Frederick Douglass -- Activist Fervor Revived

 

At two-thirty at Festival Hall, before a throng of respectable black citizens, Frederick Douglass rose to speak.  He had before him a paper, “The Race Problem in America,” which he intended to read.  The black poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar, later described what happened.

 

Suddenly he was interrupted by “jeers and catcalls” from white men in the rear of the crowd.  In the August heat, the old man tried to go on, but the mocking persisted; his hand shook.  Painfully, … the great orator’s voice “faltered.”  Then, … the old abolitionist threw his papers down, parked his glasses on them, and eyes flashing, pushed his hand through his great mane of white hair.  Then he spoke: “Full, rich and deep came the sonorous tones, compelling attention, drowning out the catcalls …. “Men talk of the Negro problem,” Douglass roared.  “There is no Negro problem.  The problem is whether the American people have loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough, to live up to their own Constitution.”  On he went for an hour: “We Negroes love our country.  We fought for it.  We ask only that we be treated as well as those who fought against it.”  The applause when he stopped was the welcome thunder of old times.  …

 

After reading about the speech in the newspaper, Ida Wells hurried to the fair and “begged his pardon for presuming in my youth and inexperience to criticize him.  … Now she declared that his speech “had done more to bring our cause to the attention of the American people than anything else which had happened during the fair.”

 

The land in which Douglass now spoke his mind was not the one he had worked so hard to achieve.  He and all of black America had long known about the monstrous happenings in the South-the terrorism, culminating in lynchings -and the refusal of the federal government to do anything effective about them; black Americans knew that white America was deflecting its guilt by seeing them as comic figures; that so-called scientific thought was consigning them to a lower position on the evolutionary scale.  What black America had not previously experienced was the humiliation of seeing these attitudes and beliefs all together, on display at a vast celebration of “progress” spread out before the whole world (McFeely 371-372).

 

Yet Ida Wells and Frederick Douglass, together, and Wells long after Douglass’s death, never stopped defying the injustice placed upon their race.  The following is a personal example, of minor importance but significant symbolically, of their uncompromising nature.

 

… One day as the fair was winding down, Douglass invited Wells to join him for lunch.  Asked where they should go, she said there was a nice place across the street but, she told him, they did not serve colored people.  “Mr. Douglass, in his vigorous way, grasped my arm and said, “Come, let’s go there.’”  She said she was game and they “sauntered into the Boston Oyster House as if it were an everyday occurrence, cocked and primed for the fight if necessary.”  Douglass strode to a table, held a chair for Wells, and took his seat, as “paralyzed” waiters looked on-and gave no sign of coming over with a menu.  A classic standoff seemed in the making until the proprietor, recognizing Douglass, came over and greeted him.  From then on, waiters hovered, while the proprietor kept up nonstop reminiscences of a visit Douglass had once made in his hometown.  “When he finally went to another part of the room,” Wells recalled, “Mr. Douglass turned to me with a roguish look and said, ‘Ida, I thought you said that they didn’t serve us here.  It seems we are getting more attention than we want’” (McFeely 376).

 

If Frederick Douglass left a legacy for the twentieth century, no one bore it forward with more fervor or grace than she. 

 

Early in her life, Ida Wells may have been inspired by Frederick Douglass, but he, near the end of his, was driven back into the fray by Wells.   On January 9, 1894, at the great Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington, Douglass delivered what was to be his last great speech, “The Lessons of the hour.”

 

 

Work cited:

 

McFeely, William S.  Frederick Douglass.  New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1991.  Print.



Frederick Douglass -- At the Fair

 

Douglass would not be rewarded for his work in Haiti by his own government; ironically, by the Haitian government he was.  In February 1892 President Hyppolite appointed Douglass his country’s commissioner at the World’s Columbian Exposition (the first World’s Fair) in Chicago, and in April of the following year Douglass and his wife took up their residence there.  Douglass’s duties were minimal.  His function would be advisory, he had been assured.  Someone else would deal with clerical duties.  Douglass hoped that the fair would express something positive about the accomplishments of black people both in Haiti and in the United States.  At the dedication of the Haitian Pavilion, Douglass spoke dutifully about the beauty of the setting of the fair, at the shoreline of Lake Michigan, and invited visitors to enjoy “a generous taste of our Haitian coffee, made in the best manner by Haitian hands” (Bontemps 296).  He was there to draw visitors and publicize Haitian commerce and culture; but, because he was there and because of who he still was, he was drawn into the strong discontent that young black leaders felt about the Fair’s exclusion of Negro American achievements.

 

All classes and conditions of the world’s people were represented, blacks stated, except that of the American Negro.  They petitioned Congress to rectify their lack of representation, and their petition was essentially ignored.  Subsequently, Ida B. Wells, Douglass’s young black associate, wrote an eighty-one page pamphlet entitled “The Reason Why the Colored Man Is Not Represented in the World’s Columbian Exposition.”  To defuse the growing discontent fostered by the pamphlet and the fact that few blacks had been employed at the Fair and none had been included in its planning, managers of the Fair designated August 25, 1893, as “Colored American Day.”  Black contributions to American life and culture would be displayed on this day, they promised.  Most black Americans suspected that the day would be used by whites instead for ridicule.  Ida Wells wanted Douglass not to participate.

 

Douglass first became aware of the thirty-year-old Miss Wells from a newspaper article she wrote about a triple lynching that had occurred in Memphis, Tennessee.

 

This daughter of slaves, who had been an eager student at Rust University, wrote fearlessly of the killing of three male friends; they had been lynched, she asserted categorically, not for raping white women, as alleged, but for competing with white storekeepers.  While she was in Philadelphia in May, speaking at protest meetings, her neighbors destroyed the office and plant of the newspaper [the Memphis Free Speech], in which she owned a one-third interest.

 

Even before the Memphis paper was silenced, the editor of the North American Review asked Douglass to write on the subject, and “Lynch Law in the South” appeared in the July 1892 issue.  …

 

“… there is good reason to question these lynch-law reports.  … The crime imputed to the negro is one most easily imputed and most difficult to disprove, and yet it is the one the negro is least likely to commit.”  There had been, he pointed out, not rapes reported during the Civil War, when white women were often alone with their slaves.  Turning to the case about which Wells had written, he noted that just as the “Jew is hated in Russia, because he is thrifty,” so the “negro meets no resistance when on a downward course.  It is only when he rises in wealth, intelligence, and manly character that he brings upon himself the heavy hand of persecution.  The men lynched at Memphis were murdered because they were prosperous.”  Inquiring into what lay behind the summary killings, Douglass shrewdly observed that “responsibility for the lynch law … is not entirely with the ignorant mob … they simply obey … sentiment created by wealth and respectability.”

 

…

 

While Douglass was writing, Wells had a fiery piece in the June press, a seven-column article in the New York Age “giving names, dates, and places.”  Douglass, in New York, came to call on the brash new editor and writer to tell her “what a revelation of existing conditions” her writing had been for him.  Distanced as he was, he “had begun to believe it true that there was increased lasciviousness on the part of Negroes.”  Now he wrote her a letter-which appeared as a preface to her 1892 pamphlet Southern Horrors. “Brave Woman!  You have done your people and mine a service which can neither be weighed nor measured.  If the American conscience were only half alive … a scream of horror, shame and indignation would rise to Heaven. …” (McFeely 360-362)

 

Shortly afterward, Wells visited Cedar Hill.  By the time she and Douglass settled down to work together in Chicago, he was ready spiritually and emotionally to speak out again in behalf of his people.

 

Wells and Douglass both wanted the world to know how black people were fairing in American.  With his help, she wrote a pamphlet that described both the accomplishments of their race and their condition, plagued by lynchings.

 

As August 25^th neared, comments from whites that there might not be enough watermelons available to feed the duskies that would pass through the Fair’s gates foretold how the white press viewed the significance of black culture.  Despite Wells’s objections, Douglass eventually agreed to be the concluding speaker of the day’s celebration, but only after several black musicians pleaded with him to help dignify the proceedings.  They, and Douglass’s own grandson, James Douglass, a concert violinist, wished to display their accomplished skills.

 

When Douglass arrived on the grounds August 25, he saw immediately that the day was indeed intended to be a joke.  Watermelon vendors were in abundance. Puck Magazine’s cartoon entitled “Darkies’ Day at the Fair” had “fat-bellied, barefoot spear carriers in grass skirts and thick-lipped, ornately uniformed soldiers lined up to buy their watermelon from a checked-pants sharpster with his top hat atilt” (McFeely 370).

 

At two-thirty at Festival Hall, before a throng of respectable black citizens, Frederick Douglass rose to speak.  He held before him a paper, “The Race Problem in America,” which he intended to read.  The black poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar, later described what happened.

 

 

Works cited:

 

Bontemps, Arna, Free at Last, the Life of Frederick Douglass, New York, Dodd, Mead & Company, 1971.  Print

 

McFeely, William S.  Frederick Douglass.  New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1991.  Print.



Frederick Douglass -- Serving in Haiti

 

The Republican Party won back the Presidency in 1888.  Douglass had campaigned for Benjamin Harrison and now wanted another government job.  A cabinet position was something that Douglass could dream about but he was willing to settle for his old job, recorder of deeds.  The position, ironically, went to Blanche K. Bruce, former black senator from Mississippi and a witness to Douglass’s marriage.  Douglass waited three months for a government appointment, all the while ignoring the advice of friends not to antagonize the new President by urging Harrison to bring back federal protection of the lives of Negroes in the South and of their right to vote.  In June 1889 Douglass was offered the ministry to Haiti.  Despite advice from friends, he accepted.

 

Two black generals, Francois D. Legitime and Florvil Hyppolite, had directed a revolution in 1888 that had removed Haiti’s president.  With naval and military aid provided by the American navy, Hyppolite then removed Legitime and his supporters from the island, and, as the new Haiti president, it was Hyppolite who received Douglass’s credentials in November of 1889.

 

The Harrison administration wanted something back for the helpfulness.  They wanted Mole St. Nicholas, an excellent harbor on the extreme northwestern tip of Haiti.  The location would then become the primary United States naval station in the Caribbean.

 

Always vulnerable, independent Haiti was now under the particularly avaricious eyes of white powers seeking bases for their growing navies-bases that in the Caribbean would support them in their rivalry to build a canal across the Central American isthmus.  Other Caribbean islands, among them Spain’s Cuba and the British West Indies, already belonged to competing European empires.  … They [the Haitians] knew that as a black republic their nation was viewed with much contempt and that it was judged fair prey by those wishing to annex part or all of it (McFeely 336).

 

Likely, Douglass had received his assignment to mollify the suspicions of Haitians, who were well familiar with his past history.  Douglass, himself, revered Haiti.  He believed that its people were a singular example of what all black people could accomplish, unhindered by white persecution.  Douglass, although in favor of acquiring the Haitian harbor for the navy’s use, well understood Haitian cynicism and performed his tasks openly and honestly, despite the arrogant words and threatening manner of an American admiral, who was assigned to work with Douglass in their negotiations to obtain a lease of the harbor.  Their efforts failed, and the administration abandoned the project in the late summer of 1891.  The expansionists of the administration had now focused their desire upon Hawaii, Cuba, and Puerto Rico.  President Harrison had never been more than luke warm about acquiring a Haitian harbor.

 

Critics in the press inaccurately accused Douglass ob being the main reason for his administration’s failure to obtain the harbor.  New York newspapers demanded and predicted that he would be fired.  On June 30 Douglass submitted his resignation, but not because of the criticism.  Both his own health and that of Helen had suffered from the climate.

 

Douglass defended himself six months later in the North American Review.  “A man must defend himself,” he wrote, “if only to demonstrate his fitness to defend anything else.”

 

… To be sure, he had had enough of Haiti, but his pride had been hurt, and, worse, his loyalty to his country had been challenged.  … He contended … that he had had no orders to try to secure it [the harbor] during his first year in Haiti and therefore could not be charged with delay in the months immediately following Hyppolite”s assumption of power.  Discussing the negotiations that did take place, Douglass was candid in suggesting that Admiral Gherardi had been condescending and hence insulting to Antenor Firmin, Haiti’s secretary of state.  [After the article appeared, Firmin, from exile in Paris, wrote Douglass that his resignation was a great loss to both Haiti and the United States] McFeely 356-357).

 

This was Douglass’s last government position.

 

 

Work cited:

 

McFeely, William S.  Frederick Douglass.  New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1991.  Print.



Frederick Douglass -- Second Marriage

 

On August 4, 1882, Anna Murray Douglass died, following a month’s struggle to survive a severe stroke, her left side useless, but her mind and her speech clear.  She was buried in Rochester, by the graves of two children.

 

Douglass’s grief was deep.  For quite some time he was absent from Washington, at the homes of supporting friends in New York and in Maine.  When he returned to his duties, he began to speak in lecture halls again and at convention lecterns, with moderation, but also with pointed criticism.

 

Negroes lived “among a people whose laws, traditions, and prejudices have been against us for centuries, and from these they are not yet free.  … Though the colored man is no longer subject to be caught and sold, he is still surrounded by an adverse sentiment which fetters all his movements.  … He is rejected by trade unions … and refused work where he lives, and burial where he dies.”  Douglass still clung to the notion that the Republican Party, chastened, could be counted upon.  He opposed the desire of many of his race to support a third political party, for doing so, Douglass insisted, would only help the hated Southern Democrats.  On October 15, 1883, the Supreme Court, including eight of nine Republican judges, in a decision that, in Douglass’s words, “came upon the country like a clap of thunder,” removed “the rights of colored citizens as those rights are defined by the fourteenth amendment of the Constitution.”  According to the Court, only the state legislatures, not the United States Congress, had jurisdiction over a person’s rights.  “Seven millions of the people of this country,” Douglass would say in a speech soon afterward, were “naked and defenceless” against “malignant, vulgar, and pitiless prejudice.”  He predicted that “far down the ages” the Court’s decision would be reversed (McFeely 315, 317, 318).  [Federal legislation reversed the discriminatory policies of the Southern states eighty-one years later with the adoption of the Civil Rights Act of 1964]

 

Less than a year and a half after Anna’s death, on a cold January evening [the 24^th] in 1884, Douglass and his secretary, driving in Douglass’s carriage behind magnificent while horses, were joined by the Senator from Mississippi, Blanche K. Bruce, and Mrs. Bruce.  Douglass directed his coachman to the home of a prominent Negro clergyman.  A personal friend of Douglass’s, the minister was nevertheless surprised by his late callers.  He sent word downstairs for them to wait.  A few moments later, upon request of those concerned, the Reverend Mr. Francis J. Grimke joined Frederick Douglass and Helen Pitts in marriage, the Bruces witnessing.

 

… A hurricane of outraged letters hit Cedar Hill.  Negroes and whites seemed equally offended.  The venerable Douglass, white-haired and sixty-two, should not have married again at all, some thought.  Others shouted that Negro womanhood had been disparaged by the implications of his choice.  Could he not find … a colored woman good enough for him?  In the South, of course, criticism found its most picturesque expression.  Douglass was a “lecherous old African Solomon” in the eyes of the Franklin, Virginia, Gazette.

 

Douglass’s own children joined in the howl.  How could he do this to them—and without consultation?  … Douglass watched the whole demonstration with a twinkle in his eye.

 

He showed his amusement by keeping a scrapbook of the opprobrium heaped upon him and his white wife.  When confronting interviewers, he slyly observed that in his first marriage he had paid his respects to his black mother, in his second to his white father.  “Love came to me,” Helen crooned when questioned, “and I was not afraid to marry the man I loved because of his color.”  For the resentment of his children Douglass was prepared, and his retort was neither witty nor pleasant.  There wasn’t one of them who wasn’t at least partially dependent on him for support.  They swallowed hard and crept away.

 

Douglass and Helen began playing croquet on the lawns of Cedar Hill.  The place was quieter now.  His health was wonderful.  Douglass actually began to feel young again.  … None of his close friends, he discovered, had actually turned their back on him and Helen (Bontemps 175-177).

 

A Democrat President, Grover Cleveland, took occupancy of the White House in 1885.  Douglass presumed that his office, recorder of deeds, would be immediately given to a Democrat supporter; however, it was not until January of 1886 that Cleveland requested that Douglass resign.  Additionally, Cleveland, during the tenure of his office, unlike his Republican predecessors, extended to Douglass, and the ladies of his family, invitations to his large, official receptions.  Douglass and his new wife attended, without embarrassment.

 

Free from governmental responsibility, Douglass took his wife to Europe and leisurely toured the continent as far east as Greece; and, with aid, the seventy-year-old man climbed atop the great pyramid of Cheops in Egypt.  While in England, he and Helen had enjoyed the hospitality of the widowed Julia Griffiths-Crofts, whom Douglass had not seen for thirty-two years.  They did not, they could not visit Ottilia Assing.

 

On August 21, 1884, [almost seven months after Frederick and Helen’s marriage] Ottilia Assing dressed carefully in a monogrammed blouse and skirt, put on her hat, dropped her key, a brooch with a picture inside, and a bit of money into her red leather wallet, and left her Paris hotel.  Walking in the Bois de Boulogne, she stopped to pick a leaf from an oak tree and carefully put it into her purse; shortly, from that same purse, she took out a container of poison and swallowed its contents (McFeely 322).

 

 

Works cited:

 

Bontemps, Arna, Free at Last, the Life of Frederick Douglass, New York, Dodd, Mead & Company, 1971.  Print

 

McFeely, William S.  Frederick Douglass.  New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1991.  Print.