Blight shows Douglass to rival the intelligence and charisma of the best known 20th and 21st century black Americans. David Blight’s Frederick Douglass affords this important American the distinguished biography he deserves.ĭavid Blight offers a nuanced biography of Fredrick Douglass, a great 19th century American leader. There has not been a major biography of Douglass in a quarter century.
Douglass was not only an astonishing man of words, but a thinker steeped in Biblical story and theology. Blight tells the fascinating story of Douglass’ two marriages and his complex extended family. In this remarkable biography, David Blight has drawn on new information held in a private collection that few other historian have consulted, as well as recently discovered issues of Douglass’ newspapers. He sometimes argued politically with younger African Americans, but he never forsook either the Republican party or the cause of Black civil and political rights. In his unique and eloquent voice, written and spoken, Douglass was a fierce critic of the US as well as a radical patriot. He denounced the premature end of Reconstruction and the emerging Jim Crow era. By the Civil War and during Reconstruction, Douglass became the most famed and widely traveled orator in the nation. He broke with Garrison to become a political abolitionist, a Republican, and eventually a Lincoln supporter.
Initially mentored by William Lloyd Garrison, Douglass spoke widely, often to large crowds, using his own story to condemn slavery. His very existence gave the lie to slave owners: with dignity and great intelligence, he bore witness to the brutality of slavery. He wrote three versions of his autobiography over the course of his lifetime and published his own newspaper. He was fortunate to have been taught to read by his slave owner mistress, and he would go on to become one of the major literary figures of his time. The definitive, dramatic biography of the most important African American of the 19th century: Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave who became the greatest orator of his day and one of the leading abolitionists and writers of the era.Īs a young man, Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) escaped from slavery in Baltimore, Maryland.
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