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.