Frederick Douglass (1818–1895)

I decided to read “The Narrative of Frederick Douglass after visiting Drayton Plantation in Charleston, S.C. I was most amazed by the resilience of the slaves, the strategies many used to survive such horror. Douglass must have been a genius, writing his narrative in 1845, 20 years before The Emancipation. His writing is eloquent. At times, I was moved to tears and had to put the book down. His words painted a real picture of what enslavement was like. Overall, the most important and show more valuable features of this book to me are: what I learned about the nature of slavery’s emotional abuse and psychological control of humans, treated as animals and, ultimately, the emotional strength and determination of slaves which allowed many to survive and make us into the people we are today. So inspirational in helping me understand where I came from and who I am. show less

Douglass writes scenes that feel like they're from a stage play. The characters speak in lengthy soliloquies. There is nothing real about the encounters between characters. Coincidence plays a high part in plot movement. In spite of all these qualities The Heroic Slave is a moving read. Douglass's dignity and outrage both combine to elevate the language to an eloquence that marks all his writing. But I could almost feel Douglass's growing frustration with the constraints of fiction as he show more wrote. Because by writing "fiction" he is by definition writing something "not true," his writing about the horrors of slavery sometimes grows more insistent and melodramatic. I believe he discovered even as he wrote this book that fiction a less useful means for him to expose to readers the truth about slavery, and The Heroic Slave remained his only fictional work. show less

This is a gloriously well-written memoir, but certainly not an easy one. Douglass’s narrative of his life as a slave includes accounts of humans being viciously flayed, sometimes for over 12hrs at a time; women being repeatedly raped to satiate lust and/or create new slaves; children starved, families deliberately separated, men murdered, and religion used as a justification for the worst imaginable atrocities. A world in which overseers viewed their reputation for cruelty as a competitive show more advantage, and in which even the most high-minded, virtuous masters were eventually corrupted into immorality by the collective operation of peer pressure, greed, and specious moral justifications. Hardest of all to stomach: accepting that every word of this horror show is actual, lived history.

As certain cultural forces seem intent on “whitewashing” our country’s racial history, feel like eyewitness accounts of our nation’s history serve a more critical purpose than ever before. In fact, I’d speculate that if we were to assign this short, accessible text to high school students (as we should), these are just a few of the positive outcomes we might anticipate:

• Student complaints about the high quality of prose being demanded of them by their English teachers would be forcibly moderated, as students were exposed to the astonishing level of literacy and rhetoric achieved by this self-taught, disenfranchised, enslaved son of immigrants.

• Students might cast a more skeptical eye on the motives of politicians and their fundraisers (“masters of business”) intent upon degrading the public education system - for, as Douglass notes: “If you teach [someone] how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master.” In other words, uneducated workers make more docile and manageable workers – and who stands to profit from that?

• Douglass’s horrific tales of atrocities that he personally experienced would profoundly discredit attempts by modern politicians to cast slavery as some sort of inconvenient memory rather than a moral atrocity; also ongoing attempts to cast slaveholders as “good men who were merely abiding by the norms of their times” – because, I’m sorry, but you simply don’t get to be called a good man if condone the rape, starvation, and torture of ANY living thing – certainly not a fellow human.

• Students might notice that while our country has certainly made enormous headways since the days of slavery, some of the iniquities that Douglass highlights this account – black workers being blackballed by white workers afraid of competition, the willingness of supposedly devout people and institutions to condone irreligious deeds – continue today. show less

Hakim Adi's selection of writings about Britain (mainly England) by Black people of the late 18th to the early 20th century is carefully chosen to establish their presence in all strata of society at a date earlier than certain commentators would wish it known. There's a thread showing the development of abolitionism into emancipation into supremacism to justify the continued exploitation of Black Labour, and Adi's selections often strongly resonate with current issues, such as the Windrush show more scandal and the illegal Tory Rwanda deportation policy.

There's also many fascinating glimpses into Georgian and Victorian society and, while varying degrees of racism are noted, many of the impressions of visitors to the island are positive about their reception and of the culture in which they find themselves.

A nuanced and balanced selection of historical testimonies which I thoroughly enjoyed reading, not least the short section on John Ocansey's day trip from Liverpool to my home town of Southport 🏖️ show less