Michael L. Blakey is the NEH Professor of Anthropology and American Studies and the director of the Institute for Historical Biology at the College of William and Mary. He is the editor, with Lesley M. Rankin-Hill, of The Skeletal Biology of the New York African Burial Ground , Volume I of The New York African Burial Ground: Unearthing the African Presence in Colonial New York (2009), and the co-author of “Political Economy of African Forced Migration and Enslavement in Colonial New York: An Historical Biology Perspective” ( New Directions in Biocultural Anthropology , ed....

Frederick Douglass published three autobiographies during his lifetime— 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, 1892)—as well as numerous autobiographical lectures and essays. In his three major autobiographies, Douglass consistently presents himself as a heroic black figure whose energy, will, and intelligence helped him to rise from slavery to become one of the great black leaders of his time. But there are contradictory moments in these autobiographies, key events...

On February 24, 1844, the Liberator printed an admiring report on Frederick Douglass’s “masterly and impressive” speech in Concord, New Hampshire. The fugitive slave was the master of his audience. Douglass, the writer fantasized, was like “Toussaint among the plantations of Haiti. . . . He was an insurgent slave, taking hold of the right of speech, and charging on his tyrants the bondage of his race.” In the two decades before the Civil War, a new generation of African American abolitionists, most of them fugitive slaves, came to dominate the movement. Of these the most famous...

“Here comes my friend Douglass,” exclaimed President Abraham Lincoln in the East Room of the White House after delivering his Second Inaugural Address on March 4, 1865. As he grasped the hand of the distinguished abolitionist and orator Lincoln continued, “there is no man in the country whose opinion I value more than yours. I want to know what you thought of it.” In stately tones, Douglass told the President that the speech “was a sacred effort.” [1] Lincoln’s second inauguration occurred four years into the Civil War, and in the address that Douglass praised so warmly, the re...

Featuring a passage from Adele Alexander’s book in progress, A Black Suffragist in the Jim Crow South: Adella Hunt Logan’s Epic Journey Author’s Introduction Most historians consider Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington the most prominent African American leaders of their eras. Born into slavery in 1818, Douglass raged at everything he had experienced himself and otherwise knew about the “peculiar institution.” Nearly forty years younger than Douglass, Washington too was born in bondage, in 1856. In his writings and speeches, he addressed his people’s anguish with honor...

Frederick Douglass was a great speaker before he was a great writer. Many African Americans were renowned as orators in the mid nineteenth-century, particularly preachers and anti-slavery lecturers. The most famous names include Sojourner Truth and Reverend Samuel Ward, Charles Remond and Reverend James Pennington. One writer described Sojourner Truth as having an “electrical” effect on her listeners. But even in this impressive company, Douglass stood out. He is thought to have given more than 2000 speeches in his lifetime. Public speaking was central to his anti-slavery work,...

2018 is the 200th anniversary of the birth of an extraordinary American: Frederick Douglass. Orator and activist, champion of abolition and tireless worker for racial equality, Douglass stands, with Abraham Lincoln, as the conscience of his generation and a role model for all those who embrace the ideals of our country. Yet too many Americans, even within our political leadership, do not know of Douglass’s deeds or the power of his words. History Now is pleased to devote this issue to a collection of original essays on Douglass and his life by distinguished scholars in several...

There is perhaps no theme more central to our traditional understanding of American history than the expansion of democracy. And in that long story of democratization we habitually regard as our peculiar contribution to the world, nothing is more central than the extension of the right to vote—from the propertied to the poor, from men to women, from European-descended whites to people of all origins and shades of skin. This is a story we delight in telling, for it is easily understood as a key element in the advance from monarchy to self-rule, and in the realization and...

In the United States, voting is a constitutionally protected right and an essential symbol of meaningful political participation in our nation’s electoral processes of governing. The right to vote and to have one’s vote count toward one’s political interests are essential aspects of citizen engagement in participatory democracy. Voting is the key to citizens participating in “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” As such, voting acts as the guardian of the exercise of nearly every right we have in American society. Without the right to vote, or to vote in a...

The black freedom struggle, commonly referred to as the civil rights movement, is undoubtedly one of the greatest social movements in the history of the world. After more than two centuries of bondage followed by another century of rigid segregation and discrimination, African Americans and their white allies finally succeeded in forcing all three branches of the United States government to recognize the basic humanity of black people. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was perhaps the movement’s crowning achievement. Coming ten years after the US Supreme Court’s landmark decision in...