The Mind of Frederick Douglass

by Waldo E. Martin Jr.

Frederick Douglass was unquestionably the foremost black American of the nineteenth century. The extraordinary life of this former slave turned abolitionist orator, newspaper editor, social reformer, race leader, and Republican party advocate has inspired many biographies over the years. This, however, is the first full-scale study of the origins, contours, development, and significance of Douglass's thought.

Brilliant and to a large degree self-taught, Douglass personified intellectual activism; he possessed a sincere concern for the uses and consequences of ideas. Both his people's struggle for liberation and his individual experiences, which he envisioned as symbolizing that struggle, provided the basis and structure for his intellectual maturation. As a representative American, he internalized and, thus, reflected major currents in the contemporary American mind. As a representative Afro-American, he revealed in his thinking the deep-seated influence of race on Euro-American, Afro-American, or, broadly conceived, American consciousness. He sought to resolve in his thinking the dynamic tension between his identities as a black and as an American.

Martin assesses not only how Douglass dealt with this enduring conflict, but also the extent of his success. An inveterate belief in a universal and egalitarian humanism unified Douglass's thought. This grand organizing principle reflected his intellectual roots in the three major traditions of mid-nineteenth-century American thought: Protestant Christianity, the Enlightenment, and romanticism. Together, these influences buttressed his characteristic optimism.

Although nineteenth-century Afro-American intellectual history derivedits central premises and outlook from concurrent American intellectual history, it offered a searching critique of the latter and its ramifications. How to square America's rhetoric of freedom, equality, and justice with the reality of slavery and racial prejudice was the difficulty that confronted such Afro-American thinkers as Douglass.

Genres: Biography, American History

346 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Waldo E. Martin Jr. is professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley. His scholarly and teaching interests include modern American history and culture with an emphasis on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; his principal areas of research and writing are African American intellectual and cultural history. He is the author of "A Change is Gonna Come": Black Movement, Culture, and the Transformation of America 1945-1975 (forthcoming) and The Mind of Frederick Douglass (1985); he coedited, with Patricia Sullivan, The Encyclopedia of Civil Rights in the Untied States (forthcoming). Martin has published numerous articles and lectured widely on Frederick Douglass and on modern African American cultural and intellectual history.

~from http://www.bedfordstmartins.com/Catal...

Reviews

[Bernie Pitterman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent and Thought Provoking