David Blight’s biography of Fredrick Douglass is a tough read. Some will probably want it to be banned, along with any of Douglass’s writings in states where the Confederacy is still revered and celebrated.
Why is it a tough read? It presents a crushing reality, unadorned with “whitewashed” justifications or significant omissions about what it was like to be enslaved in America.
Frederick Douglass grew up a slave. If he had not pushed himself, he would have been illiterate, chained to a plantation for the rest of his life.
His mother was treated by plantation owners in the same way they did their cattle. So, two things happened.
First, Douglass’s mother had many children by many different men. Her body was not her own. In fact, there was little distinction between her uterus and a cow’s. Both were owned by the slave owner.
Second, his mother was separated from him shortly after birth, and he was raised by a grandmother who was raising other children as well.
Douglass remembers his mother visiting from an adjacent farm owned by the same family. She would come at night, in the dark, and he would see her only in the warm glow of candlelight.
As I tread deeper into Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, I found that it contradicted several key points of “history” taught in many U.S. public schools (including mine) and in many church houses that supported the institution of slavery by preaching, teaching and doctrine (including my denomination).
First, Blight exposes the lie that enslavement was good for African Americans. It never was.
It is incredible that anyone would suggest it could be a positive experience to be kidnapped, separated from family, sent across an ocean, be sold in a market like livestock and become enslaved for life. Even those who came over as indentured servants expected an end to their service.
Human beings resist oppression and prize freedom. In fact, the British colonists in North America revolted for far less than that. They were not enslaved, but they thought oppressive taxation without representation and autocratic rule was enough to start a war to obtain their freedom.
Second, current efforts to control women’s uteri have parallels to the enslavement of Black women, where “owners” literally and physically controlled a woman’s body.
Such a troubling parallel bubbled up in my mind as I read about the experience of enslaved women. Frankly, I cannot fathom the invasive, oppressive indignity.
Third, Christian churches played a complicit part in justifying slavery and overlooking the brutality of the institution.
In fact, Baptist churches in the South split from their Northern brethren over this issue, creating the Southern Baptist Convention in 1845. Until the abolition movement, the church in America was steeped in slavery and financed by the labor of enslaved persons.
When one bores into the real history of slavery, slave owners who were churchgoers were often involved in adultery, cruelty and murder of their fellow human beings whom they enslaved and treated as less than human. And clergy were knee deep in it all.
That is why there is such a complicity of silence and a resistance to telling the full story among some in the U.S. There is so much cruelty, and so much blood, none of which was “redemptive,” on the hands of many of our ancestors. The American economy was built on the backs of the enslaved.
Fourth, looking at the history of political parties in America should be a sobering time of rethinking one’s confidence in either party.
Picking up before the Civil War, Democrats were the political party of the South and Republicans were the party of the North, moving slowly to become the protector of a fragmenting nation.
It was the Southern Democrats who supported enslavement, who fought to the death to maintain it and, after the Civil War, put in place a society where African Americans were to be controlled, marginalized and kept from power.
That is the opposite of today where Republicans are pushing the legacy of a Democratic South, wanting new Jim Crow legislation and to ban book that tell a different narrative of history than they prefer, and they are still in the business of oppressing marginalized groups in our society today.
So, what is needed today is the continued, tiring work of prophets who speak uncensored truth to power and to the voters who place people in places of power. We need prophetic witnesses who are not subservient to politicians or political parties but who are fiercely committed to calling for, and working to create, an equitable and just social order.
Frankly, we cannot let the prophetic voices in any generation be silenced because they don’t support a biased party line or some dubious set of “alternative facts.”
A private practice counselor working with veterans and survivors of trauma. Previously, Chancellor served four churches in Texas for 33 years, then ran a Mental Health Department of Alan B. Polunsky Maximum Security prison which houses death row.
