General
Down About the Election? There Is a Speech I Want You to Read.
Most Americans who know of Frederick Douglass know that he lived to see the destruction of chattel slavery and the liberation of Black Americans from the despotism of human bondage. Less well known is the fact that Douglass would also live long …
Most Americans who know of Frederick Douglass know that he lived to see the destruction of chattel slavery and the liberation of Black Americans from the despotism of human bondage. Less well known is the fact that Douglass would also live long enough to see the slave stand free, stand a brief moment in the sun, and move back again toward slavery, to paraphrase W.E.B. Du Bois in his book “Black Reconstruction.”
Douglass died in 1895 as the counterrevolution to Reconstruction and the agrarian rebellions of the 1880s and 1890s took final shape. In 1890, Mississippi imposed its Jim Crow Constitution. Other states in the South soon followed suit. In 1896, the Supreme Court would affirm “separate but equal” in Plessy v. Ferguson, a landmark ruling that would stand until 1954, when it was overturned by Brown v. Board of Education.
In 1894, at Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington D.C., Douglass delivered the last great speech of his career. Titled “The Lessons of the Hour,” it was his attempt to make sense of the rise of Jim Crow and the violent retrenchment of the era. I want to share a little of the speech with you because I think it is worthwhile to read the perspective of someone who continues to fight for their ideals even in the midst of profound reversal and defeat.
Here’s Douglass, moving toward his conclusion.
He continues:
As much as Douglass intends to stand in the way of those would destroy the victory of an earlier age, he knows that, for him, “Time and strength are not equal to the task before me.” And yet:
Douglass concludes:
I hope you find this as useful as I do.
What I Wrote
This week’s column was on Donald Trump’s claims to monarchical power and why it is important to contest them.
I did quite a bit of chatting about the election. You can hear me talk about the results on my podcast with John Ganz as well as with Adam Conover on his podcast and with Adam Shatz on the London Review of Books podcast.
