HLG: That was the Black elite. Remember, there had been prominent free Black communities in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Boston as well as, interestingly enough, New Orleans and Charleston.
In 1860, there were more free Black people living in the slave states than in the North. There were 262,000 living in the slave states and 222,000 living in the North, which always surprises my students. You can take my family as an example. Two of my [great-great-great-great-] grandparents, Joe and Sarah Bruce, were freed in 1823 in Hardy County, Virginia, and were given one thousand acres of land. What are they going to do, give up that land and become homeless in Boston? That would have been stupid.
So the old Black elite in the North, when the Great Migration began, as Zora Neale Hurston put it, classed themselves off from these former sharecroppers. These were agrarian rural people moving up from the South, as opposed to the Black people who have had a long history of free ancestry, who were very well educated, very well spoken. They invented, starting in the 1890s, a metaphor, a trope, an image of themselves: “We are the New Negroes, not the old Negroes. The old Negroes were the sharecroppers, the recent descendants of slaves. We are the descendants of free people. We have more in common with the white elite than we do with the Black poor or the Black working class.”
DR: As this was going on, you point out in your book, Blacks were being demonized in ways that were practically worse than during slavery.
HLG: It was true. If you own somebody, you don’t need to remind them or yourself that they are a subspecies. That’s not to say that intellectual racism didn’t obtain during slavery. It did.
But after Black people were freed and then Black men had the right to vote, the genie was out of the lamp, and you had to try to put the genie back in the lamp again. You had to convince Black men and the larger society that they were not only inferior, they were subhuman.
DR: The Black elite, as they moved forward, became reasonably prosperous. But when the civil rights movement came along in the 1960s, its leaders said, “Why don’t you help us? You’re not really doing much. You’re not really helping poor Blacks.” Was that a problem?
HLG: Here’s what happened. The idea that one class of Black people, an old aristocracy, would be treated differently under the law—that they could create a class within the race that would be given equal access to the right to vote and economic opportunities—was dispelled by Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. If you have a law that says “all Blacks shall” or “all Blacks shan’t,” it doesn’t matter if you’ve been freed for two hundred years or fifty years. It doesn’t matter if your grandparents or your great-grandfather fought in the American Revolution, as [my forebears] did, or if they were living in Africa and came here just before the slave trade ended in 1808. All Black people, whether they had a PhD or could barely read and write, were equal, or unequal, before the law.
This created one big class of people, but we always have had classes within the race, like every other group. Before the law, before the larger white society, we were all of one class. It’s a paradox, but it always existed. Behind the color curtain, Blacks had upper-class people, middle-class people, working-class people, and lower-class people. W. E. B. Du Bois, in fact, in his seminal study The Philadelphia Negro, published in 1899, identified five classes within the African American people.
We’ve always had a really tough class structure. Sometimes it was confused with color. If you were mulatto, if you were light-complexioned, if you had straight hair, that put you in a higher class. If you had more, quote-unquote, African features, it was a nightmare. Really.
That began to change with the civil rights movement. No one thought the movement would begin in the South. There was always a history of protest in the North, starting with the abolitionist movement.
But Martin Luther King Jr., who was a third-generation pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church, only left the South to go to Boston University to get a PhD and then hurry back to the South. He starts the scene, and Rosa Parks starts the civil rights movement that emerges from the heart of the Confederacy, Montgomery, Alabama, with a bus boycott that shocked everybody.
James Baldwin writes about this. He’s living in Saint Paul de Vence in the South of France. He’s so ashamed when he sees those children integrating Central High School in Little Rock in 1957, when President Eisenhower sends in the National Guard, he comes back and joins the movement, and the upper-class Black people from the North all have to go south to help their brothers and sisters fight. That’s in the belly of the beast.
Because, as you know, those guys weren’t joking. They were stone-cold racists. George Wallace stood at that door and said he would never embrace the desegregation of the University of Alabama. Orval Faubus said the same thing with Central High School. You know the story as well as I do.
DR: Where did the title Stony the Road come from?
HLG: “Stony the road we trod, Bitter the chastening rod”—that is one of the verses of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the Negro national anthem. I happen to love that song, though I have to say Bill Clinton and the late Vernon Jordan are the only two people I know who know all of the verses. But that’s where it came from, and it’s a beautiful song.
DAVID W. BLIGHT on Frederick Douglass
Sterling Professor of History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University; author of Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom and other books
“Some of the most powerful, sometimes beautiful, harrowing aspects of Douglass’s autobiographies are the ways in which he reconstructs those years of his youth, and what this system of slavery was doing to him, not so much physically as psychically and mentally. Douglass always argued that the worst impact of slavery was on the mind and not on the body.”
Until the civil rights revolution of the 1960s and the rise to national and global prominence of Martin Luther King Jr., the most prominent African American in the country’s history was, without doubt, Frederick Douglass—a man who had been born into slavery, was essentially orphaned as a little boy, and yet, in time, rose to be the most distinguished and respected abolitionist seeking the end of slavery.
When that goal was achieved, Douglass became the most visible freed slave working to provide African Americans with equal rights and opportunities. He lived to see that dream partially realized and then betrayed; but his impact on American society, and on the long struggle to correct many of the country’s legal and social flaws, was enormous, indeed without peer during his lifetime.
Few would have predicted this from Douglass when he was a youth. Slaves were not supposed to learn how to read, but he did so, somewhat surreptitiously. He ultimately escaped from his Maryland slave owner and moved north, and developed his writing and oratory skills to such a level that he could make a living as a public speaker, typically attacking slavery and racism in American life.
He became influential enough to meet several times with Abraham Lincoln. And after slavery was abolished, Douglass continued his fight for social justice and equality as a best-selling autobiographer, newspaper editor, traveling orator, and, ultimately, federal government official. He was the first African American confirmed by the U.S. Senate when he was appointed by President Rutherford B. Hayes as the marshal for the District of Columbia.
For many whites, Douglass was a mystery. How could a Black man learn to read and write and speak publicly so well? For many Blacks, Douglass was also a mystery. How did he avoid being seriously harmed (though he was attacked physically from time to time)? How did he not get killed for his socializing with white women, including his second wife, or for his decades-long efforts to change the laws of white society?
These questions, and so many others, about the courageous and pioneering life of Frederick Douglass are answered as best as they can be in a Pulitzer Prize–winning book, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, by David Blight, a Yale scholar who has devoted virtually his entire academic life to th
e study of slavery, abolition, emancipation, and Reconstruction.
In this interview, conducted on February 12, 2020, as part of the Congressional Dialogues series at the Library of Congress, Professor Blight brought to life the remarkable life of a man many had known a bit about, though few had realized just how extraordinary was his life or his impact on American society. Blight’s broad knowledge about Douglass was aided immeasurably in this book by a treasure trove of Douglass family records and letters not previously available to any scholar.
I had long wanted to interview this great scholar of Frederick Douglass and that period. The interview with David Blight lived up to all of my expectations.
* * *
DAVID M. RUBENSTEIN (DR): Let’s go through Douglass’s life, because people may not be that familiar with it. Where was he born?
DAVID W. BLIGHT (DB): He was born at a horseshoe bend along the Tuckahoe River, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. His father was white, he knew that. The two principle candidates are his two owners, Aaron Anthony and Thomas Auld.
His mother was a woman named Harriet Bailey, who was owned by Aaron Anthony. She had five children between roughly the age of eighteen and thirty-one, when she died. Douglass saw her last when he was six years old.
DR: Then what happened?
DB: He was dropped off at the Wye House Plantation on the Eastern Shore when he was six. He lived there until he was nearly eight. He was then sent by his owner to Baltimore to be the playmate of his owner’s brother’s son, Tommy Auld.
DR: He goes to Baltimore and one of the most important things in his life happens: he is taught to read. It was illegal for slaves to learn how to read. Why was that? And why was he taught to read if it was illegal?
DB: Literacy is power. Literacy is a means to potential dignity. And it’s the potential of escape. Teaching a slave to read was illegal in virtually all slave states. However, that didn’t stop some people from either allowing or teaching slaves to read.
Douglass’s mistress in Baltimore was a woman named Sophia Auld, the wife of Hugh Auld, and for nearly two years, when Douglass is seven, eight years old, she teaches him his alphabet, reads the Bible out loud with him. He learns to read from his white mistress, until her husband came in one day and said, “You will not teach that slave, because if you teach him to read, he will next want to write, and then he will want to escape.” Douglass once said, “That was the first abolitionist speech I ever heard.”
DR: As a teenager, he’s sent back to the Eastern Shore. Why is he sent back?
DB: He’s sent back first because his owner died. This is one of the most horrifying things about slavery. An owner dies, the slaves are going to be sold off. After just one year in Baltimore, Douglass is sent back to the Eastern Shore, because old Aaron Anthony had died, and all of his twenty-five or thirty slaves were being divided up.
But Douglass had the great good luck of being sent back to Baltimore. He will spend nine of his twenty years as a slave in Baltimore, and it has everything to do with why we even know about him.
Baltimore was a city, a big maritime city. In the year Douglass escaped, 1838, it had about three thousand slaves, but it had seventeen thousand free Blacks. It was a very large, and very active, and vibrant free Black community, with churches and debating societies.
He lives within that community as well as living as a slave. He works on the docks, works in maritime trade. He becomes a caulker, and he has a vision of the world, in Baltimore Harbor, of all those ships always going in and out of the town.
All the money he earned down on the docks went to his owner, which was one of many causes of a building rage inside of him. And again Douglass is sent back to the Eastern Shore. He does brutal farm labor, and he becomes a disgruntled, despairing teenager. He was made to work as a fieldhand.
Some of the most powerful, sometimes beautiful, harrowing aspects of Douglass’s autobiographies are the ways in which he reconstructs those years of his youth, and what this system of slavery was doing to him, not so much physically as psychically and mentally. Douglass always argued that the worst impact of slavery was on the mind and not on the body.
He was hired out by Auld, his owner, who couldn’t handle him anymore. Auld hired him out to a man named Edward Covey.
If you ever read Douglass’s narrative, Covey is an unforgettable character. He was himself a slaveholder, but a smaller farmer. He was well known in the area for punishing and breaking recalcitrant slaves. Covey, let’s just say, beat the dickens out of him weekly for months.
Douglass ran away at one point. He ran back to his owner and said, “This guy Covey, he’s a devil, he’s killing me.” Auld said, “You must deserve it,” and sent him right back. The way Douglass tells the story—Douglass is a very crafty writer, let’s remember that; all great autobiography is good storytelling—he went back, and when Covey came after him with whip and boards, Douglass took him on and fought him, physically.
Douglass says the fight lasted two hours, but I doubt that. And Douglass tells us that he busted Covey. He beat him up, and Covey never again laid a hand on him.
Douglass makes that story into the pivot of his autobiography. He makes it into a kind of a resurrection story. He’s resurrected from his bondage through violence, through standing up in self-defense.
DR: Eventually he goes back to Baltimore?
DB: First he is rented out from Covey’s farm. He’s eighteen and he’s rented out to a guy named [William] Freeland, a much different master. One of the most fascinating things about Douglass’s autobiography is that it’s not just about the horrors of slavery. It’s a fascinating analysis of the slaveholders’ minds. He gives you portraits of very different kinds of slaveholders, very different kinds of people.
Freeland didn’t beat his slaves. But it was when he was with Freeland that Douglass organized what he called his band of brothers. He’d read the Bible out loud with them, because he was the only one who was literate. He would practice oratory with them.
But they also launched a plot of escape, and they got caught. Douglass was marched in chains with three of his buddies to the Talbot County Jail in Easton, Maryland, and jailed for two weeks.
This is crucial, because it is the luckiest break of his life. For two weeks Thomas Auld left him in his jail cell. He expected to be sold south, which is the worst possible fate. You could die getting there. You’ll never see your kinfolk again. Douglass had no less than fourteen brothers, sisters, and cousins sold south during his twenty years as a slave in Maryland.
But Thomas Auld lets him out and says, according to Douglass, “You’re not a very good slave. I’m sending you back to Baltimore. If you behave, I will free you on your twenty-first birthday.”
But Douglass didn’t believe him. He will escape when he’s twenty.
DR: He meets a woman name Anna, whom he later marries, and who is illiterate. How did she help him escape?
DB: Anna Murray is about three years older. He meets her in Baltimore, probably at a church. She’s born free out on the Eastern Shore, about three miles from where Frederick was born.
They fall in love somehow. Anna did remain illiterate, a nonreader and nonwriter all of her life, through their forty-four years of marriage. That’s a very complicated story. One of the biggest challenges a Douglass biographer faces is finding Anna. But I think I managed to, to some extent.
She became a companion in his escape plot. They planned it together. He escaped in August of 1838 dressed as a sailor. He borrowed an old sailor’s maritime ID papers. Douglass didn’t look anything like this guy. He’s twenty years old. He escaped with about three dollars that Anna gave him and his copy of the Columbian Orator in his other pocket, which is this magical book that he discovered when he was twelve years old. It’s a manual of oratory.
He took three trains and three boats from Baltimore to the Lower West Side of Manhattan in thirty-eight hours. He gets a letter back to Baltimore. Somebody tells Anna, “He’s in New York City, go.”<
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Anna had her bags packed, and her escape takes the same bravery that Douglass’s did. Because if she gets caught, her fate is going to be just as bad as his. Anna, by the way, had a good job for a free Black woman—the best deal she could get. She was a domestic servant in a white person’s home, a safe job. [A free Black woman with a domestic job was the best she could ever aspire to; free Blacks lived circumscribed lives, with no civil or political rights and very meager wages. Frederick must have represented high hopes and better days ahead for Anna.]
But she got on the same train, the same three ferryboats across the Susquehanna, the Delaware, and the Hudson, and joins him in New York City. They were married in the home of a former fugitive slave.
Douglass had no plan when he gets to New York City. He was told, “Go to New Bedford [Massachusetts]. It’s a safe haven for fugitive slaves, and you’ll get maritime work.” It was the whaling capital of the United States.
He begins to preach at a small AME Zion church, a Black church, in New Bedford. At age twenty-one, he registered to vote. I found it in the New Bedford City Hall Manifest of Voting Records. There he is, in 1839, registered to pay a $1.50 poll tax. In Massachusetts, you had to pay a tax. There he is, Frederick Douglass, on the voting roll.
DR: He’s speaking as a preacher, getting a good reputation.
DB: He’s discovered in New Bedford preaching in this AME Zion church at the age of twenty-one, twenty-two. He learns his homiletics there. He learns how to preach to the text on a Sunday.
He’s discovered doing this by some white abolitionists from up in Boston who are close associates of William Lloyd Garrison, the leading abolitionist of the time. Garrison created the American Anti-Slavery Society and published the longest-lasting antislavery newspaper, the Liberator.
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