Biography of fredrick douglas

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When Douglass referred to moral personhood as such (the essential moral worth of persons), he typically used the ideas of “equality”, “perfect human equality”, “manhood”, “brotherhood”, and “universal human brotherhood”.

There are, however, moments, as noted in the passage above from My Bondage and My Freedom, where his usage of “dignity” explicitly points to the idea of equal moral personhood.

The same is true in an editorial he wrote in 1850 responding to slander, verbal assaults, and a physical one:

My crime is, that I have assumed to be a man, entitled to all the rights, privileges and dignity, which belong to human nature—that color is no crime, and that all men are brother.

doi:10.1017/CCOL9780521889230

Levine, Robert S., 1997, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity, Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press.

–––, 2016, The Lives of Frederick Douglass, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Lott, Tommy Lee (ed.), 1998, Subjugation and Bondage: Critical Essays on Slavery and Social Philosophy, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

Martin, Waldo E., Jr., 1984, The Mind of Frederick Douglass, Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press.

Mazzini, Giuseppe [Joseph], 1860 [1862], Doveri dell’uomo, London; translated as The Duties of Man, London: Chapman & Hall, 1862; re-translated by Ella Noyes in The Duties of Man And Other Essays, introduced by Thomas Jones, London: J.M.

Dent & Sons, 1907.

McFeely, William S., 1991, Frederick Douglass, New York: Norton.

McGary, Howard, 1999a, “Douglass on Racial Assimilation and Racial Institutions”, in Lawson and Kirkland 1999: 50–63 (ch. Reprinted, 2015, as The Heroic Slave: A Cultural and Critical Edition, Robert S.

Levine, John Stauffer, and John R. McKivigan (eds.), New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press.

1853b, “The Present Condition And Future Prospects of the Negro People”, annual meeting of the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, New York City, 11 May; FDSW: 250–259.

1854, “The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered”, Hudson, Ohio, 12 July; in SFD: 116–150

1855, My Bondage and My Freedom, New York: Miller, Orton & Mulligan.

O, why was I born a man, of whom to make a brute! It plays a vital role in the history of African American political theory, and for that reason, given this nation’s history, it is a valuable contribution to American political philosophy about respect, dignity, and personhood.

• 1950, Early years, 1817–1849, volume 1
• 1950, Pre-Civil War decade, 1850–1860, volume 2
• 1952, The Civil War, 1861–1865, volume 3
• 1955, Reconstruction and After, volume 4
• 1975, Supplementary volume, 1844–1860, volume 5

1976, Frederick Douglass on Women’s Rights, Philip Sheldon Foner (ed.), (Contributions in Afro-American and African Studies 25), Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

2016, The Essential Douglass: Selected Writings & Speeches, Nicholas Buccola (ed.), Indianapolis.

Fifth, drawing on theories of providential historical development (echoing common American views of manifest destiny), he argued that slavery was inconsistent with moral, political, economic, and social progress. He remarked to a journalist, the day after his second marriage to Helen Pitts, who was white,

…there is no division of races.

As a witness and participant of the second Great Awakening, he took the politicized rhetoric of Christian redemption—personal and social liberation from sin—seriously. As Douglass scathingly pointed out, the slave-holding states resisted the abolition of slavery, and many Americans were apathetic about its cruel injustices—humans resist providential justice.

Is not my only possible aim the subduction of all that is Negro in me to the American? It is an outlook that reflects his support for organic processes of assimilation and amalgamation and social reform. (Du Bois 1897 [1992: 488])

Du Bois’s answers to these questions directly contradict Douglass’s view about amalgamation.

We shall spread the network of our science and our civilization over all who seek their shelter, whether from Asia, Africa, or the Isles of the Sea. We shall mould them all, each after his kind, into Americans; Indian and Celt, negro and Saxon, Latin and Teuton, Mongolian and Caucasian, Jew and gentile, all shall bow to the same law, speak the same language, support the same government, enjoy the same liberty, vibrate with the same national enthusiasm, and seek the same national ends.

doi:10.1017/CCOL9780521889230.006

–––, 2014, “‘I Rose a Freeman’: Power, Property, and the Performance of Manhood in Slave Narratives”, in The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative, John Ernest (ed.), New York: Oxford University Press, 260–276.

Washington, Booker T., 1907, Frederick Douglass, (American Crisis Biographies), Philadelphia/London: G.W.

Jacobs & Company.

Waldron, Jeremy, 2012, Dignity, Rank, and Rights, Meir Dan-Cohen (ed.), (Berkeley Tanner Lectures), New York: Oxford University Press. (1894 [SFD: 485]).

Fourth, according to Douglass, emigration and separation were contrary to historical development and the emergence of a composite nation comprised of a blended people.

It is something to be practiced.^[20] But if dignity is innate and inherent, why must an individual practice it for it to be said that they have it? This I have done in broad open day, scorning concealment. Slavery subjected them to debilitating, murderous violence, sexual violence and exploitation, split up families, denied them education, exploited their labor, and denied their natural property rights.

Principles for a New Political Debate, Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press.