What was the Civil War about? In a word, slavery. The driving force in American politics in the decades after the American Revolution was the rise of an arrogant, ruthless, parasitic oligarchy in the South, built on God-ordained economic inequality.
Deadly weather in 2005. KKK run out of town in 1923. FBI informers mess up in 1973. The telephone industry discovers women workers in 1878. TV news is ready for prime time in 1963. Frederick Douglass frees himself in 1838. Ethnic cleansing in 1838.
The problem wasn’t the vision of the country we remember on this day. The fault lay in the fact that some got left out. Douglass had the audacity to believe that America's story was not finished until the country kept all her promises.
Frederick Douglass gave this speech in Rochester, New York on July 5, 1852. Some now give this speech the title, "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?"
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Jelani Cobb, an executive producer of Lincoln's Dilemma, and historian Kellie Carter Jackson discuss Lincoln's legacy, his relationship with abolitionist Frederick Douglass, and how the series relates to today.
Douglass refused to cede the Constitution to the slaveholders. He insisted the Constitution did not sanction slavery, that natural law and the Constitution assured liberty, and political action would be necessary to destroy slavery and secure freedom
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Toward the end of his life, Frederick Douglass served briefly as U.S. ambassador to Haiti. The disastrous episode reveals much about the country’s long struggle for Black sovereignty while always under the threat of U.S. empire.
In an 1860 speech commemorating radical abolitionist John Brown's raid on Harper’s Ferry, Frederick Douglass argued that slavery would only end if the slave owner feared the violent retribution of the enslaved.
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