13 August 2010 Richie's Picks: FREDERICK DOUGLASS: A NOBLE LIFE by David A. Adler, Holiday House, June 2010, 144p., ISBN: 978-0-8234-2056-8

"We can change the world,

Rearrange the world

It's dying to get better."

-- Graham Nash 

"On New Year's Day 1863, Frederick Douglass was in Boston.  He and more than three thousand others, mostly African Americans, had crowded into Tremont Temple, a Baptist church sometimes used for public events.  They were excited, anxiously waiting news from Washington.  Close to midnight, someone rushed from the telegraph office with a message.  The long-awaited Emancipation Proclamation had become law."

To internalize the eighty-six pages of FREDERICK DOUGLASS: A NOBLE LIFE that precede this particular passage is to understand what the Emancipation Proclamation becoming law really meant.  Reading these pages that so graphically detail the nightmarish, sometimes lethal brutality to which Frederick Douglass and countless other slaves were subjected daily, makes all the difference in our ability to really grasp the true effect of that particular moment in history upon millions of American lives.  In fact, I have to think that the impact of the Proclamation upon America far exceeded the import of Pearl Harbor or walking on the moon or 9/11.  With the enactment of the Proclamation's provisions the lives of slaves were changed far more than were the lives of free whites when the Declaration of Independence was signed on the fourth of July in 1776. 

The Fourth of July was, in fact, a topic which Douglass (in the years after he escaped from bondage in the South) would sometimes address when delivering lectures to white, northern audiences -- such as on July 5, 1852 when he said: 

"'Oppression makes a wise man mad.  Your fathers were wise men,' he said.  'They felt themselves the victims of grievous wrongs.'  Referring to the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution he said, 'The  freedom gained is yours, and you, therefore, may properly celebrate this anniversary.

'"Then came the fireworks.  He asked and answered the question of the day.

"'What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?  I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all the other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.  To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy -- a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.'  One can easily imagine the tall, powerful Douglass's voice rising as he read  the next line.  'There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.'"

"There's a river running sweat right through our land

Driven by a man with a bullwhip in his hand

And I've taken just as much as I can stand

Oh we've got to free our brothers from their shackles if we can

-- Elton John/Bernie Taupin, "Slave"

Having being raised a slave who learned to read and write, Frederick Douglass escaped to became one of the most articulate and significant Americans of the nineteenth century.  David Adler repeatedly quotes from the wealth of words spoken publicly and written by Douglass over the course of his lifetime.  The author also presents relevant, parallel highlights of American history so that readers can better understand the political and social climate in which Douglass was living -- as a slave, as an escaped slave, and as a free man.  

And what was Frederick Douglass's primary focus after that New Year's of rejoicing in Boston?  He fought for the right to vote, so that everyone would have a voice in America.  In his mind, (and as an attendee of the 1848 American women's rights conference in Seneca Falls, New York), this right should have also extended to women.

As a writer and sometimes-activist with never-ending hopes of doing a little something to change the world, I found FREDERICK DOUGLASS: A NOBLE LIFE to be an inspiring read about an inspiring American hero who made history and did change the world. 

Richie Partington, MLIS
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