Frederick Douglass Archives

Democracy

American Democracy in Crisis: Q & A on Tocqueville, Douglass, Dewey, and Arendt

Liberal institutions, abolition democracy, and civic virtue

February 1, 2023 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, Juliet Hooker, William Milberg, James Miller and Deva Woodly

If we think about the way that liberalism anchors democracy, it largely relies on rights and institutional design. Just as a descriptive matter, it’s the case that the institutions that have been designed and the regime of rights that has been conceived, including the regime of human rights that has ...

Democracy

Frederick Douglass on Multiracial Democracy

On a universal right to migration and the ideal of “composite nationality”

January 30, 2023 • by Juliet Hooker

Douglass’s conception of multiracial democracy envisioned the political coexistence on egalitarian terms of individuals of “all races and creeds” as fellow citizens. He called for a “composite nationality” anchored in the idea of a universal human right to migration and the political legacy of the Americas as a multiracial continent. ...

Frederick Douglass on Multiracial Democracy

Literature

Excerpt from “A Rising Tide Lifts all Boats: Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects”

“Hers is the story, if ever there was one, of a great American”

September 7, 2022 • by Dwight A. McBride

The story of Poems on Various Subjects, like the story of its author, the slave girl named after the ship that brought her across the Atlantic, is a story that should both inspire and enrage. ...

Excerpt from “A Rising Tide Lifts all Boats: Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects”

Interviews

Walking This Road Together

A conversation with historian Linda Hirshman about interracial alliances, social movements, and her new book, The Color of Abolition: How a Printer, a Prophet, and a Contessa Moved a Nation

February 9, 2022 • by Linda Hirshman and Claire Potter

Linda Hirshman is a lawyer and cultural historian whose book The Color of Abolition: How a Printer, a Prophet, and a Contessa Moved a Nation, is making its debut this week. Linda, a historian of social movements who is also the author of books about the feminist and gay rights ...

History

The Color of Abolition

Linda Hirshman introduces her new book on Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and Maria Weston Chapman

February 9, 2022 • by Linda Hirshman

I was looking for the mechanics of activism—the meetings, the speeches, the broadsides, the litigation—for my analysis. And Garrison and Douglass were both central to the mechanics of activism. Their alliance fueled critical years of the movement, and their breakup affected the direction of the movement profoundly. This was the ...

Race

Can I Get a Witness?

Until recently, Black testimony about racism had to be validated by whites. That’s changing

November 19, 2020 • by Jeffrey Aaron Snyder

“I opened my phone and I started recording because I knew if I didn’t, no one would believe me.” So said Darnella Frazier, the 17-year old Minneapolis resident who took the footage of George Floyd’s killing that circulated around the world last summer. Frazier’s instinct to press record, something other witnesses ...

Politics

Trump’s Story of America

Whistling “Dixie” through the graveyards

July 9, 2020 • by Rogers M. Smith

By the time of Trump’s Mount Rushmore speech on July 3 of this year, his targets had shifted, slightly but significantly. Now America faced threats from “angry mobs” trying to “tear down statues of our Founders” and “unleash a wave of violent crime” in the service of a “new far-left ...

Politics

Fox News Accidentally Reveals the Horrible Truth About Republicans

An attempt to advance the Republican party line goes awry

July 9, 2020 • by John Stoehr

Brian Kilmeade is co-host of Fox & Friends, the president’s favorite weekday morning show. Kilmeade is, well -- he’s not that bright. To be sure, he’s very good at advancing the party line. Sometimes, though, he gets mixed up. Wednesday morning, he tried saying something bad about the Democrats but ...

Fox News Accidentally Reveals the Horrible Truth About Republicans

Politics

Expendable Bodies

What Sophocles can teach us about our political moment

June 25, 2020 • by Daniel Schillinger

An ancient Greek tragedy, Sophocles’s Philoctetes, can help us to think holistically about our own political moment. What Sophocles shows us is that the same bodies the polity dominates, annihilates, or consigns to suffering in isolation it also tends to use for its own ends. That political communities too often view ...

Activism

The New Abolitionists

And what they can learn from their predecessors

June 11, 2020 • by Sidney Tarrow

On the same weekend when hundreds of thousands of protesters filled the streets of countless American cities, I saw a yard sign reading “Black Lives Matter!” in Genoa, New York -- which came as a real shock. Genoa is an overwhelmingly Republican town of 1,900 residents, with a tiny black ...

Democracy

Thoughts on Donald Trump, George Wallace, Frederick Douglass, and the Meaning of the Fourth of July

Only we can save ourselves

July 4, 2019 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

Donald Trump has decided to make this year’s July Fourth his own, complete with a nationally televised address in front of the Lincoln Memorial backed by a display of military force. As the Washington Post reports, “plans by President Trump to reshape Washington’s Independence Day celebration now include an area ...

Feature

This is Your America

Why Frederick Douglass Still Matters

June 15, 2018 • by Neil Roberts

I’m worried. Very worried. But don’t mistake my worrying for pessimism or, worse, nihilism. Rather, I worry because I see a nation, with its connection to a wider world, unraveling right in front of us. Daily attempts to shatter what constitutes citizenship contribute to this entropy. There’s no immediate solution ...