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ISBN-13:
978-1848891968

Author:
Laurence Fenton

Publisher:
The Collins Press

Guideline Price:
€12.99

Frederick Douglass was an escaped slave forced to flee the US in 1845, aboard the paddlesteamer Cambria out of Boston, when his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of an American Slave, was published. He went on to become the most prominent African-American of the 19th century, being called "the most impressive man I ever met" by Abraham Lincoln.

He landed in Ireland in August 1845, campaigning for action against the slavery laws of the United States on behalf of the American abolitionist movement. "I have spent some of the happiest days of my life since landing in this country," he wrote to William Garrison, one of the founders of the American Anti-Slavery Society.

The first signs of potato blight became evident soon after he arrived. It was a catastrophe that over the next two years would kill a million and send millions more into penniless exile.

By the time Douglass reached Limerick, in November 1845, the Limerick Reporter was writing: "The rot of the potato continues to so engross the public mind that scarcely any other topic is discussed."

Douglass was appalled by the numbers of beggars on the streets of Dublin; he likened the situation of the Irish poor to that of the American slave. "I am not only an American slave, but a man, and am bound to use my powers for the welfare of the whole human brotherhood," he wrote to Garrison as he struggled to stick to his single-issue mission. "I am not going through this land with my eyes shut, ears stopped, or heart steeled".

Douglass was invited to speak on a platform with Daniel O'Connell in Conciliation Hall, the Repeal Association's headquarters on Burgh Quay in Dublin. It now houses the Garda National Immigration Bureau, where asylum seekers are processed and deportees assembled. Douglass, who arrived in Ireland on false papers, was invited to dine with the lord mayor. It's a lot better than the reception asylum seekers receive nowadays at the hands of Ireland's refugee laws and direct-provision system, which leaves families in limbo for years, to live in one room, on €19 a week.

Born on a plantation
Laurence Fenton gives us Douglass's background - born and reared on a slave plantation in Maryland - synopsised neatly from Douglass's celebrated narrative. Douglass once met two Irishmen on the wharf in Baltimore. They encouraged him to escape to Pennsylvania. Douglass, knowing that white men sometimes lured slaves to try to escape, so they could claim the recapture bounty, feigned ignorance, but he remembered the two Irishmen, and credited them with triggering his ambition to break for freedom, which he accomplished in 1838.

Fenton gives us a fascinating insight into the strains of emphasis within the abolitionist movement, in Ireland and in the US. Douglass was somewhat at odds with Garrison. They held each other in the highest regard, but Douglass was so moved by the poverty he saw on the streets of Dublin, and in Ireland generally, that he felt he must speak out against the causes of human suffering generally, even if it was not directly pertinent to US slavery.

The Quakers of Ireland were the mainstay of the anti-slavery movement in Ireland, with support from the footsoldiers of O'Connell's Repeal Association. Richard Webb, Richard Allen and James Haughton were inveterate campaigners and helpful hosts, and Webb published Douglass's memoir. But there were strains, too. Douglass's travelling companion, James Buffum, left for Britain after a dispute. Douglass also fell out with Webb, who wrote disparagingly of him to other abolitionists.

Douglass was recognised as one of the great orators of his day. He had taught himself to read, and always carried a well-thumbed copy of The Columbian Orator, a popular collection of speeches. Newspaper reports of his speeches in Dublin, Wexford, Waterford, Cork, Limerick, Belfast and elsewhere are littered with phrases such as "prolonged applause" and "approving interruptions". Women played an active role in organising his speaking engagements, the Quakers Susanna Fisher and Isabel Jennings developing close relationships with him during his stay in Ireland.

Strains of campaigning
Anyone who has campaigned on social justice or human-rights issues will recognise in this book the strains inherent in any broad-based movement such as that against slavery. Douglass had to pick his way through a thicket. He was under direction not to associate too openly with O'Connell and his movement to repeal the Act of Union, as this would alienate unionist support of abolition. He had to be careful not to exacerbate strain between Protestant and Catholic abolitionists in Ireland. He criticised US Methodists, many prominent members of the church being influential slaveholders, as a result of which he was sometimes barred from Irish Methodist halls.

While in Cork, Douglass took the total abstinence pledge from the campaigning priest Fr Theobald Mathew. Douglass was a teetotaller anyway, having hated the occasional drink-sodden holidays allowed to plantation slaves - a strategy slaveholders used to quell discontent. Fr Mathew, however, later incurred the disdain of the entire anti-slavery movement by ingratiating himself with southern slaveholders on his tour of the US, not only refusing to condemn the slave system but also saying that nothing in the Bible prohibited it.

President Obama
Douglass's friendship with Daniel O'Connell has become relatively well known in the past few years, mainly because of President Obama's speech on College Green during his visit to Ireland in 2011. What is less well known, and is treated in detail here, is O'Connell's steadfast opposition to the system of US slavery. He was consistent in spite of virulent opposition from his main funding source, the cash-laden repeal movement in the US, and he rejected overtures of support for repeal in the House of Commons if he would desist from his opposition to slavery. This is in stark contrast to some of his supposedly more radical opponents in the Young Irelanders. John Mitchel, for example, wanted to own a slave plantation in Alabama "well stocked with healthy Negroes".

Fenton's style is informative and refreshingly unfussy. He charts the nuances of the anti-slavery movement clearly, and the added complication of spreading the message in Famine-hit Ireland. Douglass's transformative sojourn in Ireland has been dealt with in two novels, Richard Bradbury's Riversmeet, from 2005, and Colum McCann's TransAtlantic, from last year. In this important addition to the mounting store of study on Douglass and Ireland, Fenton's factual account is both rigorously researched and fluidly written, deftly juggling chronological sequence and narrative threads. It's a fascinating read, with sharp lessons for anyone campaigning on issues of social justice and human rights today.

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Sharp lessons for contemporary campaigners: Frederick Douglass in Ireland by Laurence Fenton

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ISBN-13: 978-1848891968 Author: Laurence Fenton Publisher: The Collins Press Guideline Price: €12.99 Frederick Douglass was an escaped slave forced to flee the US in 1845, aboard the paddlesteamer Cambria out of Boston, when his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of an American Slave, was published.

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Disgracing His Racial Ancestors

by Peter Heck

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The ex-slave abolitionist icon Frederick Douglass once proclaimed , "Where justice is denied...where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe."

What a sick irony to realize that the first man sharing Douglass' race to occupy the Oval Office embodies the very dark spirit of oppression that generations of black Americans suffered to overcome, and that if left unchallenged, threatens the lives and liberties of all men.

For in our day, the same shroud of ignorance that once deceived corrupt minds into believing that one race of humans could be denied their natural rights and treated as the legal property of masters prevails again.It exists in the crooked and depraved notion that tiny humans can be denied their natural rights and treated as the legal property of their mothers.And as Douglass rightly cautioned, if our leaders can arbitrarily declare that one group of humans are not worthy of their inalienable rights today, they can declare another group is unworthy tomorrow.

Appallingly, this slavish mindset is not only accepted by 's first black president, it is celebrated.On the 38th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision that overturned precedent in all fifty states and ushered in a return of the plantation owners' ideology, Barack Obama took the time to honor its legacy

And as his lips dripped with the euphemistic language of reproductive rights and fundamental liberties, he could no more hide the heinous butchery of abortion than his southern progenitors could hide their abusive bull whips by speaking of states' rights and nullification.

For as Obama reiterated his unwavering devotion to defending a supposed right to kill life in the womb - a choice that has resulted in the wholesale slaughter of nearly 50 million American babies - he incredibly called upon us all to, "recommit ourselves more broadly to ensuring that our daughters have the same rights, the same freedoms, and the same opportunities as our sons to fulfill their dreams."

It speaks to the unearthly coldness of Mr. Obama's soul that those words could escape his tongue without the cries of approximately 25 million of "our daughters" overwhelming his conscience, demanding to know why their rights, freedoms and dreams could be legally sacrificed for the convenience of another.

Only a man bereft of moral conscience could make such a proclamation and not be spiritually consumed by the blood of nearly 25 million of "our sons" pouring out from the ground they never had the opportunity to tread.

Only a man terrifyingly unmoved by the injustices perpetrated against his own ancestors could, just a century and a half later, facilitate even worse atrocities without a hint of remorse.

Intellectual honesty demands that we face a harsh and uncomfortable reality: Barack Obama - our first black president - has chosen to take up the whip against his fellow man.By doing so, he carves out an eternal legacy for himself far removed from the dignified halls of honor reserved for those with the moral courage to defend the defenseless.By instead regarding them as subhuman, Obama wars against the life work of Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman and Abraham Lincoln.

Imagine how history would regard had he chosen to respond to the great moral evil of his day as Barack Obama has chosen to respond to the holocaust of child sacrifice that has occurred with impunity since 1973.Imagine proclaiming that determining whether blacks were entitled to human rights was, " above his pay grade ."Imagine pledging to " protect this constitutional right " of slavery, while calling the brutality of plantation masters a, " legitimate disciplinary procedure ."

How would history have judged such a small man if not for the same way it will soon regard Mr. Obama: an utter coward.When given the incredible opportunity to stand on the shoulders of the Great Emancipator - an opportunity generations of slaves labored to make possible - Barack Obama chose not to use it to defend the inalienable rights of all, but to undermine them.

In the final analysis, such an incomprehensible betrayal of human rights for the sake of convenience and political expediency far outweighs any contributions his electoral success has brought to "black ."For what Douglass, Tubman, Truth and so many other courageous black abolitionists fought for was not the day when they would see a man with dark skin pigmentation sitting in the White House.They fought for the day when all men - black and white, large and small - would see their inalienable rights protected from those who would callously demean them as less than human.

Obama has failed miserably in living up to their vision, and shamefully discredits their efforts.As he commits himself to what Douglass called the denial of justice, the perpetuation of ignorance, and the organized conspiracy to degrade his fellow countrymen, it can rightly be concluded that Barack Obama disgraces his office, his ancestors, and his place in the eternal struggle for the rights of man.

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Peter Heck - columns - Disgracing His Racial Ancestors

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The ex-slave abolitionist icon Frederick Douglass once proclaimed , "Where justice is denied...where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe."

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China's Dominance: LETTERS [Scot Region]

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China's Dominance: LETTERS [Scot Region]

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Dems Hijack GOP's Frederick Douglass Party to Stump for D.C. Statehood

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Dems Hijack GOP's Frederick Douglass Party to Stump for D.C. Statehood

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From: The Atlantic

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House Speaker John Boehner's office built an elaborate website devoted to the statue ceremony, and the speaker himself appeared slightly verklempt during his introductory remarks dedicating the statue of "one of the greatest Americans who ever lived."

But the vice president, Senate majority leader, and House minority leader all spoke on behalf of D.C.'s legislative autonomy and statehood during the ceremony in the Capitol Visitor Center's Emancipation Hall, taking the conversation in a direction less welcome to Republicans, who have opposed D.C. statehood.

"Over a century ago, Douglass asked a good question. He said, what have the people of the District done that they should be excluded from the privileges of the ballot box?" Vice President Biden observed. "Many District representatives and residents, like Representative [Eleanor Holmes] Norton, can trace their families back to former slaves, who entered this District seeking freedom and helped build the city."

"We agree with -- the president and I -- with Senator Norton -- with Representative Norton and Frederick Douglass and support home rule, budget autonomy, and the vote for the people of the District of Columbia."

Harry Reid took things a step further than Biden and reiterated his long-standing call for D.C. statehood. "It is right and fitting that Frederick Douglass -- this extraordinary man, this unflinching voice for freedom, this unyielding advocate for justice -- should be honored with an enduring monument. And it is just and proper that more than 600,000 American citizens who reside in the District of Columbia should finally have a statue representing them here in the United States Capitol," he said.

"Washington, D.C., residents pay taxes, just like residents of Nevada, California, or any other state. Washington, D.C., residents have fought and died in every American war, just like residents of Ohio, Kentucky, or any other state. And Washington, D.C., residents deserve the same right to self-government and Congressional representation as residents of any other state.

"The District deserves statehood. And Congress should act to grant it."

It seemed a fitting tribute to a man who spent his life as an advocate for freedom and voting rights.

Douglass's is the fourth bust or statue of an African American in the Capitol. Martin Luther King's visage arrived in 1986, but was not followed by Sojourner Truth until 2009. A statue of Rosa Parks arrived earlier this year.

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Dems Hijack GOP's Frederick Douglass Party to Stump for D.C. Statehood

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House Speaker John Boehner's office built an elaborate website devoted to the statue ceremony, and the speaker himself appeared slightly verklempt during his introductory remarks dedicating the statue of "one of the greatest Americans who ever lived."

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Mugging Frederick Douglass

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From LA Sentinel

Click "view original" to read article

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Frederick Douglass published his autobiography 170 years ago this year. When it appeared in 1845 it instantly became a blockbuster and a central text of the abolitionist cause. It also made Douglass perhaps the best known African American in the country.

The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass describes the grinding, awful realities of slavery from the point of view of the slave. As he tells his own story, in his own voice, he also takes great pains to expose and discredit every possible rationale used to defend the "peculiar institution." It is both a deeply personal statement and a sweeping social analysis.

In Chapter 8, Douglass describes being put up for sale at a slave auction. "We were all ranked together at the valuation," he writes, "Men and women, young and old, married and single, were ranked with the horses, sheep, and swine." Here is what it means to be a slave and sold like any other commodity. But Douglass finishes this paragraph is an unexpected direction: "At that moment, I saw more clearly than ever the brutalizing effects of slavery upon both slave and slaveholder."

When I have taught the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass over the years, I have paused to consider that sentence. Why, I ask students, in a book describing the horrors of slavery would Douglass suggest that it brutalizes slave-owners too? Was he merely trying to broaden the appeal of the book to his largely white readers? Or was he expressing a more profound truth about the corrupting nature of power?

The Narrative is filled with examples of this corruption, of violence done to slaves in a dozen different ways. And yet Douglass is asking us to remember that as physically and psychologically scarring as that violence is to slaves, it also ruins the souls of those who perpetrate it -- turning them, literally, into brutes. Absolute power, after all, corrupts absolutely.

Slavery ended in the United States 20 years after Douglass published the Narrative and 150 years ago this year. But arguably the system of white supremacy in the American south expanded after emancipation with the imposition of Jim Crow segregation. Jim Crow was both a legal system and an unwritten code of conduct which perpetuated white dominance over black Americans well into the 20th century. Fewer than 50 percent of Southerners owned slaves, after all, but in the years after Emancipation all white Southerners could enjoy the economic, social and other advantages that came with Jim Crow.

That power truncated and diminished countless black lives without question, and that legacy continues to play out today. But it also corrupted white Southerners too and not that long ago. Southern baby-boomers grew up in a segregated society where any white person could exercise arbitrary authority -- legal or otherwise -- over any black person and not worry about consequences.

Racism is surely not an exclusively Southern problem, but the legacy of "brutalization," in the sense Frederick Douglass described, is. What happens to a person whose daily life is built on a foundation of racial hatred and the exercise of a panoply of petty sadisms? Think of that iconic photograph of the integration of Little Rock Central High. The quiet dignity of that young black woman and the white teen shrieking in hatred just behind her. Or of that gruesome image of a Southern lynching where a young girl smiles up at the body hanging from a tree.

True, not all Southerners supported slavery or the racial segregation that followed it, but like the French during World War II very few of them actually joined the resistance. They certainly kept electing politicians, at all levels, who vowed to perpetuate white supremacy -- now and forever, in George Wallace's memorable words.

Perhaps Frederick Douglass helps us understand why Southern politics has been and remains so angry and cruel. Southerners controlled Congress during the New Deal and circumscribed those programs lest they benefit black Americans. Their successors fought bitterly against the expansion of civil rights and voting rights in the 1960s. And their successors have mounted a massive resistance to Obamacare, never mind the human suffering that obstruction perpetuates. Perhaps a culture in which the capricious exercise of arbitrary power by one group over another is still a living memory makes people fundamentally callous.

Nearly 170 years after Frederick Douglass published his autobiography, Ta-Nehisi Coates, who shares with Douglass roots in Baltimore, has published his own which promises to join Douglass' as an expression of what it is like to be black in these United States. As we read this indispensable book, it is worth remembering what Douglass taught us: Racial injustice, rooted in the very bones of the nation, has poisoned us all.
Steven Conn is the W. E. Smith Professor of History at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.

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Frederick Douglass and Southern Politics

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Frederick Douglass published his autobiography 170 years ago this year. When it appeared in 1845 it instantly became a blockbuster and a central text of the abolitionist cause. It also made Douglass perhaps the best known African American in the country.

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