"Frequently Underestimated Breadth, Complexity, and Variety of Beliefs and Perspectives"

"But that does not mean that the experience of a particular African American will necessarily determine that person's preferences. Experience affects thinking in all sorts of subtle, complex, mysterious, and surprising ways. But it does not determine thought. Hence, we ought to be skeptical about claims regarding 'the authority of experience' and efforts to make a credential of experience. That a person has suffered impoverishment and marginalization is, alas, no guarantee at all that that person will be attuned to those social vices or immune to them."

Randall Kennedy at Heterodox Academy emphasizes diversity of thought throughout African-American history.

"From Abolitionist Roots"

"O save the Black man from the curse of drink: he has become an integral part of our civilization. In saving him we shall save ourselves,' Frederick Douglass thundered in his temperance addresses from the 1870s. 'Whisky arms the hand of violence. It stifles in the white race all ennobling sentiments of justice, kindness and good will,' he wrote later in 1887. 'Few things could do more for the elevation and happiness, or for the welfare of the colored people than the banishment of intoxicating liquors.'"

Mark Lawrence Schrad at Politico discusses "The Forgotten History of Black Prohibitionism."

Gold from Dross

"In a world as compromised as ours, a soul so exalted was always destined for the Cross. Jefferson's Bible ends before the Resurrection, with Jesus crucified by the Roman occupiers, as the Gospels tell us he was. Jefferson’s austere editing turns the killing almost into an afterthought—a desiccated reiteration of Socrates' final encounter with hemlock, the simple consequence of having offended the wrong people. For Thurman, the Crucifixion was an emphatic lesson in creative weakness: by sticking out his neck and accepting the full implications of his own vulnerability, Christ had radically identified himself with the worst off. Those societal castoffs who could never get a break now had a savior, and a champion, and a model. This, for Thurman, is as great a teaching as anything that Jesus merely said. Where death, for Jefferson's Jesus, is an ending, for Thurman's it is a necessary precondition—just a start." 

At The New Yorker, Vinson Cunningham reads Peter Manseau's The Jefferson Bible: A Biography.

And Nicole Penn reviews Manseau's book at The Bulwark.

"Too-La-Loo"

"A little over a decade later, however, African Americans like Douglass began making the glorious anniversary their own. After the end of the Civil War in 1865, the nation's four million newly emancipated citizens transformed Independence Day into a celebration of black freedom. The Fourth became an almost exclusively African American holiday in the states of the former Confederacy—until white Southerners, after violently reasserting their dominance of the region, snuffed these black commemorations out."

In a 2018 Atlantic article, Ethan J. Kytle and Brian write about "When the Fourth of July Was a Black Holiday."

"Portrays Douglass Unequivocally as a Hero While Also Revealing His Weaknesses"

"Ironically, his popularity is also due to ignorance. Some who commend him would probably cease doing so if they knew more about him. Frederick Douglass was a whirlwind of eloquence, imagination, and desperate striving as he sought to expose injustice and remedy its harms. All who praise him should know that part of what made him so distinctive are the tensions—indeed the contradictions—that he embraced."

Randall Kennedy in The Atlantic reviews David W. Blight's Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom.

The Father of the Civil Rights Movement

Susan Parker at DelmarvaNow describes how Maryland is marking Frederick Douglass's bicentennial birthday.

"And That's a Problem"

"The language we turn to in describing the war, from speaking of compromise and plantations, to characterizing the struggle as the North versus the South, or referring to Robert E. Lee as a General, can lend legitimacy to the violent, hateful and treasonous southern rebellion that tore the nation apart from 1861 to 1865; and from which we still have not recovered. Why do we often describe the struggle as between two equal entities? Why have we shown acceptance of the military rank given by an illegitimate rebellion and unrecognized political entity?"

Christopher Wilson at Smithsonian argues that "We Legitimize the 'So-Called' Confederacy With Our Vocabulary."

"American Slavery Could No Longer Be Hidden From the Rest of the World"

"This was a rhetorical device, however, used to set up the glaring contrast between what the founders did for themselves and the condition of black people at that time. In 1776, he noted, many people viewed George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and the others as dangerous subversives and insurgent upstarts despite British tyranny.
"However, with the hindsight of 1852, he said, it was no longer problematic to see 'that America was right, and England wrong.'
"Likewise, Douglass noted, in 1852, abolitionism was considered a dangerous and subversive political proposition. The implication here was that future generations would consider his anti-slavery stance patriotic, just, reasonable—and necessary."

Herbert Dyer, Jr., in Counterpunch discusses Frederick Douglass's "The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro."

Christopher Wilson in Smithsonian investigates "The Star-Spangled Banner" and the life of Francis Scott Key.

And Robert G. Parkinson in The New York Times looks at slavery, Native Americans, and the Declaration of Independence.

James Livingston reponds to Parkinson at Politics and Letters.

The "Unfinished Revolution"

"Recall where the Constitution stood 150 years ago today—before this Second Founding. It didn't mention the word 'slavery.' And, worse, various provisions—including the Three-Fifths Clause and the Fugitive Slave Clause—had increased the political power of the slave states throughout the pre-Civil War period. The Constitution was silent on the Declaration’s promise of equality and on the issue of African American voting rights. States could violate key Bill of Rights protections like free speech with impunity—and many Southern states did throughout the pre-Civil War period, banning abolitionist speech, with at least one state punishing such advocacy with death. And citizenship rights were left to the states and the courts—with Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney infamously concluding in Dred Scott that African Americans could not be citizens and that they had 'no rights which the white man was bound to respect.'
"While the American people rightly revere George Washington, James Madison, and their fellow Framers, it took the heroic efforts of Lincoln, Stevens, Frederick Douglass, John Bingham (the framer of the Fourteenth Amendment), and many others to create the 'more perfect Union' built on winning a bloody Civil War and ratifying a series of amendments that ended slavery, protected fundamental rights from state abuses, guaranteed equality for all, and expanded the right to vote. While the 1787 Framers succeeded in creating the most durable form of government in history, it's only after the Second Founding that the Constitution fully protected the liberty and equality promised in the Declaration of Independence."

In The Atlantic, Jeffrey Rosen and Tom Donnelly announce a five-year initiative to commemorate America's Second Founding.

"Has There Ever Been Another Independence Day Speech to Match It?"

"In the end, the promise of the Declaration could not be delivered without force of arms. The contradictions between freedom and slavery were etched so deeply into the nation that no orator's tongue could resolve them. Still, Douglass called down the storm, whirlwind, and earthquake in the attempt, and his oration deserves a place of honor in the American canon. It would please the wrathful prince to receive the recognition that is his due; though he would surely be careful to accept it only through faintly pursed lips. And then, with that tight smile, he might wonder if we too would be rash enough to ask him to speak on our Fourth."


James West Davidson in Slate analyzes Frederick Douglass's speech from July 5, 1852.

"Brings to a Conclusion One of the Towering Achievements of Historical Scholarship of the Past Half-Century"

"Davis is fully aware of the moral ambiguities involved in the crusade against slavery, the process of abolition and the long afterlife of racism. Nonetheless, in a rebuke to those historians today who belittle the entire project of emancipation, he insists that the abolition of slavery in the Western Hemisphere was one of the profoundest achievements in human history, 'a crucial landmark of moral progress that we should never forget.' His monumental three-volume study helps to ensure that it will always be remembered."


In The Nation, Eric Foner reviews David Brion Davis's The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation.

"David McCullough Wondering How Much Scratch He Could Shake Out Of Frederick Douglass"

"Noting that the most difficult part of beginning a new book project is settling on the right horse to ride all the way to the goddamned bank, McCullough said that since he’s decided to explore Douglass’ life, all that he has left to do is 'construct an engrossing narrative, throw in a couple of demonstrative anecdotes from his childhood, then sit back and watch the dough roll in.'"

From The Onion.

"A Bronze, Bearded Figure with a Determined Gaze Perched atop a Three-Foot Marble Pedestal"

"Douglass is the fourth African American to have a statue or bust in the halls of Congress, following the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks and Sojourner Truth. Reflecting the nation’s complicated past, Statuary Hall also includes Confederate heroes Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee."

Ben Pershing in The Washington Post reports on the debut of a statue of Frederick Douglass at the U.S. Capitol.

"It Now Has Two Faces"

"Leone said the stone was placed amid the bricks by the slave who built the furnace: 'We infer ... that the man ... was using and believed in the North American version of the hybrid religion whose origins come from West Africa.'
"'You would pick up the stone, and you would put it some place because it has the power of the deity,' he said."

Michael E. Ruane in The Washington Post reports on the recent discovery of slave artifacts at Maryland's Wye House plantation, where a young Frederick Douglass once lived.

"Lincoln Wasn't a Douchebag!"

"Watch as Jen Kirkman has two bottles of wine and tells us the story."

Funny or Die presents the complete Drunk History, Vol. 5: Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, starring Will Ferrell and Don Cheadle.

"This Remarkably Messy History"

"Given this remarkably messy history, the problem with reparations may not be so much whether they are a good idea or deciding who would get them; the larger question just might be from whom they would be extracted."

In The New York Times, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., wades into the issue of slavery reparations.

And others, including Eric Foner, respond.

Lincoln Logged

In The New Republic, Sean Wilentz reviews Harold Holzer's Lincoln President-Elect: Abraham Lincoln and the Great Secession Winter 1860-1861 and The Lincoln Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Legacy from 1860 to Now, Michael Burlingame's Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Ronald C. White, Jr.'s A. Lincoln: A Biography, Fred Kaplan's Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Donald Yacovone's Lincoln on Race & Slavery, and John Stauffer's Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. And Kaplan, Gates, and Stauffer (along with Michael Kazin) respond.

"Too Big to Fit on a Lapel Pin"

"Consider this: The Lakota Sioux offered some of the most fierce resistance to the United States in the 1860s and 1870s, but in the decades that followed, Lakota artists regularly incorporated the design of the U.S. flag into their beadwork, painting and weaving. What those stars and stripes meant to the Lakota artists could vary widely: In their hands, the U.S. flag could be a gesture of their new allegiance, a plea for justice from the U.S., a symbol of the nation for which their young men were now fighting or simply a decorative motif they knew to be popular with collectors. It might have been all of these things at the same time."

In the Los Angeles Times, Michael A. Elliott considers Native-American patriotism on the 132nd anniversary of the Battle of the Little Bighorn.


"If conservatives tend to see patriotism as an inheritance from a glorious past, liberals often see it as the promise of a future that redeems the past. Consider Obama's original answer about the flag pin: 'I won't wear that pin on my chest,' he said last fall. 'Instead, I'm going to try to tell the American people what I believe will make this country great, and hopefully that will be a testimony to my patriotism.' Will make this country great? It wasn't great in the past? It's not great as it is? "The liberal answer is, Not great enough. For liberals, America is less a common culture than a set of ideals about democracy, equality and the rule of law. American history is a chronicle of the distance between those ideals and reality. And American patriotism is the struggle to narrow the gap. Thus, patriotism isn't about honoring and replicating the past; it's about surpassing it."

And Peter Beinart in Time compares liberal and conservative patriotism.