12/16/2023 0 Comments Define eloquent criticism![]() In 1962, the esteemed literary critic Edmund Wilson published Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War, a sprawling (and lavishly praised) commentary on writings famous and obscure that omitted Douglass, and virtually all the other black literary figures of the period. But in “mainstream”-white, socially and politically conventional-circles, Douglass was widely overlooked. White historians on the left also played a key role in protecting Douglass from oblivion, none more usefully than Philip Foner, a blacklisted Marxist scholar (and uncle of the great historian Eric Foner), whose carefully edited collection of Douglass’s writings remains essential reading. The historian Benjamin Quarles wrote an excellent study in 1948. In the wake of Douglass’s death in 1895, it was African Americans who kept his memory alive. His sensitive, careful, learned, creative, soulful exploration of Douglass’s grand life, however, transcends his own identity. Given the salience of charges of cultural misappropriation, griping about his achievement would be unsurprising: Blight is a white man who has written the leading biography of the most outstanding African American of the 19th century. At the same time, he speaks to urgent, contemporary concerns such as Black Lives Matter. Blight illuminates important facets of 19th-century political, social, and cultural life in America, including the often overlooked burdens borne by black women. Blight’s magnificently expansive and detailed Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom.Ī history professor at Yale who has long been a major contributor to scholarship on Douglass, slavery, and the Civil War, Blight portrays Douglass unequivocally as a hero while also revealing his weaknesses. ![]() New books about Douglass have appeared with regularity of late, and are now joined by David W. More recently, the Republican National Committee issued a statement joining President Donald Trump “in honoring Douglass’ lifelong dedication to the principles that define Party and enrich our nation.” Across the ideological divide, former President Barack Obama has lauded Douglass, as has the leftist intellectual Cornel West. When a statue memorializing him was unveiled at the United States Capitol in 2013, members of the party of Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell sported buttons that read frederick douglass was a republican. N ow everyone wants a piece of Frederick Douglass. When he died, an admiring obituary in The New York Times suggested that Douglass’s “white blood” accounted for his “superior intelligence.” After his death, his reputation declined precipitously alongside the general standing of African Americans in the age of Jim Crow. As a traveling evangelist for abolitionism, he was repeatedly ejected from whites-only railroad cars, restaurants, and lodgings. He fled to the “free” North, only to have his work as a maritime caulker thwarted by racist white competitors. As a slave, he suffered at the hands of a vicious “nigger breaker” to whom he was rented. Throughout his life, however, Douglass repeatedly fell victim to the brutalizations and insults commonly experienced by African Americans of his time. “I cannot have any love for this country … or for its Constitution.” “I have no patriotism,” Douglass thundered in 1847. ![]() Hayes nominated him to be the marshal of the District of Columbia. He was the first black person appointed to an office requiring senatorial confirmation in 1877, President Rutherford B. ![]() The most celebrated black man of his era, Douglass became the most photographed American of any race in the 19th century. ![]() He also wrote three exceptional memoirs, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), My Bondage and My Freedom(1855), and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass(1881). He published many arresting columns in magazines and newspapers, including several that he started. He wrote analyses of court opinions that deservedly appear in constitutional-law casebooks. To him, your celebration is a sham … your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery … There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.” What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? … a day that reveals to him … the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. ![]()
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