I was a writer in a world that didn’t believe Black people were really writers.” It was a world where a lot of famous and important philosophers had said that Africans and most of their descendants were people without language.īut he became, first and foremost, a kind of prose poet of American democracy a prose poet of what slavery had meant in America a prose poet of what the U.S. And then there are the thousands of speeches, which were hard to select because there are so many of them, and so many of them range from good to masterpieces.įor a long time I’ve believed that if Douglass were here today and some of us could ask him, “Sir, what are you most proud of in your life? What do you most want to be recalled for?”, I suspect he would say, “I was a writer. He also wrote 1,200 pages of autobiography. He wrote hundreds and hundreds of shorter-form editorials in his own newspaper and other places. But they may not know the scope and scale of this life, nor the scope and scale of this man as an orator and writer. It used to be that if Americans knew much about Frederick Douglass, they knew the young Douglass, the heroic story of his life as a slave and then his escape at age 20.

I want to start with a little background on Douglass, and perhaps a little bit about why we’re still here in the twenty-first century talking about him, writing about him, and indeed, reading him. The full program is available to watch on YouTube. In this condensed and edited transcript of his remarks, Blight shares insights on Douglass’s complexity as a political and literary figure, the influences of religion, war, and Reconstruction on his thinking, and the approach that informed the recent LOA edition of Douglass’s speeches and writings, edited by Blight. Blight joined Library of America for the LOA Live program “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom” to discuss the extraordinary life and legacy of the man who escaped slavery to become one of the nation’s greatest orators and writers. This February, distinguished historian David W. Miller/Art Institute of Chicago) Frederick Douglass: Speeches & Writings Blight on Frederick Douglass, “prose poet of American democracy” David W.

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