Volume 32, Number 11 · June 27, 1985
Self-Made Hero
By George M. Fredrickson
Young Frederick Douglass: The Maryland Years
by Dickson J. Preston
Johns Hopkins University Press, 242 pp., $8.95 (paper)
The Mind of Frederick Douglass
by Waldo E. Martin Jr.
University of North Carolina Press, 333 pp., $27.50
Frederick Douglass was not only the most famous Afro-American of the nineteenth century; when he died in 1895 he was one of the best-known Americans of any race. A eulogist plausibly compared his international reputation to Lincoln's. No other black spokesman before Martin Luther King, Jr., was able to appeal to whites on behalf of racial justice and equality with so much force and effect. Part of his prestige and influence came from his skill with the written and spoken word; he was a great orator at a time when elocution was highly valued and a forceful writer whose three autobiographies (published in 1845, 1855, and 1881) rank with the best written by Americans. But it was more the substance than the style of his autobiographical writings that made him such a remarkable and intriguing figure. At a time when most whites viewed blacks as inherently inferior to themselves, he rose from the depths of slavery to such a height of Victorian eminence that he challenged this prevailing assumption in a dramatic fashion. Racists did, however, have a solution to the Douglass problem; they simply attributed his undeniable intelligence and character to his white father.
Review, 3153 words
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