freedom,” “liberty,” “tyranny,” and the “rights of man.” Well before he read any serious history, he garnered and cherished a vocabulary of liberation. Among the most striking features of the collection were eleven dialogues, most of them originally written for the book by David Everett, Bingham’s associate in Boston. They were both serious and comical, aimed at the ethical imagination of young people and laced with moral tales about human nature, truth telling, and reversals of fate where underdogs outwit their oppressors.” ( 6 )

“Above all,” Dwight concludes, “what Douglass found in this book was an elocution manual.” ( 7 )

“[The Columbian Orator] drew upon the ancients to demonstrate a variety of practical techniques for effective oratory… The primary aim of oratory, said Bingham, was to create ‘action’ between speaker and audience. ‘The perfection of art consists in its nearest resemblance to nature,’ the educator argued. True eloquence emerged when the orator could train his voice to ‘follow nature.’ Bingham provided specific examples of such elements of speech making as cadence, pace, variety of tone, and especially gestures of the arms, hands, shoulders, and head. Young Frederick was enthralled, and though he could not yet know it, his life’s vocation, his true calling, appeared as a saving grace. Gaining knowledge—through experience, and now so importantly through reading, and slowly, through what he called the ‘art of writing’—became young Douglass’s reason for living.” ( 8 )

Yet arguably more important than the lessons in oratory was a particular dialogue included by Bingham:

“A dialogue Douglass read— between a slave and his master—struck him deeply. With a ‘spirited defense’ the slave successfully argued against the institution of slavery and his master ‘seeing himself to be thus vanquished at every turn in the argument; he generously and meekly emancipates the slave, with his best wishes for his prosperity.’ An intelligent dialogue, for this slave, brought him freedom by ‘penetrating even the heart of the slaveholder, compelling him to yield up his earthly interests to the claims of eternal justice.’ Slavery, Douglass realized , was not the black man’s inherent state. The more Douglass read, the more he detested slavery as knowledge opened his eyes ‘to the horrible pit.’He studied in the evenings and learned about the abolitionist movement through antislavery petitions in the newspaper.” ( 9 )

The Self-Made Man

After escaping to New England in the 1830s, where he became active in the abolitionist movement and gained fame in the anti-slavery literary and newspaper culture of 1840s, Douglas began articulating his views on education.

By the outbreak of the Civil War, when Douglass was already known as a representative example of the 19th-century American “self-made man,” ( 10 ) he showed that he valued formal education more than many others who went by that label. For decades after the war, he gave lectures insisting that “there never was a self-educated man who, with the same exertion, would not have been better educated by the aid of schools and colleges.” ( 11 )

Even this view, however, may have related less to the content of the education than it did to his impression that college training produced citizens more confident in their own judgment , and with a greater ability to demonstrate their capacity to others’ satisfaction. “A man may know much about educating himself,” Douglass explained in a lecture, “but little about the proper means of educating others.” As a result, a self-made man was “liable to be full of contrarieties. He may be large, but at the same time awkward; swift but ungraceful; a man of power, but deficient in the polish and amiable proportions of the affluent and regularly educated man.” ( 12 ) Douglass’s concerns here probably reflect the fact that he wished to participate in American life at the highest level, which meant interacting with men who had received an elite education.

In any event, during the Reconstruction era, Douglass clearly identified with the “Yankee” tradition of the formally educated Massachusetts elites who made up much of the Radical Republican faction. This tradition held that integrated public schooling was necessary to establish the belief in the political equality of all citizens necessary to republican self-governance. Indeed, this was one of the main purposes of education, in their eyes, as I explained in earlier pieces such as “ Lincoln on Education .” ( 13 )

As Douglass put it, “let the colored children be educated and grow up side by side with white children, come up friends unsophisticated and generous childhood together, and it will require a powerful agent to convert them into enemies, and lead them to prey upon each other’s rights and liberties.” Integrated education provided “many opportunities for removing prejudices and establishing the rights of all men.” This belief gave Douglass a strong reason to favor formal schooling. Like Massachusetts education pioneer Horace Mann, Douglass believed that only a centrally organized and broadly accessible, even compulsory, system of public education could ensure that students from all backgrounds intermingled and internalized the same norms. ( 14 )

Indeed, shortly after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, and before the war had even ended, Douglass had promoted a vision of post-war education in his newspaper. This vision was firmly in the Yankee tradition, and naturally assumed a Union victory:

“ Douglass hoped the New England schoolhouse would replace every Southern whipping-post: “Schools for the education of [millions of black Americans] will be required…slavery has ‘stood athwart the pathway of knowledge and progress’ and ‘kept the nation from fully becoming what it was meant to be.’ The institution of slavery inhibited Americans—both slave and master—from bettering themselves for their Republic.” ( 15 )

One scholar’s summary of Douglass’s views on education, and her suggestions as to what modern Americans should take from it, are a fitting conclusion to this piece. Particularly interesting is how she integrates the shades of Deweyan thought that Douglass increasingly anticipated after the war with the Yankee tradition.

“For Douglass , an integrated and universal education encouraged ‘forms of moral responsibility that are essential to civic life,’ ‘responsible behavior because educated people [. . .] are less likely to behave immorally,’ and “the development of stronger bonds of civic education by bringing (or forcing) citizens together into a public space where they must interact with one another.’ Providing universal education to the black man was a necessary act of justice and preservation. Douglass urged a manly education, with Lincolnian characteristics as the foundation of such education. …While Congressional debates have changed since Reconstruction, Douglass’s thoughts on education retain their currency today. Education provides moral and intellectual benefits to the individual, his/her community, and country. Douglass ‘believed education was crucial for the development of free and responsible citizens.’ Thus, for Douglass, a thriving Republic requires public schools to place civic education at the forefront of instruction. Such education should emphasize students’ common nationality as opposed to “any measure that authorizes or deepens one’s self- identification in predominantly racial terms.” ( 16 )

Further Reading on Frederick Douglass’s Life and Education

David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

Emily Hess, “It Must Develop Men”: Frederick Douglass and Education in Nineteenth-Century America

• See note 2, below, and David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (Simon & Schuster, Kindle Edition) (“With hardly any formal schooling, although a good deal of reading in his prairie farming background , the twenty-two-year-old Abraham Lincoln studied with relish the classical and Enlightenment-era oratory in The Columbian Orator during his first winter (1831–32) in New Salem, Illinois…’All men,’ [Douglass] said with his well-honed Protestant ethic, “however industrious, are either lured or lashed through the world.” The lecture is at times knitted together by lines that read like platitudes in a young man’s advice manual. ‘A man never knows the strength of his grip till life and limb depend upon it. Something is likely to be done when something must be done.’… Like Emerson, Douglass’s embrace of individualism called for finding motivation, truth, and one’s own character from within one’s own ‘soul.’ Douglass may have borrowed actual words as well as ideas from Emerson’s classic essay ‘Self-Reliance.’”) Blight, David W.. Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (p. 805). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.) (Emphases added; internal citations omitted.) As Blight notes, however, Douglass did not necessarily agree with all of Emerson’s philosophy. Nor did he necessarily agree with all of the assumptions of the “Yankee” educational tradition, at least for black Americans in the antebellum years, though arguably these disagreements were over means and not ends. See Emily Hess, “’It Must Develop Men’: Frederick Douglass and Education in Nineteenth-Century America,” Expositions, Vol. 8, No. 2, Villanova University, 2014, https://expositions.journals.villanova.edu/article/view/1842 (“We needed more to learn how to make a good living,’ he wrote [Harriet Beecher] Stowe, ‘than to learn Latin and Greek.’ Douglass later favored classical education but black education in antebellum America needed to serve immediate financial ends and prove the black man could flourish in freedom, develop a sound work ethic, and become a productive citizen in society. This type of education extended a powerful argument for the abolition of slavery. “The most telling, the most killing refutation of slavery,” Douglass wrote, “is the presentation of an industrious, enterprising, thrifty and intelligent free black population.” In other words, the free black population of the North held the heavy responsibility of proving their race capable and worthy of freedom.” (Emphases added; internal citations omitted.)
• See, for example, Hess, “'It Must Develop Men’: Frederick Douglass and Education in Nineteenth-Century America” (“…Frederick Douglass fostered a clear vision of education that would not only improve his race but also provide an intelligent, virtuous, and moral citizenry that ‘the proud fabric of freedom’ could rest ‘as the rock of its basis.’ He considered this both a necessity and act of justice. From his own experience, Douglass found education a vital component for full emancipation. Enlightenment made man ‘fit to be free’ and capable of self- government. Ultimately, Douglass sponsored an integrated education that resurrected the materials of reason from Lincoln’s Lyceum address. Such education would elevate the black man to disprove stereotypes, overcome prejudice, and demonstrate his capacity for citizenship . This article examines Frederick Douglass’s education while enslaved, his road to enlightenment, what he considered an appropriate education for the emancipated race, and why the federal government should provide a universal and integrated education.”) (Emphases added; internal citations omitted.)
• See Hess, “'It Must Develop Men’: Frederick Douglass and Education in Nineteenth-Century America” (“In March of 1826, Douglass was sent to Baltimore to live with and serve Hugh and Sophia Auld. The following year, after Mr. Auld forbade his benevolent wife from helping young Frederick learn the alphabet (because it was ‘unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read’), Douglass understood ‘the white man’s power to enslave the black man’ and ‘the direct pathway from slavery to freedom’ was education. Thus , ‘the argument which he so warmly urged, against my learning to read, only served to inspire me with a desire and determination to learn more. In learning to read, I owe almost as much to the bitter opposition of my master, as to the kindly aid of my mistress.’ At a young age Douglass understood that ‘education and slavery were incompatible with each other.’ ) (Emphases added; internal citations omitted.)
• See ibid. (“Once his lessons with Mrs. Auld ceased, Douglass sought out young white schoolchildren in town to learn more of the alphabet. Few helped however, because, as Douglass knew, providing education was promoting freedom. It was ‘almost an unpardonable offense to do anything, directly or indirectly, to promote a slave’s freedom in a slave state .’”)See also Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, and note 3, above.
• See Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom.
• Ibid. Blight continues: “In “Dialogue Between the Ghosts of an English Duelist, a North American Savage, and Mercury,”Englishman is revealed as the greater “savage,” while the Mohawk Indian, respected for his cultural differences, achieves the higher virtue. With such stories about democratized education and ethnic pluralism, it was as if Frederick Bailey had landed in a modern multicultural classroom in the midst of a slave state. He read many speeches, and especially one dialogue, ‘repeatedly.’ ‘Dialogue Between a Master and a Slave’ is to modern eyes a naïve and simplistic exchange between a slave owner and his bondman; but it profoundly affected Douglass as he read its improbable conclusion. If we can imagine our way into a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old’s sensibility, what Douglass discovered in this story was that slavery was subject to “argument,” even between a master and a slave.” (Emphases added; internal citations omitted.)
• Ibid. (Emphases added; internal citations omitted.)
• Hess, “'It Must Develop Men’: Frederick Douglass and Education in Nineteenth-Century America.” (Emphases added; internal citations omitted.) While the description of this dialogue given by Douglass’s biographer in note 6, above, portrays it less favorably, there is no doubt that Douglass found it convincing, and the belief that slaveholders or supporters of slavery could be persuaded of the practice’s immorality through argument was common in that era. This was a central conviction of many abolitionists and early Republicans, and the contemporary record indicates that it was not as absurd or childish a belief as Blight suggestions. Hess provides additional context on how Douglass saw the issue over the course of his life: “Douglass worked as an itinerant abolitionist speaker for William Lloyd Garrison’s American Anti-Slavery Society for a number of years after his escape. As he recalled in one of his autobiographies, ‘All that the American people needed, I thought, was light. Could they know slavery as I knew it, they would hasten to the work of its extinction.’ Like the articulate slave in The Columbian Orator, Douglass believed the United States simply needed an exposition of the horrors of slavery from an articulate, intelligent black man. He soon realized, however, a grander education would be necessary. The Civil War, according to Douglass, served the purpose as an ‘apocalyptic education’ for the United States. Historian David Blight notes, ‘only small numbers of Americans would have willed emancipation in 1861; none could stop it in 1864–1865.’ Douglass considered President Lincoln one of the war’s best students. He continued to recruit black soldiers for the Union cause, in part, because he was ‘so well satisfied’ with Lincoln and ‘the educating tendency of the conflict.’ Moreover, Douglass urged black men to enlist for the Union during the Civil War to demonstrate to all of society their capacity to reason: ‘you are a man [. . .] if you were only a horse or an ox, incapable of deciding whether the rebels are right or wrong, you would have no responsibility, and might like the ox go on eating your corn.’ But, instead, “manhood requires you to take sides.’” (Emphases added; internal citations omitted.)
• See note 11, below, and Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (“…the New York Tribune instructed its readers that Douglass ‘became the representative man of his race . . . by virtue of self-help . . . [and] self-education.’”)
• See ibid. (“  One of Douglass’s fullest expressions of the doctrine of self-reliance, though it is much more, was his famous speech ‘Self-Made Men,’ delivered dozens of times from 1859 to the early 1890s . The lecture reflected the culture and political economy of the Gilded Age; he appears to have carried it along with him on many of his speaking tours…He lampooned the ‘haughty manner’ of Yale boys, but never learning itself.”)
• Quoted in ibid.
• In the 1950s, the Supreme Court used these arguments, in a modified form and without credit, to establish the right to non-segregated public education. See Michael W. McConnell, " Originalism and the Desegregation Decisions ," 81 Virginia Law Review 947 (1995), https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=12624&context=journal_articles
• See Hess, “'It Must Develop Men’: Frederick Douglass and Education in Nineteenth-Century America” (“The Republican Party considered universal education so important to the reconstruction of the South that it became an integral condition for admittance back into the Union.”) See also footnote 2 in Kerry Ellard, “ The Revealing Historical Differences Between Northern and Southern Education in America, Part I: The Northern Education Tradition ,” Montessorium .
• See Hess, “'It Must Develop Men’: Frederick Douglass and Education in Nineteenth-Century America” (“After successfully ratifying the 13th amendment, many Republicans wondered what could replace antislavery ‘as the leading Republican idealistic issue.’ The Republican Party decided to promote public schools, especially for emancipated blacks, so they would be “worthy of the responsibilities of citizenship and suffrage. ’” (Emphases added; internal citations omitted.)

Kerry Ellard

Kerry Ellard earned a B.S. in Communication and a B.A. in Political Science from Boston University, and a J.D. from Boston College Law School. During school and after graduation, she worked in law, education, and government. Most recently, she has worked as a tutor, independent historian, and sociological analyst. Kerry lives in Boston, where she enjoys playing with her dog and attending concerts.

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The Revealing Historical Differences Between Northern and Southern Education in America, Part I: The Northern Education Tradition

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Emerson on Education

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Blessings of Liberty and Education

• September 03, 1894

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Ladies, Gentlemen ad Friends:

As I am a stranger among you and a sojourner, you will, I hope, allow me a word about myself, by way ofintroduction. I want to say something about the day upon which we are met. Coincidents are always more or less, interesting and here is one such of a somewhat striking character. This day has for me a special interest. It happens to be the anniversary of my escape from bondage. Fifty-six years ago to-day, it was my good fortune to cease to be a slave, a chattel personal, and to become a man. It was upon the 3rd day of September, 1838, that I started upon my little life work in the world. It was a great day for me. With slavery behind me and all the great untried world before me, my heart throbbed with many anxious thoughts as to what the future might have in store for me. I will not attempt here any description of what were my emotions in this crisis. I leave you to imagine the difference between what they were and what they are on this happy occasion. I then found myself in a strange land, unknown, friendless, and pursued as if I were a fugitive from justice. I was a stranger to every one I met in the streets of the great city of New York, for that city was the first place in which I felt at liberty to halt in my flight farther North. New York, at that day was by no means a city of refuge. On the contrary, it was a city in which slave-hunters and slave-catchers delighted to congregate. It was one of the best fields for that sport this side of Africa. The game once started was easily taken. If they had caught me, I should have been elsewhere to assist in founding an Industrial School for colored youth in Virginia. This is all I have to say on this point.

My first thought germain to this occasion, and which must have some interest for us all, very naturally relates to noted place where we now happen to be assembled. Since the great and terrible battle with which its name is associated and which has now passed into history as the birth of many battles, no event has occured here so important in its character and influence and so every way significant, as the event which we have this day met to inaugurate and celebrate. To found an educational institution for any people is worthy of note; but to found a school in which to instruct, improve and develop all that is noblest and best in the souls of a deeply wronged and long neglected people, is especially note worthy. This spot, once the scene of fratricidal war, and the witness of its innumerable and indescribal horrors, is, we hope to be hereafter the scene of brotherly kindness, charity and peace. We are to witness here a display of the best elements of advanced civilization and good citizenship. It is to be the place where the children of a once enslaved people may realize the blessings of liberty and education, and learn how to make for themselves and for all others the best of both worlds.

No spot on the soil of Virginia could have been more fitly chosen for planting this school, than this historic battle-field. It has not only the high advantage of forming an instructive contrast and illustrating the compensation possible to mankind, by patiently awaiting the quiet operation of time and events, but suggests the battle to be waged here against ignorance and vice. Thirty years ago, when Federal and Confederate armies met here in deadly conflict over the question of the perpetual enslavement of the negro, who would or could have dreamed, that, in a single generation, such changes would be wrought in the minds of men that a school would have founded here, for the mental, moral and industrial education of the children of this same people whose enslavement was sought even with by sword? Who would have imagined that Virginia would, after the agony of war and in a time so short, become so enlightened and so liberal as to be willing and even pleased to welcome here, upon her “sacred soil,” a school of the children of her former slaves? Thirty years ago neither poet, priest nor prophet, could have foretold the vast and wonderful changes which have taken place in the opinions of the American people on this subject since the war. The North has changed, and the South has changed, and we have all changed, and all changed for the better. Otherwise, we should not be here to-day engaged in the business of establishing this institution.

The liberality on the part of the people of Virginia, a typical State of the South, which has encouraged and justified the founding of this Industrial School, not only within her borders, but here on the very first great battle-field between the two great sections of our Union, is as much a cause of amazement, satisfaction and joy, as is the readiness with which the good people of the North have responded to the call for pecuniary aid and thus made this enterprize successful. Both circumstances are to-day causes of joy and congratulation. They show that the colored man need not despair; that he has friends in both sections of the Republic. In view of this school and the changes in public sentiment which it indicates, we may well exclaim with Milton, “Peace hath her victories no less renowned than war!”

When first invited to speak a few words in celebration of the founding of this industrial school, I was disposed to decline the honor, in favor of some of my younger and better educated brothers. But I am glad that I did not decline the honor. The duty devolved upon me, but which I then hesitated to assume, is, in every respect, an agreeable duty. I am glad that, at my time of life, the opportunity is afforded me to connect my name with a school so meritorious and which I can reasonably hope will be of so great and permanent service to a people so greatly needing it. It is in line with my relations to the negro. I have pleaded the cause of the oppressed against all comers, during more than fifty years of conflict. Were a period put to my career to-day, I could hardly wish for a time or place, or an occasion, better suited for a desired ending, than here and now. The founding of this and similar schools on the soil of Virginia, —a State formerly the breeder, buyer and seller of slaves; a State so averse in the past to the education of colored people, as to make it a crime to teach a negro to read,—is one of the best fruits of the agitation of a half a century, and a firm foundation of hope for the future.

The idea at the bottom of this Institution is rapidly gaining ground every where. Industrial education is, with me, however, no new idea. Nearly forty years ago I was its advocate, and at that time I held it to be the chief want of the free colored people of the North. I was then editor and publisher of the North Star, a newspaper printed in Rochester, New York I saw even then, that the free negro of the North, with every thing great expected of him, but with no means at hand to meet such expectations, could not hope to rise while he was excluded from all profitable employments. He was free by law, but denied the chief advantages of freedom; he was indeed but nominally free; he was not compelled to call any man his master, and no one could call him slave, but he was still in fact a slave, a slave to society, and could only be a hewer of wood and a drawer of water. It was easier at that day to get a black boy into a lawyer’s office to study law, or into a doctor’s office to study medicine, than it was to get him into a carpenter’s shop to push a plane, or into a blacksmith’s shop to hammer iron.

While I have no sympathy whatever with those who affect to despise labor, even the humblest forms of it, and hold that whatever is needful to be done it is honorable to do, it is, nevertheless, plain that no people, white or black, can, in my country, continue long respected who are confined exclusively to mere menial service for which but little intelligence or skill are required, and for which but the smallest wages are paid or received; especially if the laborer does not make an effort to rise above that condition. While the employment as waiters at hotels and on steamboats and railroads, is perfectly proper and entirely honorable, in the circumstances which now surround the colored people, no one variety of the American people can afford to be known only as waiters and domestic servants.

While I say this, I fully believe in the dignity of all needful labor. All honest effort to better human conditions is entitled to respect. I have met at Poland Springs, in the State of Maine, and at the White Mountains in New Hampshire, and at other places, as well as at the late World’s Columbian Exposition at Chicago, many young white ladies and gentlemen, who were truly such, students and teachers in high schools and seminaries, gladly serving as waiters during their vacation, and doing so with no sense of being degraded in any degree, or embarassed by such service. This would not have been the case with them, if society, by any law or custom, had decided that this service should be, for such persons, their only calling and vocation in life. Daniel Webster used to say that New Hampshire was a good State to emigrate from. So I say of menial service— it is a good condition to separate from, just as soon as one can find any other calling, which is more remunerative and more elevating in its tendency. It is not the labor that degrades, but the want of spirit to rise above it.

Exclusive service, or exclusive mastery, is not good for the moral or mental health of any class. Pride and insolence will certainly be developed in the one class, and weakness and servility in the other. The colored people, to be respected, must furnish their due proportion to each class. They must not be all masters, or all servants. They must command, as well as be commanded.

However much I may regret that it was my lot to have been a slave, I shall never regret that I was once a common laborer; a servant, if you please so to term it. But I felt myself as much a man then, as I feel myself a man now; for I had an ambition above my calling, and I was determined then, as I have been ever since, to use every honorable means in my power to rise to a higher plane of service, just as soon and as fast as that should be possible.

My philosophy of work is, that a man is worked upon by that upon which he works. Some work requires more muscle than it does mind. That work which requires the most thought, skill and ingenuity, will receive the highest commendation, and will otherwise do most for the worker. Things which can be done simply with the exertion of muscle, and with little or no exertion of the intellect, will develop the muscle, but dwarf the mind.

Long ago it was asked, “How can he get wisdom, who holdeth the plow and whose talk is of oxen?”

The school which we are about to establish here, is, if I understand its object, intended to teach the colored youth, who shall avail themselves of its privileges, the use of both mind and body. It is to educate the hand as well as the brain; to teach men to work as well as to think, and to think as well as to work. It is to teach them to join thought to work, and thus to get the very best result of thought and work. There is in my opinion, no useful thing that a man can do, that cannot be better done by an educated man than by an uneducated one.

In the old slave times, they colored people were expected to work without thinking. They were commanded to do as they were told. They were to be hands—only hands, not heads. Thought was the prerogative of the master. Obedience was the duty of the slave. I, in my ignorance, once told my old master I thought a certain way of doing some work I had in hand was the best way to do it. He promptly demanded, “Who gave you the right to think?” I might have answered in the language of Robert Burns,

“Were I designed yon lordling’s slave, By Nature’s law designed, Why was an independent thought E’er planted in my mind?”

But I had not then read Robert Burns. Burns had high ideas of the dignity of simple manhood. In respect of the dignity of man we may well exclaim with the great Shakspeare concerning him: “What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In apprehension how like a God! The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!” Yet, if man be benighted, this glowing description of his power and dignity is merely a “glittering generality,” an empty tumult of words, without any support of facts.

In his natural condition, however, man is only potentially great. As a mere physical being, he does not take high rank, even among the beasts of the field. He is not so fleet as a horse or a hound, or so strong as an ox or a mule. His true dignity is not to be sought in his arm, or in his legs, but in his head. Here is the seat and source of all that is of especially great or practical importance in him. There is fire in the flint and steel, but it is friction that causes it to flash, flame and burn, and give light where all else may be darkness. There is music in the violin, but the touch of the master is needed to fill the air and the soul with the concord of sweet sounds. There is power in the human mind, but education is needed for its development.

As man is the highest being on earth, it follows that the vocation of teacher is among the highest known to him. To properly teach it to enduce man’s potential and latent greatness, to discover and develop the noblest, highest and best that is in him. In view of this fact, no man whose business it is to teach should ever allow himself to feel that his mission is mean, inferior, or circumscribed. In my estimation, neither politics nor religion present to us a calling higher than this primary business of unfolding and strengthening the powers of the human soul. It is a permanent vocation. Some know the value of education, by having it. I know its value by not having it. It is a want that begins with the beginning of human existence, and continues through all the journey of life. Of all the creatures that live and move and have their being on this green earth, man, at his birth, is the most helpless and the most in need of instruction. He does not know even how to seek his food. His little life is menaced on every hand. The very elements conspire against him. The cattle upon a thousand hills; the wolves and bears in the forest, all come into the world better equipped for life than does man. From first to last, his existence depends upon instruction.

Yet this little helpless weakling, whose life can be put out as we put out the flame of a candle, with a breath, is the lord of creation. Though in his beginning, he is only potentially this lord, with education he is the commander of armies; the builder of cities; the tamer of wild beasts; the navigator of unknown seas; the discoverer of unknown islands, capes and continents, and the founder of great empires, and capable of limitless civilization.

But if man is without education, although with all his latent possibilities attaching to him, he is, but a pitiable object; a giant in body, but a pigmy in intellect, and, at best, but half a man. Without education, he lives within the narrow, dark and grimy walls of ignorance. He is a poor prisoner without hope. The little light that he gets comes to him as through dark corridors and grated windows. The sights and sounds which reach him, so significant and full of meaning to the well-trained mind, are to him of dim and shadowy and uncertain importance. He sees, but does not perceive. He hears, but does not understand. The silent and majestic heavens, fretted with stars, so inspiring and uplifting, so sublime and glorious to the souls of other men, bear no message to him. They suggest to him no idea of the wonderful world in which he lives, or of the harmony of this great universe, and hence impart to him no happiness.

Education, on the other hand, means emancipation. It means light and liberty. It means the uplifting of the soul of man into the glorious light of truth, the light only by which men can be free. To deny education to any people is one of the greatest crimes against human nature. It is to deny them the means of freedom and the rightful pursuit of happiness, and to defeat the very end of their being. They can neither honor themselves nor their Creator. Than this, no greater wrong can be inflicted; and, on the other hand, no greater benefit can be bestowed upon a long benighted people than giving to them, as we are here this day endeavoring to do, the means of useful education. It is aimed to make them both better and more useful in life and to furnish them with increased means of livelihood; to make of them more skilled workmen, more useful mechanics, and better workers in wood, leather, tin and iron.

It is sometimes said that we have done enough for the negro; that we have given him his liberty and we should now let him do for himself. This sounds well, but that is all. I do not undervalue freedom from chattel slavery. It was a great and glorious triumph of justice and humanity. It was the first of long years of labor, agitation and sacrifice. But let us look at this emancipation and see where it left the negro, and we shall see how far it falls short of the plainest demands of justice and of what we owe the negro.

To find an adequate measure of compensation for any wrong, we must first ascertain the nature and extent of the wrong itself. The mere act of enslaving the negro was not the only wrong done him, nor were the labors and stripes imposed upon him, though heavy and grievous to bear, the sum of his wrongs. They were, indeed, terrible enough; but deeper down and more terrible still were the mental and moral wrongs which enter into his claim for a slight measure of compensation. For two hundred and forty years the light of letters was denied him, and the gates of knowledge were closed against him.

He was driven from time to eternity in the darkest ignorance. He was herded with the beasts of the field, was without marriage, without family, without schools and without any moral training, other than that which came by the slave driver’s lash. People who live now and talk of doing too much for the negro, think nothing of these things, and those who know them, seem to desire to forget them especially when they are made the basis of a claim for a larger measure of justice to the negro. They forget that for these terrible wrongs there is no redress and no adequate compensation. The enslaved and battered millions have come, suffered, died and gone with all their moral and physical wounds into eternity. To them no recompense can be made. If the American people could put a school-house in every valley of the south a church on every hill-top; supply with a teacher and preacher each respectively, and welcome the descendents of the former slaves to all the moral and intellectual benefits of the one and the other, without money and without price, such a sacrifice would not compensate their children for the terrible wrong done to their fathers and mothers by their enslavement and enforced degradation.

I have another complaint. It is said that the colored people of the South have made but little progress since their emancipation. This complaint is not only groundless, but adds insult to injury. Under the whole heavens there never was a people liberated from bondage under conditions less favorable to the beginning of a new and free mode of life, than were the freedmen of the South. Criminals, guilty of heinous crimes against the State and society, are let go free on more generous conditions than were our slaves. The despotic government of Russia was more liberal and humane to its emancipated slaves than our Republic was to ours. Each head of a family of slaves in Russia was given three acres of land and necessary farming implements with which to begin life, but our slaves were turned loose without any thing—naked to the elements.

As one of the number of enslaved, I am none the less disposed to observe and note with pleasure and gratitude every effort of our white friends and brothers to remedy the evils wrought by the long years of slavery and its concomitants. And in such wise I rejoice in the effort made here to-day.

I have a word now upon another subject, and what I have to say may be more useful than palatable. That subject is the talk now so generally prevailing about races and race lines. I have no hesitation in telling you that I think the colored people and their friends make a great mistake in saying so much of race and color. I know no such basis for the claims of justice. I know no such motive for efforts at self-improvement. In this race-way they put the emphasis in the wrong place. I do now and always have attached more importance to manhood than to mere kinship or identity with any variety of the human family. RACE, in the popular sense, is narrow; humanity is broad. The one is special; the other is universal. The one is transient; the other permanent. In the essential dignity of man as man, I find all necessary incentives and aspirations to a useful and noble life. Man is broad enough and high enough as a platform for you and me and all of us. The colored people of this country should advance to the high position of the Constitution of the country. The Constitution makes no distinction on account of race or color, and they should make none.

We hear, since emancipation, much said by our modern colored leaders in commendation of race pride, race love, race effort, race superiority, race men, and the like. One man is praised for being a race man and another is condemned for not being a race man. In all this talk of race, the motive may be good, but the method is bad. It is an effort to cast out Satan by Beelzebub. The evils which are now crushing the negro to earth have their root and sap, their force and mainspring, in this narrow spirit of race and color, and the negro has no more right to excuse and foster it than have men of any other race. I recognize and adopt no narrow basis for my thoughts, feelings, or modes of action. I would place myself, and I would place you, my young friends, upon grounds vastly higher and broader than any founded upon race or color. Neither law, learning, nor religion, is addressed to any man’s color or race. Science, education, the Word of God, and all the virtues known among men, are recommended to us, not as races, but as men. We are not recommended to love or hate any particular variety of the human family more than any other. Not as Ethiopeans; not as Caucasians; not as Mongolians; not as Afro-Americans, or Anglo-Americans, are we addressed, but as men. God and nature speak to our manhood, and to our manhood alone. Here all ideas of duty and moral obligation are predicated. We are accountable only as men. In the language of Scripture, we are called upon to “quit ourselves like men.” To those who are everlastingly prating about race men, I have to say: Gentlemen, you reflect upon your best friends. It was not the race or the color of the negro that won for him the battle of liberty. That great battle was won, not because the victim of slavery was a negro, mulatto, or an Afro-American, but because the victim of slavery was a man and a brother to all other men, a child of God, and could claim with all mankind a common Father, and therefore should be recognized as an accountable being, a subject of government, and entitled to justice, liberty and equality before the law, and every where else. Man saw that he had a right to liberty, to education, and to an equal chance with all other men in the common race of life and in the pursuit of happiness.

You know that, while slavery lasted, we could seldom get ourselves recognized in any form of law or language, as men. Our old masters were remarkably shy of recognizing our manhood, even in words written or spoken. They called a man, with a head as white as mine, a boy. The old advertisements were carefully worded: “Run away, my boy Tom, Jim or Harry,” never, “my man.”

Hence, at the risk of being deficient in the quality of love and loyalty to race and color, I confess that in my advocacy of the colored man’s cause, whether in the name of education or freedom, I have had more to say of manhood and of what is comprehended in manhood and in womanhood, than of the mere accident of race and color; and, if this is disloyalty to race and color, I am guilty. I insist upon it that the lesson which colored people, not less than white people, ought now to learn, is, that there is no moral or intellectual quality in the color of a man’s cuticle; that color, in itself, is neither good nor bad; that to be black or white is neither a proper source of pride or of shame. I go further, and declare that no man’s devotion to the cause of justice, liberty, and humanity, is to be weighed, measured and determined by his color or race. We should never forget that the ablest and most eloquent voices ever raised in behalf of the black man’s cause, were the voices of white men. Not for the race; not for color, but for man and manhood alone, they labored, fought and died. Neither Phillips, nor Sumner, nor Garrison, nor John Brown, nor Gerrit Smith was a black man. They were white men, and yet no black men were ever truer to the black man’s cause than were these and other men like them. They saw in the slave, manhood, brotherhood, and womanhood outraged, neglected and degraded, and their own noble manhood, not their racehood, revolted at the offence. They placed the emphasis where it belonged; not on the mint, anise and cummin or race and color, but upon manhood the weightier matters of the law.

Thus compassed about by so great a cloud of witnesses, I can easily afford to be reproached and denounced for standing, in defense of this principle, against all comers. My position is, that it is better to regard ourselves as a part of the whole than as the whole of a part. It is better to be a member of the great human family, than a member of particular variety of the human family. In regard to men as in regard to things, the whole is more than a part. Away then with the nonsense that a man must be black to be true to the rights of black men. I put my foot upon the effort to draw lines between the white and the black, or between blacks and so-called Afro-Americans, or to draw race lines any where in the domain of liberty. Whoever is for equal rights, for equal education, for equal opportunities for all men, of whatever race or color,— I hail him as a “countryman, clansman, kinsman and brother beloved.”

I must not further occupy your time, except to answer briefly the inquiry, “What of the night?” You young people have a right to ask me what the future has in store for you and the people with whom you are classed. I have been a watchman on your walls more than fifty years, so long that you think I ought to know what the future will bring to pass and to discern for you the signs of the times. You want to know whether the hour is one of hope or despair. I have no time to answer this solemn inquiry at length or as it deserves, and will content myself with giving you the assurance of my belief. I think the situation is serious, but it is not hopeless. On the contrary, there are many encouraging signs in the moral skies. I have seen many dark hours and yet have never despaired of the colored man’s future. There is no time in our history that I would prefer to the present. Go back to the annexation of Texas, the Fugitive Slave Law times, and the Border War in Kansas. The existence of this Industrial School of Manassas is a triumphant rebuke to the cry of despair now heard in some quarters. Nor does it stand alone. It is a type of such institutions in nearly all of the Southern States. Schools and colleges for colored youth are multiplying all over the land. Hampton, Tuskeegee, Cappahoosic, are brilliant examples. The light of education is shedding its beams more brightly and more effectively upon the colored people in the South, than it ever did in the cause of any other emancipated people in the world. These efforts cannot fail in the end to bear fruit.

But it is said that we are now being greatly persecuted. I know it. I admit it. I deplore it. I denounce it. Attempts are being made to set aside the amendments of the Constitution; to wrest from us the elective franchise; to exclude us from respectable railroad cars; to draw against us the color line in religious organizations; to exclude us from hotels and to make us a proscribe class. I know it all, and yet I see in it all a convincing evidence of our progress and the promise of a brighter future. The resistence that we now meet is the proof of our progress. We are not the only people who have been persecuted.

The resistance is not to the colored man as a slave, a servant or a menial, or as a person. It is aimed at the negro as a gentleman, as a successful man and a scholar. The negro in ignorance and in rags meets no resistance. He is rather liked than otherwise. He is thought to be in his place. It is only when he acquires education, property, popularity and influence; only when he attempts to rise above his ancient level, where he was numbered with the beasts of the field, and aspires to be a man and a man among men, that he invites repression. Even in the laws of the South excluding him from railroad cars and other places, care is taken to allow him to ride as a servant, a valet or a porter. He may make a bed, but must not sleep in it. He may handle bread, but must not eat it. It is not the negro, but the quality of the negro that disturbs popular prejudice. It is his character, not his personality, which makes him an offense or otherwise. In one quality he is smiled upon as a very serviceable animal; in the other he is scorned as an upstart entirely out of his place, and is made to take a back seat. I am not much disturbed by this, for the same resistance in kind, though not in degree, has to be met by white men and white women who rise from lowly conditions. The successful and opulent esteem them as upstarts. A lady as elegant and splendid as Mrs. Potter Palmer, of Chicago, had to submit to the test. She was compelled to hear herself talked about as a “shoddy” upstart; the “wife of a tavern-keeper,” and the like, during the Columbian Exposition. But the upstart of to-day is the elite of to-morrow.

A ship at anchor, with halliards broken, sails mildewed, hull empty, her bottom covered with sea-weed and barnacles, meets no resistance. She lies perfectly still; but when she spreads her canvas to the breeze, turns her prow to the open sea, and sets out on her voyage, the higher shall be her speed, the greater shall be her resistance. So it is with the colored man. He meets with resistance now, because he is now, more than ever, fitting himself for a higher life. He is shedding the old rags of slavery and putting on the apparel of freedom.

In conclusion, my dear young friends, be not discouraged. Accept the inspiration of hope. Imitate the example of the brave mariner, who, amid clouds and darkness, amid hail, rain and storm bolts, battles his way against all that the sea opposes to his progress. You will then reach the goal of your noble ambition in safety.

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Home » Season 4 » Frederick Douglass & The Power of Literacy

Frederick Douglass & The Power of Literacy

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• Frederick Douglass & The Power of Literacy

In Frederick Douglass’s autobiographical narrative, he explores the power of education in slavery, one of the most important themes in the narrative. Literacy is initially the beacon of hope that reminds Douglass that there is ultimately freedom from slavery. However, learning to read reveals to Douglass the horrific truth of slavery, transforming his views on the opportunities that are rooted in literacy. He realizes that learning to read has only pushed him further into the depths of slavery rather than helped him fight for liberty. Though the immediate impact of literacy on Douglass reveals the paradox of education in his life as a slave, Douglass’s views on literacy ultimately shift from paradoxical to positive. Douglass finds that education has only led him deeper into the chains of slavery, but he eventually sees the power to be gained from literacy and the potential to use literacy as a tool to fight against slavery.

When Douglass was first introduced to the world of literacy by his mistress, he described his first few lessons with passion and zeal, explaining the joy he felt when he was able to spell three-letter words. Upon being denied future lessons by his master, Douglass was even more attracted to becoming literate. He was enticed by his master’s fervent opposition to his learning, realizing that a slave becoming literate was liberation from his master. He writes, “From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom” (Douglass 32). As an illiterate slave, Douglass felt he was completely at the mercy of his master, his only knowledge of the world coming from the man who had absolute power over him. However, becoming literate would give Douglass new power that would challenge his master’s control over him. After being forbidden from having lessons, Douglass persisted instead of dejectedly returning to his life of illiteracy as his master’s rejection “served to inspire [him] with a desire and determination to learn” (Douglass 32). Seeing how his master endeavored to keep the world of reading and writing from him and fellow slaves showed Douglass that there was immense power to be gained from what he could learn – power that could lead to liberty. His master’s resistance towards his learning revealed a deep fear in his slaves becoming more educated and thus destroying his superiority over them. Becoming intellectually equal to his master would leave Mr. Auld, vulnerable to the newly gained knowledge of Douglass and his fellow slaves, no longer keeping his slaves submissive to his orders.

After describing his inspiration to secretly educate himself, Douglass tells the story of his journey to literacy. He immediately reveals that he grew disgusted with his life as a slave, as the world of slavery was fraught with horror and hateful exchanges between masters and slaves. Though it was once something he highly revered, literacy showed Douglass the horrific truth of slavery. He was repulsed by the idea that slaves were taken from their homes and made to be property with no value or rights. Douglass writes, “It opened my eyes to the horrible pit, but no ladder upon which to get out” when describing how powerless he felt when reading about slavery” (Douglass 36). Instead of gaining a deeper understanding of the world around him and how to remove himself from his situation, he only fell deeper into the hateful clutches of slavery with no way to escape. Douglass was left despising his enslavers a great deal more than before and the hope he had for liberty through literacy vanished. The idea of abolition was dangled in front of him, but Douglass had no way to take action against slavery as his reading showed him the utter lack of power slaves had against their masters. Douglass was tortured by his constant thinking over what he had learned about slavery, envying his “fellow slaves for their stupidity” (Douglass 36). Douglass felt as though they lived in blissful ignorance, unaware of the true nature and inhumanity of slavery, while he could no longer be sheltered by that ignorance as his choice to pursue literacy led him to face the harsh truth of slavery.

Douglass emphasizes the importance of education through many descriptions of his journey to literacy. Initially, Douglass was angry with the knowledge he gained through reading, causing him to view literacy as “a curse rather than a blessing” (Douglass 35). Douglass was forced to acknowledge that his masters were correct in saying that only disappointment was to be gained from his learning to read. Though Douglass believed that the only way to freedom was through literacy, at the same time, literacy led him to loathe his live as a slave as he felt overcome with the chains of slavery that confined him to a life not worth living. As he continues his journey to literacy, Douglass uses his experiences to highlight the paradox of literacy in the lives of slaves, though he ultimately believed that education was beneficial and necessary for all slaves. The power of literacy, though difficult to bear, was a tool that will allow him to organize an abolition movement. Douglass’s passion for education led him to create a Sabbath School for his fellow slaves. He was desperate to teach those whose “minds had been starved by their cruel masters” (Douglass 60). No longer did he feel that his fellow slaves should live in ignorance over their enslavement. Douglass prized knowledge of the truth very highly. Though learning about the inhumanity of slavery disturbed him, Douglass was determined to educate all slaves in order to create something larger – an army to fight an intellectual war against slavery. An abolition movement required individuals to come together to work against slavery rather than to conserve the hope and ignorance of each individual slave. Although that would require slaves to learn the horrific truth about slavery, working towards destroying the entire institution of slavery would validate their sacrifices.

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Tags: Autobiography of a Slave , Douglass , English , Frederick Douglass , Literacy , Literature , Slavery

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Frederick Douglass, The Blessings of Liberty and Education, 1894

Get The Scaffolded Version

Guiding question: to what extent did founding principles of liberty, equality, and justice become a reality for african americans from reconstruction to the end of the nineteenth century.

• I can interpret primary sources related to Founding principles of liberty, equality, and justice from the colonial era to the outbreak of the Civil War.
• I can explain how laws and policy, courts, and individuals and groups contributed to or pushed back against the quest to end slavery.
• I can create an argument using evidence from primary sources.
• I can analyze issues in history to help find solutions to present-day challenges.

Building Context

Near the end of his life, Frederick Douglass grappled with the fact that Black Americans were economically unequal and lacked the same opportunities for social mobility as white Americans. Douglass believed that individuals could rise with equal opportunity, education, hard work, and good character. However, he also believed that the legacy of slavery impeded equal opportunity for Black Americans and argued that the federal government should provide aid for education. Douglass gave the following speech at a dedication of a school for African Americans in Manassas, Virginia. In it, he shared his continued belief in the Founding principle of liberty, equality, and justice.

Source Link: https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/blessings-of-liberty-and-education/

It is sometimes said that we have done enough for the negro; that we have given him his liberty and we should now let him do for himself. This sounds well, but that is all. I do not undervalue freedom from chattel slavery. It was a great and glorious triumph of justice and humanity. . . . But let us look at this emancipation and see where it left the negro, and we shall see how far it falls short of the plainest demands of justice and of what we owe the negro . . . .   I have no hesitation in telling you that I think the colored people and their friends make a great mistake in saying so much of race and color. I know no such basis for the claims of justice . . . I do now and always have attached more importance to manhood than to mere kinship or identity with any variety of the human family. RACE, in the popular sense, is narrow; humanity is broad. The one is special; the other is universal. The one is transient; the other permanent. . . . Man is broad enough and high enough as a platform for you and me and all of us. The colored people of this country should advance to the high position of the Constitution of the country. The Constitution makes no distinction on account of race or color, and they should make none.   I would place myself, and I would place you, my young friends, upon grounds vastly higher and broader than any founded upon race or color. Neither law, learning, nor religion, is addressed to any man’s color or race. Science, education, the Word of God, and all the virtues known among men, are recommended to us, not as races, but as men . . . It was not the race or the color of the negro that won for him the battle of liberty. That great battle was won, not because the victim of slavery was a negro, mulatto, or an Afro-American, but because the victim of slavery was a man and a brother to all other men, a child of God, and could claim with all mankind a common Father, and therefore should be recognized as an accountable being, a subject of government, and entitled to justice, liberty and equality before the law, and every where else. Man saw that he had a right to liberty, to education, and to an equal chance with all other men in the common race of life and in the pursuit of happiness.   Hence, at the risk of being deficient in the quality of love and loyalty to race and color, I confess that in my advocacy of the colored man’s cause, whether in the name of education or freedom, I have had more to say of manhood and of what is comprehended in manhood and in womanhood, than of the mere accident of race and color; and, if this is disloyalty to race and color, I am guilty . . . that to be black or white is neither a proper source of pride or of shame. I go further, and declare that no man’s devotion to the cause of justice, liberty, and humanity, is to be weighed, measured and determined by his color or race.   You want to know whether the hour is one of hope or despair. . . . I think the situation is serious, but it is not hopeless. On the contrary, there are many encouraging signs in the moral skies. I have seen many dark hours and yet have never despaired of the colored man’s future. . . . The light of education is shedding its beams more brightly.

Comprehension and Analysis Questions

• What does Douglass mean when he says it is a “great mistake in saying so much of race and color”?
• What pursuits are open to all regardless of race, according to Douglass?
• What won the “great battle of liberty” in abolishing slavery, according to Douglass?
• Why is Douglass optimistic about the future? Given voting restrictions, segregation, economic inequality, and routine violence toward Black Americans, do you think he has cause to be optimistic? Why or why not?

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History Resources

Selected Essays about Frederick Douglass

Many essays about Frederick Douglass and his times have been published on the Gilder Lehrman Institute website and in  History Now , the online journal of the Gilder Lehrman Institute. The selected essays listed below provide historical perspective for teachers, students, and general readers. 

The first essay is open to everyone for free. The rest of the essays are available by  subscription  to History Resources or History Now (both free for K–12 teachers and students in the free Gilder Lehrman Affiliate School Program; to join visit this page:  Affiliate School Program ).

Frederick Douglass: An Example for the Twenty-First Century  by Noelle N. Trent (National Civil Rights Museum)

Director of Interpretation, Collections, and Education at the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel, Noelle N. Trent writes about Frederick Douglass’s legacy and influence on the present day in this essay. 

“The Merits of This Fearful Conflict”: Douglass on the Causes of the Civil War  by David Blight (Yale University)

Historian David Blight discusses Douglass’s reflection on the Civil War and his fear that Americans were forgetting about the root causes of the war in their efforts to reconcile the North and the South. 

Frederick Douglass: From Slavery to Freedom  by Steven Mintz (University of Texas at Austin)

Historian Steven Mintz writes about Douglass’s journey from being enslaved to becoming one of the most prominent Black activists of his time. 

The Lion of All Occasions: The Great Black Abolitionist Frederick Douglass by Manisha Sinha (University of Connecticut)

Historian Manisha Sinha writes about Douglass’s work as an abolitionist in this essay from the Winter 2018 issue of History Now,  “Frederick Douglass at 200.”

Douglass the Autobiographer by Robert S. Levine (University of Maryland, College Park)

Professor Robert S. Levine discusses Frederick Douglass’s autobiographies and writing in this essay from the Winter 2018 issue of History Now,  “Frederick Douglass at 200.”

Frederick Douglass, Orator by Sarah Meer (University of Cambridge)

Sarah Meer, a professor of nineteenth-century literature, explores Douglass’s work through his speeches. 

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