Frederick Douglass -- End of Life

 

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.”

 

“A white man has but to blacken his face and commit a crime, to have some negro lynched in his stead.  An abandoned woman has only to start to cry that she has been insulted by a black man, to have him arrested and summarily murdered by the mob.”

 

 Douglasss … introduced the idea that guilt was a motivating force, if not among lynchers, then among those who defended them.  He went on to attack the spurious literacy tests and the various other “obstacles and sinuosities” used to keep the black man from voting.  “That this is done,” he continued, “is not only admitted, but openly defended and justified by so-called honorable men inside and outside of Congress.”  …

 

Turning to the character of the black man, Douglass cited the fact that when southern men had been away from their homes during the Civil War, there had been no rape of the women by the slaves left behind.  And then he got down to the heart of the matter-the utility of accusing a whole group of a propensity for rape to justify the practice of lynching as a means of social control.  He identified “three distinct periods of persecution,” each with its own excuse for violence.  “First you remember it was insurrection,” seen as a threat during slavery.  “When that was worn out, [the danger of] negro supremacy” was the excuse, during Reconstruction.  “When that is worn out, now it is assault upon defenseless women” that is seen as the threat justifying violence.  “Now, my friends, I ask what is the rational explanation of this singular omission of this charge [rape] in the two periods preceding the present?”  Answering his own question, Douglass said that the third accusation had not been necessary as long as the threat of insurrection or of negro supremacy could be invoked to justify severe measures of social control; now “altered times and circumstances have made necessary a sterner … justification of Southern barbarism.”

 

…

 

… “I have sometime thought that the American people were too great to be small.”  Now, he was not so sure: “I cannot shut my eyes to the ugly facts before me.  …  He is a wiser man than I am, who can tell how low the moral sentiment of this republic may yet fall.  … The Supreme Court has surrendered.  … It has destroyed the civil rights bill, and converted the Republican party into a party of money rather than a party of morals.”

 

The idea of deporting his people received his greatest scorn.  …” The native land of the American negro is America.  His bones, his muscles, his sinews, are all American.  His ancestors for two hundred and seventy years have lived, and labored, and died on American soil, and millions of his posterity have inherited Caucasian blood.”  Shrewdly, he counted on the fact that the white South did not want to expel its workers: “The land owners of the South want the labor of the negro on the hardest possible terms,” terms including perpetual debt and a lien system by which “he is fastened to the land as by hooks of steel.”

 

“Words are things,” dangerous things, and the words “Negro Problem” were false, pernicious.  … This thinking had to end.  The problem was the nation’s problem; if it  could not be solved, the nation was doomed.  But, Douglass insisted, there was still a solution and he thundered forth a stream of correctives: “Let the white people of the North and South conquer their prejudices.  … Let the nation try justice and the problem will be solved.” …

 

… The speech was handsomely printed, with a fine photograph of the orator on the cover, and was much praised.  … It did absolutely no good (McFeely 377-381).

 

Douglass was as aware as anybody of the lengthening chain of his years, and presently he began to have premonitions.  This did not prevent him on February 20, 1895, from attending a Woman’s Council (Liberation) meeting at Metzerott Hall, and when he entered, the presiding officer, Mary Wright Sewall, promptly suspended business of the Council in order to allow Susan B. Anthony and the Reverend Anna H. Shaw to escort him to the platform as the membership rose spontaneously and, waving handkerchiefs, gave him a standing ovation.

 

He told Helen abut it at dinner that evening at Cedar Hill.  It was five o’clock, and they were not hurried because there was enough time to relax before his speaking engagement scheduled that evening at a local church.  When suddenly he rose from the table and turned toward the stairs, his wife thought he was about to dramatize the events of the afternoon, as he so often did, but she was petrified with shock when he bowed and began to sink lower and lower.

 

Later descriptions of the moment differ, but in one of them he is reported as saying, as he fell to his knees, “What is this?”  If he received an answer, he did not divulge it.  He never regained consciousness.  He was dead when the carriage arrived to take him to his speaking engagement (Bontemps 298-299).

 

On February 21, Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote, “Taking up the papers today, the first word that caught my eye thrilled my very soul.  Frederick Douglass is dead!”  … She recalled his “burning eloquence” before a Boston anti-slavery meeting when “with wit, satire, and indignation he graphically described the bitterness of slavery and the humiliation of subjection to those who, in all human virtues and powers, were inferior to himself.”  It was the first time she had seen Douglass: “Around him sat the great antislavery orators of the day, earnestly watching the effect of his eloquence on that immense audience, that laughed and wept by turns, completely carried away by the wondrous gifts of his pathos and humor.  … all the other speakers seemed tame after Frederick Douglass.”  He “stood there like an African prince, majestic in his wrath” (McFeely 382-383).

 

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.