Frederick Douglass in Brooklyn

November 21, 2016
This collection of Douglass’s speeches in Brooklyn displays the power of the former slave’s oratory before, during, and after the Civil War. Editor Hamm, a professor of media studies, places a selection of carefully reconstructed speeches in this slim volume, and gives useful context on how they were locally received. A concise introduction provides detail about 19th-century Brooklyn and its conflicted legacy of racial prejudice and abolitionism. When Douglass’s own words are reproduced, his talent as a writer and the sheer monstrousness of slavery are both driven home. In one speech, he points out that black soldiers “are willing to fight in this war, provided they have the shield of this government extended over them,” laying bare a truth that continued to be relevant for the American armed services for long afterward. His Brooklyn lectures show him at his peak as an advocate of racial equality in a hostile climate, represented here by editorials from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. It is as moving to read his 1866 speech today as it must have been to be in a crowd and hear him say, “I appear here no longer as a whipped, scarred slave—no longer as the advocate merely of an enslaved race, but in the high and commanding character of an American citizen.”

October 15, 2016
A collection of rousing 19th-century speeches on freedom and humanity.The eloquent orator Frederick Douglass (c. 1818-1895) delivered eight impressive speeches in Brooklyn, New York, "far from a bastion of abolitionist support," which, even as late as 1886, had only a small black population and included among its white citizens many who had been slave owners. Editor Hamm (Journalism and New Media Studies/St. Joseph's Coll.; The New Blue Media: How Michael Moore, MoveOn.org, Jon Stewart and Company Are Transforming Progressive Politics, 2008, etc.) provides helpful introductions and notes and gives illuminating context and perspective by including their coverage in the "virulently proslavery" Brooklyn Eagle.At churches, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and several public events, Douglass repeatedly tackled the question, "What Shall Be Done with the Negro?," answering it with a call for black equality that included arguments against persisting assumptions about black inferiority. "The question," he maintained, "is not whether colored men will be likely to reach the presidential chair." After all, he added, a man "may live quite a tolerable life without ever breathing the air of Washington." But rather, the question was whether blacks would be accorded political, social, and economic equality. "The term, Negro," he announced in 1863, "is at this hour the most pregnant word in the English language. The destiny of the nation has the Negro for its pivot, and turns upon the question as to what shall be done with him." That question informed his speech about Lincoln's assassination, delivered in 1865, which was as much an attack on President Andrew Johnson for his refusal to grant rights to blacks as it was a eulogy for his friend. Covering one speech, theEagledefended its claim of black inferiority by asserting, "the abject submission of a race who are content to be enslaved when there is an opportunity to be free, gives the best evidence that they are fulfilling the destiny which Providence marked out for them." Proof that Douglass' speeches, responding to the historical exigencies of his time, amply bear rereading today.

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