31 Quotes by David W. Blight

For a former slave and then an orator and an editor whose political consciousness had awakened with the Mexican War and the Compromise of 1850, who had seen the fate of the slaves bandied about in one political crisis after another, and who had struggled to sustain hope in the face of the Dred Scott decision’s egregious denials, a resolute stand by the North against secession and the Slave Power was hardly a sure thing.

Everybody in the south,” wrote Douglass, “wants the privilege of whipping somebody else.

As a final objection to Blair’s entreaty, Douglass once again addressed the pernicious effects of colonization, which he saw as proslavery theory in disguise. Douglass insisted that slavery, racism, and future black equality be discussed as a single question, to be settled on American soil within American institutions.

But what man has made, man can un-make.

We can only guess at the thrill in Douglass’s heart, knowing that the cause he had so long pleaded – a sanctioned war to destroy slavery and potentially to reinvent the American republic around the principle of racial equality – might now come to fruition.

When the influence of office or any other influence shall soften my hatred of tyranny and violence do not spare me; let fall upon me the lash of your keenest and most withering censure. – FREDERICK DOUGLASS, 1879.

Douglass played the prophetic role of the “suffering servant” with zeal. His famous statement about agitation, delivered in a speech in 1857, has stood the test of time and numerous protest ideologies: “If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to.

The problem of the twenty-first century is still some agonizingly enduring combination of legacies bleeding forward from slavery and color lines. Freedom in its infinite meanings remains humanity’s most universal aspiration. Douglass’s life, and especially his words, may forever serve as our watch-warnings in our unending search for the beautiful, needful thing.

The cynic in Douglass left him saying, “Heaven help the poor slave, whose only hope for freedom is in the selfish hearts of such a people.” 32.