{"id":55770,"date":"2018-02-20T03:42:54","date_gmt":"2018-02-20T03:42:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=55770"},"modified":"2018-02-20T03:42:54","modified_gmt":"2018-02-20T03:42:54","slug":"frederick-douglass-refugee","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=55770","title":{"rendered":"Frederick Douglass, Refugee"},"content":{"rendered":"

Frederick Douglass, Refugee<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The Atlantic<\/a>
\n2017-02-07<\/p>\n

David Blight<\/strong><\/a>, Class of 1954 Professor of American History; Professor of African-American and American Studies; Director, Gilder Lehrman Center
\nYale University<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a>
\n J.C. Buttre<\/a> \/ Wikimedia<\/small><\/p>\n

Throughout modern history, the millions forced to flee as refugees and beg for asylum have felt Douglass\u2019s<\/a> agony, and thought his thoughts.<\/em><\/p>\n

Frederick Douglass<\/a>, author, orator, editor, and most important African American leader of the 19th century, was a dangerous illegal immigrant. Well, in 1838 he escaped a thoroughly legal system of enslavement to the tenuous condition of fugitive resident of a northern state that had outlawed slavery, but could only protect his \u201cfreedom\u201d outside of the law.<\/p>\n

Douglass\u2019s life and work serve as a striking symbol of one of the first major refugee crises in our history. From the 1830s through the 1850s, the many thousands of runaway slaves, like Douglass, who escaped into the North, into Canada<\/a>, or Mexico<\/a> put enormous pressure on those places\u2019 political systems. The presence and contested status of fugitive slaves polarized voters in elections; they were the primary subject of major legislation such as the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850<\/a> as well as Supreme Court decisions such as Dred Scott v. Sanford<\/em><\/a> in 1857. They were at the heart of a politics of fear in the 1850s that led to disunion. Among the many legacies of Douglass\u2019s life and writings alive today, one of the most potent is his role as an illegal migrant and very public abolitionist orator and journalist posing as a free black citizen in slaveholding America.<\/p>\n

On February 1, 2017, President Donald J. Trump<\/a> made some brief remarks on Black History Month<\/a>. \u201cFrederick Douglass,\u201d he said, \u201cis an example of somebody who\u2019s done an amazing job, that is being recognized more and more, I notice.\u201d That afternoon in one of the discussion sections of my lecture course at Yale on \u201cThe Civil War and Reconstruction Era,\u201d my teaching fellow, Michael Hattem<\/a>, reports that he read that quotation to the class. Students had just been assigned to read Douglass\u2019s classic first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass<\/em><\/a>. Michael says the class let out an audible collective groan, and one student declared: \u201cMy God, he doesn\u2019t know who he was!\u201d<\/p>\n

…Born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, his father likely his owner and his mother, Harriet, likely the owner\u2019s slave, Douglass lived twenty years in bondage on Maryland\u2019s eastern shore<\/a> and in Baltimore<\/a>. At age 18 he organized an escape plot with a small \u201cband of brothers\u201d among the slaves on a farm near St. Michaels, Maryland<\/a>. Foiled and betrayed, he and his comrades were arrested, put in chains and marched several miles to the jail in Easton<\/a>, the Talbot County<\/a> seat. As great luck, Douglass\u2019s owner, Thomas Auld, sent his slave back to Baltimore rather than selling him into obscurity in the deep South<\/a>. Two years later, in a cunning and brave plot hatched with a few friends and with his intrepid fianc\u00e9e, Anna Murray, Douglass escaped from slavery by train, steamer<\/a>, and ferryboat to New York City<\/a>, disguised as a sailor. His story is one of great drama and risk in the face of what he called a sense of \u201chopelessness\u201d and \u201cloneliness.\u201d But in recollecting these events Douglass left the world an illegal refugee-immigrant\u2019s language of fear and courage. His greatest power always resided in the written and spoken word…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Throughout modern history, the millions forced to flee as refugees and beg for asylum have felt Douglass\u2019s agony, and thought his thoughts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1245,459,8,26,6940],"tags":[17251,17250,84,6001],"class_list":["post-55770","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-biography","category-history","category-media-archive","category-politics","category-slavery","tag-david-blight","tag-david-w-blight","tag-frederick-douglass","tag-the-atlantic"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55770","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=55770"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55770\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55771,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55770\/revisions\/55771"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=55770"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=55770"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=55770"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}