Original subtitles

♪ ♪

I have no love for America.

As such, I have no patriotism. I have no country.

What country have I?

The institutions of this country do not know me,

do not recognize me as a man.

I am not thought of or spoken of

except as a piece of property.

Now,

in such a country as this, I cannot have...

patriotism.

Imagine that you had to dispel doubts

about your full humanity

every time you took to a stage.

♪ ♪

Imagine you had to refute doubts

about your own native ability

every time you picked up a pen.

Imagine having to fight to show

that you were as complicated a human being

as any who walked the face of the earth,

having to fight that battle

over and over every day.

That was the life of Frederick Douglass.

He was the most famous Black man

in the world in the 19th century,

and he achieved that position

through one means... his voice.

♪ ♪

♪ ♪

More than 20 years of my life

were consumed in a state of slavery.

I grew up to manhood eating the bread

and drinking the cup of slavery with the most degraded

of my brother bondmen, and sharing with them

all the painful conditions of their wretched lot.

♪ ♪

In consideration of these facts,

I feel that I have a right to speak

and to speak strongly.

Yet, my friends...

I feel bound to speak truly.

The power of Douglass' words,

the way that he wielded language, was undeniable,

and is still undeniable.

He could take you, in a single sentence sometimes,

inside of a crisis

and say, "Here's what it's doing to us."

"Here's what it's doing to you.

Here's what it's doing to the nation."

André Holland: There can be no peace to the wicked

while slavery continues in the land.

It will be condemned,

and there will be agitation.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: He was able to realize from his own experience

that an arbitrary system had been created,

designed to reinforce

the sense of inferiority

of every Black person.

A system that was designed to make them believe

that nature had made them inferior to white people.

And his job was to blow up that system.

♪ ♪

(wind blowing, birds chirping)

(water flowing)

Holland: The very first mental effort

that I now remember on my part

was an attempt to solve the mystery,

why am I a slave?

♪ ♪

Why are some people slaves and others masters?

(birds chirping)

I could not have been more than 7 or 8 years old

when I began to make this subject my study.

It's a childhood where he has to learn to survive.

He has to learn to overcome his own fear.

He has to see brutality, but live past it.

♪ ♪

From my earliest recollection, I entertained a deep conviction

that slavery would not always be able to hold me

within its foul embrace.

The desire for freedom only needed a favorable breeze

to fan it into a blaze at any moment.

♪ ♪

Kenneth B. Morris, Jr.: There was one point in his life

that he described

as divine providence in his favor,

and that was he was chosen

from among all of the children on the plantation

on the Eastern shore of Maryland to go to Baltimore

to be the house servant for his master's family.

I left that plantation with inexpressible joy.

Going to live at Baltimore opened the gateway

to all my subsequent prosperity.

David Blight: Baltimore made it possible for Douglass

to dream and imagine.

He sees the world come into the harbor of Baltimore,

this maritime capital,

and he can begin to imagine that there's a world outside.

Morris, Jr.: But what happened, most importantly,

when he got there, his slave mistress

didn't know that it was illegal to teach him.

She was just a kind, Christian lady with this heart,

and there was Fred, you know,

bright and eager and ready to learn,

and so, she naturally began to teach him his ABCs.

Blight: He's in search of any kind of

adult loving figure he can find.

He finds one in Sophia Auld.

She taught him his alphabet, read out loud with him,

got him interested in language.

But alas, this kind heart

had but such a short time to remain such.

Mr. Auld found out what was going on,

and at once forbade Mrs. Auld to instruct me further,

telling her that it was unlawful

as well as unsafe to teach a slave to read.

He would at once become unmanageable

and of no value to his master.

These words sank deep into my heart

and called into existence

an entirely new train of thought.

From that moment,

I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom.

♪ ♪

And he would teach himself to read and write.

He was very clever in the way that he went about doing that.

He would carry bread in his pocket,

and he would trade the bread for reading lessons

with the poor kids.

He picks up scraps of the King James version of the Bible

from gutters. He dries them out,

and he sets them out nicely so he can learn from them.

Gates: He was reading all the time, and the fact that

he never had one day of formal education

is just flabbergasting.

Blight: He tells us that he first sees

the word "abolition" in a newspaper,

and then, again in a magazine.

We can only imagine our way into

a young boy's mind.

He's trapped in this world of enslavement,

and now he learns that up North,

they're organizing to end slavery.

That's got to be an amazing source of hope,

and by the time he's 18, he's scheming to escape.

♪ ♪

On Monday,

the third day of September 1838,

I bade farewell to the city of Baltimore

and to that slavery

which had been my abhorrence from childhood.

This is one of the most unusual escape stories

in all of the literature about slavery.

There are no bloodhounds

and no, uh, nights hiding in the swamps.

Essentially, Douglass goes to the Baltimore train station

and jumps on a train.

Holland: I was well on the way to Havre de Grace

before the conductor came into the Negro car

to collect tickets

and examine the papers of his Black passengers.

This was a critical moment in the drama.

Had the conductor looked closely at the paper,

he could not have failed to discover that it called

for a very different looking person from myself.

The train was moving at a very high rate of speed

for that time of railroad travel,

but to my anxious mind,

it was moving far too slowly.

Minutes were hours

and hours were days.

He takes that train,

two other trains,

and three steamboats later,

in about 38 hours,

he arrived into lower Manhattan at the base of Chambers Street.

♪ ♪

Holland: I found myself in the big city of New York,

a free man.

The bonds that had held me to old master were broken.

No man now had a right to call me his slave

or assert mastery over me.

Such is briefly the manner of my escape from slavery

and the end of my experience as a slave.

♪ ♪

In the summer of 1841,

a grand anti-slavery convention

was held in Nantucket under the auspices

of William Lloyd Garrison and his friends.

Blight: William Lloyd Garrison was

the most important abolitionist in America

at the time Douglass met him.

He led a moral suasionist campaign

to destroy slavery.

Holland: I attended this convention never supposing

I would take part in the proceedings.

I was not aware that anyone connected with the convention

even so much as knew my name.

I was, however, quite mistaken.

He says he didn't intend on speaking at the convention.

He was just there to listen.

But once asked to speak, he got up and simply told

his personal story from his slave youth.

♪ ♪

♪ ♪

I feel greatly embarrassed

when I attempt to address an audience of white people.

I'm not used to speaking to them.

And it makes me tremble when doing so

because I have always looked up to them with fear.

My friends, I've come to tell you something about slavery.

♪ ♪

What I know of it...

as I felt it.

When I came North,

I was astonished to find that the abolitionists,

they knew so much about it.

They were acquainted with its deadly effects

as well as if they had lived within its midst.

But although they can tell you its history,

though they can depict its horrors,

they cannot speak as I can, from experience.

They cannot refer you to a back covered with scars as I can.

For I have felt these wounds.

I have suffered under the lash

without the power of resisting. Yes!

My blood has sprung out

as the lash embedded itself within my flesh.

♪ ♪

Yet my master has the reputation

of being a pious man

and a good Christian.

I'm not from any of the states where slaves are said to be

in their most degraded condition,

but from Maryland,

where slavery is said to exist within its mildest form.

Yet, I can stand here and relate atrocities

that would make your blood boil at the thought of them.

I lived on the plantation of Colonel Lloyd

on the Eastern shore of Maryland

and belonged to the gentleman's clerk.

He owned probably not less than a thousand slaves.

And I mention the name of the man

and also the persons who perpetrated the deeds

of which I am about to relate,

running the risk of being hurled back into interminable bondage,

for yet, I am a slave.

Yet for the sake of the cause of the sake of humanity,

I will mention the names and glory in running the risk of it.

For I have the gratification to know that if I shall fall

by the utterance of the truth in this matter,

that if I shall be hurled back into bondage

to gratify my slaveholder,

to be killed by inches,

that every drop of blood I shall shed,

every groan which I shall utter,

every pain which shall rack my frame,

every sob which I shall indulge,

shall be the instrument under God

of tearing down the bloody pillar of slavery

and of hastening the day of deliverance

for three millions of my brethren in bondage.

♪ ♪

What's interesting is I feel like

there's been individuals over time

who have had to do great things at a much younger age.

In his early 20s, having to deliver this,

again, in front of a body of white people,

must have been like terrifying.

But at the same time, too, like, he's already suffered

so much terror, what more does he have to lose?

You can feel his passion.

You can feel it within the words.

You don't even have to see it.

It was just like his soul transcended.

It was like something entered his body,

and then just like he was channeling through.

It was so compelling, however,

this personal story, this, this personal witness,

that they invited him to speak again the next morning.

And with that, a phenomenon was born.

♪ ♪

Roy: Once William Lloyd Garrison hears Douglass

deliver his address in Nantucket,

he is enraptured with Douglass' abilities

and his skills and his gifts.

The Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society

hired him

to go out on the circuit that fall.

Much interest was awakened.

Many came, no doubt, from curiosity

to hear what a Negro could say in his own cause.

Fugitive slaves were rare then,

and as a fugitive slave lecturer...

(chuckles)

I had the advantage of being a brand-new fact.

The first one out.

Blight: Audiences loved this.

He had a gift as a storyteller.

He had an unforgettable voice.

Roy: What Douglass has that no white abolitionist had

was the ability to tell his story

from the perspective of an enslaved person,

and because of that authenticity

and because of the skills that he developed

to communicate that authenticity,

the sky was the limit for Douglass' ambitions and aims.

He wanted to defeat slavery,

but I think he also has that young man's ambition

to defeat those around him

who were doing the same thing he was,

and he just wanted to do it better than they did.

Holland: "Tell your story, Frederick,"

would whisper my revered friend Mr. Garrison

as I stepped upon the platform.

I could not always follow the injunction

for I was now reading and thinking.

New views of the subject were being presented to my mind.

It did not entirely satisfy me

to narrate wrongs.

I felt like denouncing them.

He's beginning to kind of burst out

of the strategic straitjacket

that the Garrisonians had put him in.

The Garrisonians wanted to control

the sound of Frederick Douglass' voice.

"Just stick to the facts, Fred," you know, um, you know,

"You're speaking kind of white, Fred.

"Put a little plantation in your voice, Fred.

"Nobody's going to believe that anyone who sounds

"as white or as educated as you

"was really an enslaved person,

so remember your role, boy."

And he goes, "Ah, remember my role, huh? I'll show you."

♪ ♪

Without question, Frederick Douglass

wrote himself into history with his autobiography.

His book is not only a testimony

about the experience of a sensitive enslaved person.

It is an act of language.

Douglass creates a work of art.

Holland: The publishing of my narrative

was regarded by my friends

with mingled feelings of satisfaction and apprehension.

I became myself painfully alive to the liability

which surrounded me.

It was thus I was led to seek a refuge in England.

Morris, Jr.: When Frederick Douglass had to escape to Europe,

he was a fugitive slave at the time,

and the notoriety of having a best-selling book

threatened his freedom, so he would flee to Europe

for a couple of years as a cooling-off period

and speak about the abolition of slavery.

Blight: He spoke in some hundred and some venues

all over the British Isles.

The red carpet is essentially rolled out for him,

and he begins to realize, "In England,

"I'm treated with respect and with dignity,

but in America, I'm treated as property."

Gates: And he could, for the first time, as he says,

feel like a man, by which he meant a human being

and not a Black man. Not a Black human being.

And that, everybody... I experienced that.

I experienced that the first time I went to Europe,

and certainly the first time I went to Africa,

and that is a,

a deeply affecting experience.

Blight: When Douglass returned from England

in the spring of 1847,

he returns both an inspired young man,

but he also returns extremely angry.

This is a much more militant Douglass

as an abolitionist, and when he returns,

he goes out on the circuit immediately,

speech-making,

but in those speeches, he starts with lines like,

"My country hates me. I hate it back."

He was young,

he was outraged,

he was powerful,

and he wasn't gonna take it anymore.

He was just all fire.

♪ ♪

♪ ♪

I have no love for America.

Such...

I have no patriotism.

♪ ♪

The only thing that links me to this land

is my family

and the painful consciousness that here,

there are three million of my fellow creatures,

groaning beneath the iron rod of the worst despotism

that could be devised even in pandemonium.

That here are men and brethren,

identified with me by their complexion.

Identified with me by their hatred of slavery.

Identified with me by their love

and aspirations for liberty.

Identified with me by the stripes upon their backs,

their inhumane wrongs and cruel sufferings.

This...

and this only...

attaches me to this land,

and brings me here to plead with you

and with the country at large

for the disenthrallment of my oppressed countrymen

and to overthrow this system of slavery,

which is crushing them to the earth!

♪ ♪

But it is asked...

"What good will this do or what good has it done?

"Have you not irritated,

"have you not annoyed your American friends

and the American people rather than done them good?"

I admit we have irritated them.

They deserve to be irritated!

I am anxious to irritate

the American people on this question!

As it is in physics, so in morals.

There are cases which demand irritation

and counter-irritation.

The conscience of the American public

needs this irritation.

And I would blister it all over,

from center to circumference,

until it gives signs of a pure and a better life

than it is now manifesting to the world!

♪ ♪

This was the speech in which

we were closest in age.

Frederick is 30 years old in this moment,

and I'm 31 years old in this moment.

When he says...

that it's crushing them to the earth,

that, that's when I went, okay, well that's...

that's Brother Floyd.

You know, that is that image.

And it's not a new thing.

Just made me want to say those words

to people, uh, for the people who couldn't.

Blight: He was so angry,

so you can begin to see it right there.

Now, he's going to plow this new energy, of course,

into a newspaper.

He wants to create

his own kind of anti-slavery movement,

apart from the Garrisonians.

Nothing more dramatic could have recalculated

their relationship than for Douglass

to establish

a parallel publication.

Blight: Garrisonians will be extremely angry about this.

Gates: It's as if he thought about it while he was in England.

"How can I declare my independence?

How can I show I'm a man?"

Blight: And now, the fame grows ever, ever, evermore.

(rumbling)

As the fame grows, the invitations to speak grow.

♪ ♪

It became a kind of an American phenomenon

to see Douglass.

"Did you see Douglass? Let me tell you the time"

"I first saw Douglass, I first heard Douglass."

"Well what did he sound like?"

Newspapers are full of this.

Sarah Lewis: This was, as many journalists had put it,

a volcanic, magisterial orator.

He could command crowds of thousands.

And from that point on,

all the way to 1877,

he will never make a living any other way

than with his voice and his pen.

♪ ♪

He wrote millions of words,

but Douglass will not tell us anything

about his private life, especially his marriage.

He hid everything he could about his marriages,

relationships, his children.

His relationship with Anna Douglass

is an enigma, a, a, a puzzle,

and I think he wanted it that way.

Frederick Douglass had a wife? What?

Why don't we know anything about her? Who was she?

Who would be married to Frederick Douglass?

♪ ♪

Roy: While he was traveling around the world,

speaking out against slavery,

you know, she would take care of the kids.

She would take care of the finances.

She would press his clothes

so that he would be looking sharp.

Nzadi Keita: She met Harriet Tubman,

Sojourner Truth, John Brown,

anybody who was anybody

in the anti-slavery movement

came to her house.

But she tended to stay in the kitchen area

or out in the garden, or, you know, in spaces

where she was comfortable.

His marriage to Anna is both the center of his life,

the heart of his family,

but it also became increasingly, no doubt,

what we moderns would call a difficult marriage.

There's one letter he writes to a friend, a woman friend,

he had lots of women correspondents,

and he just unloads about

how Anna has just read the riot act to him.

If I should write down all her complaints,

there would be no room to put my name at the bottom.

And by the time I am home, a week or two longer,

I shall have pretty full learned in how many points

there are needs of improvement in my temper

and disposition as a husband and a father.

Keita: They were married 44 years,

and I was angry at him after seeing the extent

to which Frederick Douglass ignored her

and her contributions to his life and his writing.

But, you don't do the kinds of things

that Frederick Douglass did

without some substantial ego going on.

As to the whole question of fidelity,

I, I can only, uh, say

that it's much disputed.

Too many times, scholars, both Black and white,

have felt it necessary

to remove the warts from prominent figures

in African-American history.

Douglass had his flaws. He had his weaknesses.

I think the more human

we make our heroes, the more noble they become.

♪ ♪

Blight: There's always a poignant contrast

between Douglass' private and public lives.

That same virile Douglass

that we have a visual image of

also collapsed into depression.

Collapsed into...

almost incapacity, at times, under the pressure.

The demand upon my time and attention

by my books and papers

and by visitors are incessant.

I am beginning to look upon a journey

as a potential misfortune.

Blight: In the early 1850s, it's clear to me

he had what we would sometimes call a nervous breakdown.

He kind of fell to pieces.

But even in this moment,

'51, '52, '53, '54,

he does some of his greatest work.

In the summer of 1852, when he was 34 years old,

Douglass wrote what's probably his most famous speech.

Morris, Jr.: He was invited to speak

at the Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society

about Independence Day.

Big, big event.

Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York.

"Douglass says, "Okay.

"I'll give a Fourth of July speech.

"But, I'm going to speak beyond Corinthian Hall.

"I'm going to speak beyond Rochester.

I'm going to speak to the country."

He worked on that speech for at least three weeks.

He tells us that in a letter,

and, man, does it show it.

It would go down in history

as the oratorical masterpiece

of the entire abolitionist movement.

♪ ♪

♪ ♪

Mr. President,

friends, and fellow citizens.

He who could address this audience

without a quailing sensation

has stronger nerves than I have.

I do not remember ever to have appeared as a speaker

before an assembly more shrinkingly

nor with greater distrust of my ability

than I do this day.

The papers and placards say that I am to deliver

a Fourth of July oration.

Fact is, ladies and gentlemen,

the distance between this platform

and the slave plantation from which I escaped

is considerable.

And the difficulties to be overcome

in getting from the latter to the former

are by no means slight.

♪ ♪

I liken the speech to a symphony

with three movements.

The first movement, fairly short,

is Douglass putting his audience at ease

about the glories of the Founding Fathers,

the glories of the Declaration of Independence,

and it is beautiful,

and the audience must have felt like, "Wow.

Frederick's going to lift us up today."

Fellow citizens, I am not wanting in respect

for the Fathers of this Republic.

The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men.

They were peace men.

But they preferred revolution

to peaceful submission to bondage.

And then, the whole middle movement of the symphony

is like a hail storm.

It's the physical horror of slavery.

He wrecks upon his audience.

"You invited me here to sing for you,

but I'm not going to sing. I'm going to make you hurt."

Mark.

Mark the sad procession

as it moves wearily along

and the inhuman wretch who drives them.

Hear his savage yells and his blood-chilling oaths

as he hurries on his affrighted captives.

Attend the auction.

See the men examined like horses.

See the forms of women rudely and brutally exposed

to the shocking gaze of American slave buyers.

♪ ♪

Do you mean, citizens, to mock me

by asking me to speak here today?

What do I or those I represent have to do

with your national independence?

Are the great principles of political freedom

and natural justice embodied in that declaration

extended to us?

What to the American slave is your Fourth of July?

I answer a day that reveals to him,

more than any other days of the year,

the gross injustice and cruelty

to which he is the constant victim.

To him,

your celebration is a sham.

Your national greatness, swelling vanity.

Your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless.

Your shouts of liberty and equality?

Hollow mock.

The existence of slavery in this country

brands your humanity as base pretense,

and your Christianity as a lie.

♪ ♪

Hm...

Had I the ability and could I reach the nation's ear,

I would today pour out a fiery stream

of biting ridicule,

blasting reproach,

withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke.

For it is not light that is needed,

but fire.

It is not the gentle shower, but thunder.

We need the storm, the whirlwind,

and the earthquake.

The feeling of the nation must be roused.

The propriety of the nation must be startled,

the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed,

and the crimes against God and man

must be proclaimed

and denounced.

Blight: And he stops.

You can sense a pause in the rhetoric.

It's as though the storm is over.

The audience has felt in pain

for 10 pages of this text,

and then, he lets them back up.

The last short movement of the speech,

he says, "But your nation is still young.

"It is still malleable,

"but you're on the precipice of self-destruction.

"If you can't solve this problem of slavery,

there will be no America."

♪ ♪

I do not despair of this country.

There are forces in operation

which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery.

I therefore leave off where I began.

With hope.

♪ ♪

We don't hear a lot about people

who, um, weren't allowed to have an education,

and who got this far, had such, you know, eloquent language

and such an intention.

You know, he's a Black man in that period,

or even in this period, um.

He has to be extremely savvy

about getting people's attention and disarming people,

and then figuring out how to, how to get in there

to really change people's thinking.

And he does it really effectively and beautifully.

Gates: Douglass knew that an argument

had to be eloquent to be persuasive.

That you had to appeal to the mind,

but through the emotions.

And, he knocked it out of the park.

♪ ♪

Roy: The Civil War began when Douglass was

43 years old.

So, he was too old to fight but he wasn't too old

to deliver his speeches, his writings,

to the American people who he felt needed to hear it.

Blight: The war brings about

a personal recreation

and transformation.

Douglass saw it as finally, finally,

the coming of what he had most hoped for.

During all the winter of 1860, notes of preparation

for a tremendous conflict came to us on every wind.

(wind blowing)

The South was mad and would listen to no concessions.

They had come to hate everything

which had the prefix "free."

Free states, free schools,

free speech, and freedom generally,

and they would have no more such prefixes.

This haughty and unreasonable attitude

of the imperious South

saved the slave and saved the nation.

From the first, I, for one,

saw this war as the end of slavery.

♪ ♪

Blight: In the first year or two of the war,

he's still very much an outsider.

He's on the circuit speaking,

but he's just writing in his newspaper,

month after month after month,

especially criticisms of the Lincoln administration.

He's trying to light fires under Republicans,

but he has no access to them. He's not an insider at all.

♪ ♪

The first of January 1863,

was a memorable day

in the progress of American liberty and civilization.

This proclamation changed everything.

Abraham Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation

in part to allow

African Americans to join the Union cause.

They couldn't up until then.

Gates: Not only did it change the nature of the war,

but it gave Black men, for the first time,

the legal right to kill white men.

♪ ♪

Blight: And then, he did what Douglass always did.

He went to his desk, he wrote a new speech.

In that speech, he famously says,

this proclamation has the opportunity now

to free us all from the past.

♪ ♪

There are certain great national acts,

which, by their relation to universal principles,

properly belong to the whole human family,

and Abraham Lincoln's proclamation

of the 1st of January, 1863,

is one of these acts.

But I hold that the proclamation,

good as it is, will be worthless,

a miserable mockery,

unless the nation shall so far conquer its prejudice

as to welcome into the army full-grown Black men

to help fight the battles of the Republic.

That paper proclamation must now be made iron,

lead, and fire

by the prompt employment of the Negro's arm in this contest.

I know it is said the Negroes won't fight,

but I distrust the accuser.

I know the colored men of the North.

I know the colored men of the South.

They are ready to rally under the stars and stripes

at the first tap of the drum.

Give them a chance.

Stop calling them niggers, and call them soldiers.

Stop telling them they can't fight,

and tell them they can fight and shall fight,

and they will fight and fight with vengeance.

Give them a chance.

Away with prejudice. Away with folly.

And in this death struggle for liberty,

country, and permanent security,

let the Black iron hand of the colored man

fall heavily on the head of the slave-holding traders

and rebels and lay them low.

Give them a chance!

Give them a chance.

I don't say they are great fighters.

I don't say they will fight better than other men.

All I say is give them a chance.

♪ ♪

The moment you read Frederick Douglass' words,

you think that they were written

yesterday, literally,

especially dealing with all the upheaval

that we have in our country.

A lot of people don't know a lot about him,

but, I mean, that's just American history, period.

You know we don't know a lot about ourselves.

That's also the trick of this country,

to try to make us forget and have amnesia.

So, I think the more that we, uh, put

Frederick Douglass' words on stage, now,

as we interrogate the soul of America,

the better for all of us.

I love the attack that he has with it

because he's, he's so intelligent and strong,

um, that you can't deny whatever he's saying.

It's very spirited, and he's trying to really

get people going and move the crowd to think.

Roy: Frederick Douglass sees Black soldiers

wielding rifles as one of the clearest

and most profound expressions of American citizenship.

He begins to transition

from America being about you and yours

to America being about we and ours.

Gates: Douglass believed that if Black men

comported themselves nobly and heroically,

demonstrating bravery on the battlefield,

then, certainly, Americans would say,

"You deserve all the rights

"inscribed in the Declaration of Independence

and the Constitution of the United States."

Unfortunately, he was wrong.

♪ ♪

Holland: I had assured colored men that once in the Union army,

they would be put on an equal footing with other soldiers,

that they would be paid,

promoted, and exchanged as prisoners of war.

But the government had not kept its promise

or the promise I made for it.

I was induced to go to Washington and lay

the complaints of my people before President Lincoln.

I was an ex-slave identified with the despised race,

and yet, I was to meet

the most exalted person in this great Republic.

Blight: He goes to Washington in August 1863

with no appointment. He just goes

and gets in line at the White House, says,

"I wanna speak to the President," and Lincoln lets him in.

I shall never forget my first interview with this great man.

There was no vain pomp or ceremony about him.

I at once felt myself in the presence of an honest man.

Proceeding to tell him who I was and what I was doing,

he promptly, but kindly, stopped me, saying,

"I know who you are, Mr. Douglass."

Gates: Without a doubt, Abraham Lincoln

matured in his ideas about Black people,

who and what a Black person was,

and there's no doubt that Douglass played a key role

in that transition.

When Douglass meets Lincoln in the White House, it's a bridge.

It's a first step for Douglass to begin to enter into

higher orders and levels of power.

Blight: Now, he has a role.

He has the role of being recognized by

the President of the United States

as the spokesman of Black America.

He is, as he loved to say himself,

the representative-colored man in the United States.

I think Douglass thought that he single-handedly

was charged with the task of refuting

every racist stereotype

about Black people,

but also, his ego was healthy enough,

and big enough, that he thought he was up to the task.

Blight: And that's, of course, where the photography comes in.

♪ ♪

Gates: He is one of the most,

if not the most, photographed American in the 19th century.

He was profoundly insightful

about the potential uses of photography

to refute stereotypes,

the caricatures about Black people.

Bisa Butler: These photos were taken so that people could see

this intelligent, learnèd Black man

as an equal.

He's not casting his eyes down

as slaves were told to.

He's looking you directly in your eye,

so that's a challenge and a provocation in itself.

♪ ♪

Lewis: It's important to understand

when thinking about Frederick Douglass

that there is no model for who he is

at this period of time in American life. None.

He has to invent himself effectively.

He has to will himself to be seen in a way

that no one in society

was ready to see a Black man.

There's one image that I love that shows Douglass

as a homeowner with his children

across the two brownstones, townhomes,

that he owned in Washington, DC.

They're defying every possible convention

about what it means to be a Black family

and a Black man in American life.

He was really an A-list celebrity,

what we would call an A-list celebrity today.

Blight: Especially after he appeared on the cover

of "Harper's" in the 1870s.

Once you're on the cover of "Harper's," that was like

"Time" magazine and Google put together back then.

But being such a national or world symbol,

of course, is both a pleasure and a peril.

Douglass' extended family become the Black First Family,

and they're constantly in the press.

Roy: Fame was such a double-edged sword for Douglass

because, on the one hand,

it's personally fulfilling and very lucrative,

but, on the other hand, it's exhausting,

and it's alienating.

He had some internal struggles with relevancy

and how he will maintain his status

as a man of consequence

after the Civil War.

♪ ♪

Holland: When the war for the Union was substantially ended

and peace had dawned upon the land,

when the gigantic system of American slavery

was finally abolished,

a strange,

perhaps perverse, feeling came over me.

My great and exceeding joy over these stupendous achievements

was slightly tinged with a feeling of sadness.

The anti-slavery platform had performed its work,

and my voice was no longer needed.

He thought, "Well, who'll wanna hear from me anymore?

Slavery's ended."

What is his personal role now?

But all he had to do,

someone could go back in time and say, "Fred, don't despair."

"You know, hang around. White supremacy's just asleep,

and it's not going to be asleep for very long."

Holland: The Emancipation Proclamation had given slavery

many deadly wounds,

yet it was, in fact, only wounded and crippled,

not disabled and killed.

♪ ♪

Though slavery was abolished,

the wrongs of my people were not ended.

Though they were not slaves, they were not yet quite free.

I therefore soon found that the Negro had still a cause,

and that he needed my voice and my pen

to plead for it.

Blight: It is Reconstruction

and its decline and defeat

that now causes Douglass

to find a new voice, a new role, if he can.

♪ ♪

Reconstruction is arguably the most hopeful period

of Douglass' life.

It is a legal, constitutional, political revolution,

and a new United States is being made out of that.

There's a time there when he holds

these two appointive positions in Washington,

and he's part of the federal bureaucracy.

Gates: He wanted to have enough money to take care of his family.

He wanted to be respected.

He wanted to get government jobs that affirmed

his own idea of his importance.

Blight: Douglass is a classic example of

an old, radical outsider

who becomes, with time,

a political insider.

There are many, now, next generation Black leaders

who are now his rivals.

He's frequently referred to as the old man,

particularly by young Turks out to slay him,

out to take his position.

Blight: They're all 20 years younger at least.

They're all college-educated, free-born,

and he gets into very public disputes with them in the press.

Holland: I need not tell you, Mr. Editor,

that no man is safe these days

from the attacks of anonymous falsifiers.

If my record of more than 40 years of service

to the colored race does not protect me

from violent sinuations,

nothing I can now say will silence them.

Blight: He was a very hyper-sensitive man

as he got older.

He liked being on a pedestal.

He didn't like being knocked off.

When Anna died in '82,

after a long illness, Douglass came apart.

I think he had another, at least temporary, breakdown.

♪ ♪

But, within about 15 months, he married Helen Pitts.

She was a white woman, and she's 20 years younger,

and it became

the most scandalous marriage of the 19th century.

Roy: The uproar from the Black community

and the white community is enormous.

Blight: For months, it was in the press,

but they basically just consistently said,

"We'll marry whom we wish."

Holland: I have had very little sympathy with the curiosity of the world

about my domestic relations.

What business has the world with the color of my wife?

So, imagine that you're Frederick Douglass,

and what you really want to do

is read novels and travel around the world.

Blight: And yet, once in a while, there's an issue

that just brings him back to the fore.

♪ ♪

Black men in the former Confederate states

get the right to vote two years after the end of the Civil War,

and that right is greeted with

terrorism, threats,

repression, violence,

rape, uh, lynching.

Blight: Reconstruction is full of mob actions, mob violence,

massacres of people.

It's just the destruction of life out of fear

and the feeling of the threat

to the social and political order

as white people wished it.

Soon, Reconstruction is over,

and we see the formalization of Jim Crow white supremacy.

♪ ♪

So, it's in the early 1890s

that he has to speak out more.

He writes his final speech in 1893,

then he begins to take it on the road.

He's also growing old.

He's not well.

He is constantly complaining about his hands shaking.

He's complaining about chest pains.

He's complaining about incredible weariness.

Gates: But, he's always drawn back into combat.

The war is never over

because white supremacy

is the beast that won't be defeated.

♪ ♪

♪ ♪

Friends and fellow citizens,

strange things have happened of late

and are still happening.

Some of these tend to dim the luster of the American name

and chill the hopes we once entertained

for the cause of American liberty.

Principles, which we all thought to have been permanently settled

by the late war, have been boldly assaulted

and overthrown by the defeated party.

When the moral sense of a nation begins to decline

and the wheel of progress to roll backward,

there's no telling how low one will fall

or where the other may stop.

I have waited patiently, but anxiously,

to see the end of the epidemic of mob law and persecution

now prevailing in the South.

Our newspapers are daily disfigured

by its ghastly horrors.

It's commonly thought that only the lowest

and most disgusting birds and beasts such as buzzards,

vultures, and hyenas

will gloat over and prey upon dead bodies.

But the Southern mob, in its rage,

feeds its vengeance by shooting,

stabbing, and burning

when their victims are dead.

Their institutions have taught them no respect for human life,

and especially the life of a Negro.

But, my friends, I must stop.

Time and strength are not equal to the task before me.

But could I be heard by this great nation,

I would call to mind the sublime and glorious truths

with which, at its birth, it saluted a listening world.

It announced the advent of a nation

based upon human brotherhood

and the self-evident truths of liberty and equality.

Apply these sublime and glorious truths

to the situation now before you.

Put away your prejudice.

Banish the idea that one class must rule over another.

Recognize the fact that the rights of the humblest citizen

are as worthy of protection as are those of the highest,

and your problem will be solved.

And whatever may be in store for it in the future,

whether prosperity or adversity,

whether it shall have foes without or foes within,

whether there shall be peace or war,

based on the eternal principles

of truth, justice, and humanity,

your Republic will stand

and flourish forever.

This "Lessons of the Hour" is a speech that resonates now

because in some ways, we're revisiting a similar cycle.

He represents what we miss

and how we are weakened as a society

if we are making it our institutional business

to suppress certain voices,

talents, certain minds, certain, certain bodies.

How can we, how can we as a people

not know of a man like Frederick Douglass?

All of us, whether we be Black, white, or otherwise or...

immigrant or, you know, uh, 10 generations here,

he's a, you know, he's an exemplar American.

Blight: This is a man who lives, essentially,

the whole trajectory of 19th-century America.

Slavery to freedom

to the betrayal of that freedom,

but still trying to hang on

to some kind of philosophical and principled hope.

There's still hope, but we still have to fight.

♪ ♪

We all tend to romanticize the way

that Douglass bounced back

and the way he refused to be daunted.

I find it enormously depressing that he had to bounce back.

You see the Civil War won.

You see the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments.

And still, on the eve of your death,

having to give a speech saying,

"If I have to leave this world behind

"with three words echoing in your ears,

those words are..."

Hope, faith, and charity? No.

We will overcome?

No.

Agitate. Agitate.

Agitate.

♪ ♪

I have now brought my readers to the end of my story.

I have written out my experiences here,

not in order to exhibit my wounds and bruises

and to awaken and attract sympathy to myself personally,

but as a part of the history of a profoundly

interesting period in American life and progress.

My part has been to tell the story of the slave.

The story of the master never wanted for narrators.

Forty years of my life have been given

to the cause of my people,

and if I had 40 years more,

they should all be sacredly given to the same great cause.

Taking all the circumstances into consideration,

the colored people have no reason to despair.

Notwithstanding the great

and all-abounding darkness of our social past.

Notwithstanding the clouds that still overhang us

in the moral and social sky.

It is my faith

that a better and brighter day

will yet come.

♪ ♪

♪ ♪