'Frederick Douglass in Five Speeches': A conversation with David Blight and Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Good afternoon. I'm Abby Wolfe, the Executive Director of the Hutchins Center, and it's a pleasure to welcome you here this afternoon for a conversation between two giants, David W. Blight and Henry Louis Gates Jr., who have collaborated on the film that we are about to hear about, *Frederick Douglass in Five Speeches*.

David W. Blight is Sterling Professor of History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at the MacMillan Center at Yale University. At Yale, he is currently directing the Yale and Slavery Research Project. He is the author or editor of a dozen books, including *American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era*, *Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory*, and annotated editions of Douglass's first two autobiographies. He has, in fact, worked on Frederick Douglass for much of his professional life and has been awarded the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize, among others. And one of those others was the Pulitzer Prize for History in 2019 for his biography of Douglass, *Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom*. He writes frequently for the popular press, including *The Atlantic*, *The New York Times*, and many other journals. Blight has always been a teacher. First, at the beginning of his career, he spent seven years as a high school teacher in his hometown of Flint, Michigan, which set him on his way to his storied career as a historian.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University, where he is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Emmy and Peabody Award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, journalist, cultural critic, and institutional builder, and my boss as well. Professor Gates's most recent books are two co-edited volumes, *You Don't Know Us, Negroes*, and *Other Essays*, a volume of some unpublished and some previously published essays by Zora Neale Hurston, and *Who's Black and Why: A Hidden Chapter from the 18th Century Invention of Race*. *Finding Your Roots*, his groundbreaking genealogy and genetics series, is now in its eighth season on PBS. He has also produced and hosted more than 20 documentary films, most recently *Frederick Douglass in Five Speeches* for HBO.

The springboard for the discussion today, we appreciate the co-sponsorship of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University for this conversation today. And we welcome all of you in the audience. And please do mark your calendars for 9:00 PM on February 23rd, which is also Du Bois's birthday, when the film will debut on HBO. When you have a question, please write it in the Q&A tab at the bottom of your screen, and please keep your questions brief so that we can get to as many as we can this afternoon.

Now, please join me in welcoming David W. Blight and Henry Louis Gates Jr. in conversation.

Thank you so much. Thank you, Dr. Abby Wolfe, for that marvelous introduction. Um, Abby made one error, ladies and gentlemen. She does not work for me. I work for Dr. Abby Wolfe. I always forget that somehow. Yeah.

Frederick Douglass is one of those names that now most people know, or you think we know. Schools and streets are named after him. Images of his face are on murals across the country. We now know, through the work of John Stauffer and other scholars, that Frederick Douglass is probably the most photographed American in the 19th century. Douglass's writing is taught both in history classes and in English classes. But we've never been able to hear him speak, because none of his speeches—David, I still think that somewhere we're going to find one recording, but so far, ladies and gentlemen, none of his speeches that we know was ever recorded. He died in 1895, a year after being mesmerized by his first encounter with the phonograph.

Our film was very much a joint production between David and me, our first of two films that we plan to do on Frederick Douglass. Another, the second one, will be long-form for PBS. Our film traces the life of Douglass and the history of 19th-century race relations in America through five of his canonical speeches, performed by five of the most talented Black men and women working in the field of acting today. And so, I thought it would be interesting, David, if you wouldn't mind, if we walked our audience through the five speeches in chronological order. Does that sound good?

Sure. Sure. Great.

The first is, and I'll give a little sample of each of them. The first is "I Have Come to Tell You Something About Slavery," 1841, performed by Denzel Whitaker.

"When I came north, I was astonished to find that the abolitionists knew so much about it, that they were acquainted with its deadly effects, as well as if they had lived in its midst. But although they can give you its history, though they can depict its horrors, they cannot speak as I can from experience. They cannot refer you to a back covered with scars, as I can, for I have felt these wounds. I have suffered under the lash without the power of resisting. Yes, my blood has sprung out as the lash embedded itself into my flesh, and yet my master has the reputation of being a pious man and a good Christian." — Frederick Douglass, 1841.

Tell us a little bit about this speech and why it made your shortlist of the canonical.

Well, first, the first fact worth knowing about this speech is our man was only 23 years old. Incredible. He's three years out of slavery. It's the fall of 1841. It's just a month or so after he's given that first, well, so-called first speech to a white abolitionist audience out on Nantucket. This is this speech, as the title implies, "I Have Come to Tell You About Slavery." It's Douglass telling some of his stories that he will later make famous in his narrative. It's Douglass relating some of these experiences he had as a slave child, a slave teenager, and so on. He doesn't quite hit all the notes in this early—this is a short speech, but it's the first record, it's the first text of a speech that we have from him. And there's the beginning also of at least there's a hint of what became his favorite subject in those first few years out on the circuit, which was religious hypocrisy. You know, it became eventually known as the slaveholder sermon, where he would mimic the southern slaveholder and so on, the piety of the southern slaveholder. That was his favorite subject. He loved that story of the hypocrisy of, well, Thomas Auld, his own, his own master's owner, but also the preachers. There's a flavor of that here too. And that is going to be for the next three years his staple speech. Although he talked about a lot of other things, he would even go out at times. By 1843-44, audiences were already kind of prepared for him. He'd be talking on some resolution at an abolitionist gathering, and somebody in the audience said, "Hey, Fred, do the sermon." You know? Yeah. Okay. And sometimes he'd actually grab a Bible, you know, and he'd prance around the stage. He'd go into a full, complete southern drawl, and you would mimic, and sometimes you'd use that language from the Bible: "Slaves, be loyal to your masters," and so on. He was a performer. And his performances in these early years are represented in this speech because this is where he is essentially just telling the stories of his experience. And as you know so well, because you started your career in part writing about the narrative, he sat down and ate the winter of 1844-45 and basically started writing up these experiences, writing up these stories he'd been telling out there for almost four years on the circuit. This is the first speech we have where we see him doing that. What he did in the narrative is he kind of—I envision him sitting there at his little desk up in Lynn, and he begins to just write transitions, you know, between all these stories he's been telling for three and four years, put it together in a story. By then, he was a real writer. Early on here, he's not the writer yet. That takes time. That doesn't matter, right? Tell us a little bit about what—one of the most fascinating things about your biography of Douglass is that, which, ladies and gentlemen, I've read twice. And I read a version that nobody will ever read because David would send me chapters on a Sunday morning. It was my ritual. But I couldn't believe you read them as fast as you did. I still can't. I mean, I would read them, I would put red lines, and I would say, "Tell the truth about it. Make him complex. Yeah. Don't do a hagiography." Hanging out, right? Right. You know, I'd say, "He's more human by being flawed." And we would have these arguments about his personal life, among other things. And it was great. It was one of—it was like going to graduate school for me. And it was a sign of trust and affection and esteem, too, and I really appreciated it. It was a great, great—

Your readings were the most thorough readings that manuscript ever got.

Well, so well. I wish I could take credit for it, but I can't. Mend you or you in any draft you would want all those prizes because and you richly deserve them. But one of the fascinating things of many about your biography is that you talk about the Douglass in preparation, you know, the Douglass between 1831—eight, I'm sorry, the Douglass between 1838 when he free—flees, and the Douglass who is on Nantucket in August of—tell us a little bit about that Douglass, about how Douglass learned to speak, and what venues he learned to speak.

Well, it goes right back to Baltimore and to the Eastern Shore of Maryland. It's worth everybody remembering. He was 20 years a slave. Ten, 11 of those years he spent out on the Eastern Shore, where he became everything a rural farm slave could be, including fieldhand. But the nine of those years he spent in Baltimore, where he encountered, well, he attends four different churches, two pastored by white ministers, two pastored by Black ministers. He encounters this amazing book called *The Columbian Orator*, which he gets his own—he sees his little white playmates, friends, with their schoolbooks. This *Columbian Orator*. He wants a copy of his own. By the time he's 11, he manages to buy his own or barters, actually. He buys it at a little bookstore. And that book, among other things, was a huge collection by Caleb Bingham of all these orations, both from classical times, you know, from Demosthenes to Ben Franklin. But it happened—I happen to own, you know, your edition of—

Well, yeah, I put it back in print at its 200th anniversary. I got an original edition up here. It's an amazing book. I mean, it was—and it had an anti-slavery sort of tone to it, at least parts of it. But most importantly, I think, was the 20-page introduction because it was a manual of oratory. It has everything from how to modulate your voice to what to do with your hands and your arms and your shoulders. And then it has this—the big point it makes is that a true orator has to have a message, and it has to reach the hearts of his listeners. You read that introduction to *The Columbian Orator*, and you realize this kid is reading this when he's 12, again when he's 15, again when he's 20, probably reading it again when he's 21 and 22. And you think, uh-huh, he's, you know, we always say he's self-taught. Didn't go to school and so on and so forth. Well, books, the few he had, were part of his education. Then, of course, he's learning, he's learning a good deal about homiletics from these preachers he's watching. And as you know, Skip, he encounters his old Black preacher in Baltimore named Lawson. Charles Lawson. He's a real person. We've located him. A kind of a storefront preacher who drove a—he was a drayman, drove a cart during the day. When he finds this kid who's about 13, 12, 13, 14, who can read so well, he sits him down, and especially on Sundays, Douglass tells us they would read the Bible out loud, or Douglass would read the Bible out loud, over and over and over again. And I've always felt that's where he got other sources for this, but that's where Douglass's sense of language really comes from. It's King James cadence that he first started reading out loud and listening to himself recite. And then when he's 16 and 17, turns 17, he's on the Freeland farm there for most of a year, nine months, and he develops what he calls his "band of brothers." They were anywhere from a dozen to, he says, 30 guys on Sundays, slaves who would go out in a brush arbor. And Douglass says he was the only one among them who was literate. He probably was. And he would lead them out of the Bible and out of *The Columbian Orator*. He commanded. He'd get up and start preaching, you know. And, and, and frankly, it's what I say in the book, that's where Douglass realized that this was a form of power. He could—he could wield language as a form of power, power over his buddies, power over his friends, and maybe someday, maybe power over something a bit larger. And quite frankly, for really most of the rest of his life, the only real power he ever had, the only real weapon he ever had, was the word, and he became a master at it. That's something that isn't, you know, he doesn't walk out of slavery a perfectly formed orator, certainly not a perfectly formed writer at all. That takes time. But he had practiced and practiced. And even in New Bedford, to bring us right up to that point, one of the first things he does when he gets to New Bedford is he goes and joins the little African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, and they had him preaching within the first year. This 21-year-old kid. They found out the kid could preach. And he, he formal—and he is actually formally ordained, which just meant the elders said, "Boy, you preach," and he did. And he learned to preach to the text each Sunday. That's where he honed his homiletics. And that's kind of where he's first discovered by the Garrisonians, although he also gave a couple of other talks along the way to anti-slavery meetings in New Bedford. But so by the time he's 23 and out on Nantucket and then giving this first speech we use here, he's been practicing this stuff for years and, in a sense, looking for audiences.

Yeah. You tell us that the first publicly recorded instance, and I'm quoting you, Douglass speaking at an anti-slavery meeting was in New Bedford two years before Nantucket, two full years before, on March 12, 1839. And of course, Nantucket was August 12, 1841. Um, but you dropped something, now, I'm sure it's a surprise to many people who haven't read your book yet. You all can't leave the zoo until you buy it. You got to order David's book, and we'll be monitoring this. But you just said that he was ordained. Tell us about that.

Well, to be, in effect, ordained in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, this was the Episcopal Zion Church. It was really just an act done by the congregation, by the elders. He didn't go to theology school, didn't go to divinity school. It was kind of a decision of the elders: "He shall preach." And in effect, it made him a recognized minister. Now, we don't always think of Douglass that way, but as soon as you start reading Douglass, you will think of him that way. I mean, as our good friend Bob O'Meally once wrote about the narrative, "The text was meant to be preached." As immediately said in an article way back when. I always loved that title because it's true. Douglass's orations or preachings, and the narrative. I always tell my undergraduates, Skip, I don't know if you do, but you know, get a group of three or four of you together and read the narrative out loud. And if any of you are theater majors, perform it. If it has a—so no doubt, you know, way back when, you know, the juxtapositions, the binaries, and the repetition, the repetition, the repetition. He'd already learned how to do that. And pretty soon, it became second nature. But why did he represent himself as, um, springing full-blown from the mind of Zeus, you know, on Nantucket? You know, he's the hero of the narrative. He's the hero.

I think he's like a lot of young, whatever, performers, artists, teachers. You know, you are nervous, but you want that. He wanted that lectern. But he didn't—but he didn't write about it. He didn't write about those preparatory years. You unearth them, but he doesn't tell us about the role of the AME Zion Church. And I'm fascinated. So why, why did he want to seem, um, not exactly self-created, but midwifed by the Garrisonians on Nantucket Island rather than by the Black church? That's very curious to me.

It is. Well, when he's writing the narrative, let's remember, you know, this, that he is a Garrisonian writing it under the auspices of the Garrisonians. William Lloyd Garrison's printing office is printing it for him. Garrison and Wendell Phillips are writing their prefaces on the book. And he's still basically a, as a strategist, he pretty much is a Garrisonian, which means a moral suasionist, anti-politics, anti-party, et cetera. So there's a Garrisonian flavor all over the first narrative. Not so in *Bondage* and *Freedom*. Now, your favorite, ladies and gentlemen, David and I have had a long argument about which is the greater of the two texts. I say *Bondage*. I say *Bondage and Freedom* is his long-form masterpiece. It's not as widely read because it's so much longer.

No way. You're a writer. Talk about this over dinner. All right.

Canonical Douglass speech number two: "The Anti-Slavery Cause," performed by Jonathan Majors. Here's an excerpt.

"May 11, 1847. Now, in such a country as this, I cannot have patriotism. The only thing that links me to this land is my family and the painful consciousness that here there are three million of my fellow creatures groaning beneath the iron rod of the worst despotism that could be devised, even in Pandemonium."

Douglass went to England in 1845 after the publication of his narrative, which was a runaway bestseller. England, of course, was a transformational—England, of course, was a transformational experience. Being outside the United States gave him a new perspective. Certainly, he could see himself through other eyes. Things that he would have ascribed to race, all of a sudden, he started seeing his class. He's not suffering American white supremacy and American racism, anti-Black racism, in the same way. Things are different in England, and he grows. It's a pivotal point in his own maturation. He's still a young man. So being outside the States gave him a fresh perspective. And he returned home after a year and a half, and at least publicly, in his speeches, he enunciates anger. He gives the speeches of the young, restless, angry man. And this period marks his break from the Garrisonians. When Douglass decided to start his own newspaper, the most audacious thing he could have done to break from his father figure, his mentor, was *The North Star* newspaper in Rochester, New York. Jonathan Majors delivers the speech that Douglass gave at the Anti-Slavery Society of Manhattan, spring of 1847. Jonathan's performance, intense, forceful, seething with anger. Douglass is denouncing his country, saying, "I have no love for America." And in the speech, he contrasts his treatment in England and America, saying that in Europe, he was treated like a man for the first time, like a human being.

David?

Yeah. Well, that backdrop has everything to do with the nature of this speech. He's just spent 18-plus months in Ireland, Scotland, and England. He has encountered some racism. He encountered some minstrelsy, which he hated. But by and large, he has been treated like a human being, an equal human being. He made many good friends in Ireland, Scotland, and England. He arrived in Scotland in the midst of one of their ecclesiastical wars, and he became a folk hero. They wrote poems and songs about him in Scotland, for God's sake. And, you know, he and he comes back into the hothouse of American racism, spring '47. He had considered, at least briefly, not coming back, although that was never a full reality for him because his wife, Anna, and the children—four already born—are not going to move to England. And so he does come back. But he comes back at a time the Mexican War is broken out. The turmoil over the Mexican War is all over American political culture. Abolitionism is faltering a bit, but transforming into a kind of political movement. And he's an anger, as you just suggested. He's an angry young Black man. In fact, he goes out on the circuit with this kind of speech. And by the way, this is a speech at the annual meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society, which is a very big deal. It's like their annual convention. And Garrison started this years ago, and they always had it in New York, either Brooklyn or Manhattan. And Douglass shows up, and Wendell Phillips took him aside, wonderful, great Garrison, great orator himself, and at one point said, "Fred, can you kind of tone it down? I mean, you're going to lose the audience." You know, he's so angry. And he was, without a question. That language you quoted, "I have no country, I have no patriotism, my country rejects me, I reject it." Now, that is not going to be the tone Douglass will always have, but it surely is at this time. And I found—he takes this speech on the road, and there was a Philadelphia newspaper report I had called him "the demagogue black." I saw that headline. I said, "That's—remember in a chapter title." It's a chapter title. That's a chapter. Because he was very demagogic. He was saying, "Look, this country is not only in deep trouble, it has no future with this system unless the system, slavery, is destroyed." You can begin to see the roots, of course, of our third great speech here, the greatest of all his masterpieces, the Fourth of July speech. That's not going to come for five years later, but you can begin to see the threads of it here. He doesn't have it—he doesn't have to put it together yet in that that gorgeous rhetoric that he's going to have in the Fourth of July speech. But this is this is the Jeremiah in Douglass. He's just going to bash the country. He's just going to say, "Your temple is going to be burned and destroyed if you don't find a way, and soon, to solve this problem." And it's personal for him. It's personal in the sense that he's been treated so well. You know, if you're treated like a human being for 18 months, and you're back into a situation where you're not, I mean, you're not going to give nice talks, you know? You're not going to—you're not going to be nice at lunch, so to speak. But also, he knew the audience he had here. This was like every major abolitionist in the country, right? This was the home team, you know? This was it. And he is beginning to break with Garrison. That's not completed yet, but he is beginning to show that independence, independence of rhetoric, and soon a real independence about tactics and strategy, which is going to mean a fundamental break with this mentor figure, William Lloyd Garrison.

Before we segue to the third speech, was his most famous speech, let me ask you to tell the audience about rehearsal and preparation. You know, we all know from Malcolm Gladwell about the 10,000 hours for expertise, for mastery. Give the audience a sense of how many days in the calendar year was Frederick Douglass on the road giving speeches in different stages of his life.

Well, those early four years when he's out on the circuit as a Garrisonian, before he goes to England, and then while he's in Ireland, Scotland, England, and many other periods after that, not always, but many other periods, he would spend as much as half of every year on the road. At one point in my writing, I actually tried to sit down and, you know, try to calculate estimates of numbers of miles, number of days, weeks, months, and so on. I was just trying to calculate how often he was away from home. Right? You know, I gave up on that. It's hard to do. It's very hard to do because we don't have complete itineraries, although we have pretty complete itineraries. He was on the road even after the war. After the war, when he was giving all these lecture tours, frankly, to make a living. He'd spend—he'd go on these three-month winter tours all over the Midwest, the dead of winter. He'd speak on the average of at least every other day, and sometimes two days in a row, sometimes twice in one day. And every kind of venue: churches, city halls, opera houses, wherever they'd have him. In the early years, in the 1840s, abolitionists sometimes had to beg their way in, you know. A lot of churches would reject themselves. "We don't want you people. You people are crazy. You're dangerous. You bring out the nut cases." But anyway, he traveled. He pros—I estimate in the book that he traveled more miles than any American in the 19th century with the possible exception of Mark Twain. Between them, into the '20s, and Twain went to Asia, you know, as a traveling itinerant orator. Douglass traveled thousands and thousands of miles. And I venture a guess, that I cannot prove, that more people heard Douglass speak than any other American in that century.

Oh, I think that's reasonable. I do think it is. One other quick thing about this idea of preparation. It's interesting to note for people who don't do the kind of research we do. Every major Douglass speech you think of, all the great speeches, and we could name two dozen of them, they all exist in a text. He didn't just go into halls and blow out the lights off the top of his head. He could do that, you know, and he would break from the text. But we have long texts. Some of them are 20, 25 pages long. The Fourth of July speech is a 20-some page text. And after the Civil War, they're all in typescript. So I conclude from this that this is a person, like a lot of us, who didn't know what he thought about something until he sat down at his desk to write it. That his thinking came into being by writing it down. And then, of course, he could still perform. But he wrote in an oratorical style, at least in the speeches. He could also write in that more terse style of the political editorial and the more, the more fluid style of long-form autobiography. He could—he could write in many different styles. But the oratory is in a spoken kind of language, but they exist in a text. That's important to know, especially for young people. He worked on these things, and he wrote them, and he edited. And, you know, he didn't just go out and somebody said, "Talk about the Fugitive Slave Act," and off the top of his head. No. He sat down and wrote it.

No, it is. And one of the first biographies of Donald Douglass was *Frederick Douglass: The Origin*. But yeah, he really—our generation of literary critics, Robert Stepto, Robert O'Meally, me, of course, to some extent, Houston Baker, lots of other people. Yeah. We, I think we claimed—we all have PhDs in literature, and we reclaimed him as the writer. It was a rite of passage for all of you in your generation. You all had to write your essay on the narrative, or two or three messages. I started reading all that stuff back in the '70s, and then when I was in graduate school, that was my path into Douglass. Did you and Benjamin—did you learn anything, Mr. Historian?

I surely did. I learned about binary oppositions from you. Yep. Binary opposition. But they're very much from *The Columbian Orator*. Yeah. You know, it's a trope of rhetoric.

Speech number three, of course: "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?"

"What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days of the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham. Notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented of the state of the nation, I do not despair. This country has forces in operation which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery. Therefore, I leave off where I began with hope." — Frederick Douglass, July 5, 1852.

This is Douglass's most famous speech, delivered when he's now 34 years old. It's calling out—oh, by the way, it's performed by Nicole Beharie. Douglass is calling out American hypocrisy, challenging the country to live up to the ideals of the founding fathers. It was delivered on the fifth of July, the day after Independence Day, at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, at the invitation of the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society. Afterward, he had a "quote unquote printed in bulk," David, "and sold it in his paper as well as out on the lecture circuit at 50 cents per copy." And David, in a marvelous analogy, it's a great riff, it's David at his best as well. It's when David is blasting off rhetorically. Ladies and gentlemen, David likens the speech to a symphony. He starts out warming up the crowd, singing the praises of the founding fathers, before dropping the hammer and going into a litany of gruesome descriptions of the slave trade. But he ends by saying, "It's late, it's not too late. America, you can still save yourself. You can still save the country. All you've got to do is end the enslavement of my people." And David, ladies and gentlemen, calls it "the rhetorical masterpiece of American abolitionism." Nicole Beharie performs his speech. And it's interesting, we did this intentionally. We have to give it up for our director, Julie Marchese, the genius who—she sat David and I down once for five hours in front of three cameras, and we just ripped. It was one of the greatest days of my life talking about Douglass. And then she came back six months later and said, "We're going to build it around these five speeches. We don't need you anymore." No, we got to get actors and fire you guys. Yeah. But it's interesting to hear Douglass's words interpreted by a woman. Yeah. Because it reminds us the fundamental reason that we are, that we read Douglass today, that we teach Douglass, that we made a film about Douglass, that even Donald Trump has heard about Douglass, is that Frederick Douglass was an artist with language. Long after slavery, long after the rise and fall of Jim Crow, long after Black people were excluded from having exhibited at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, long after questions about Santo Domingo and its relationship to the United States, Haiti, long after all of the political issues with which he wrestled, we still read him. Why? Because he was a master of the word. He was a poet with prose. He was one of the great writers in all of the 19th century. And we read him because his words still speak to us universally today. They aren't specific to him or even any longer to his era, and they still resonate. And Nicole's performance imbues his words with a different kind of emotion than a male actor might.

David, take it away.

Well, Douglass heard the music of words in his head. And that's why I have that music. I've done that for years. I call it a symphony. Why not? Language is music. Poetry is music. And some prose poetry is music. And I do think this speech has—it's kind of, well, most symphonies have four movements. This one has three. But, but, you know, that opening, it's a short, fairly five pages or so of the text, sets the audience at ease, honors the founding fathers, calls for—the American Passover. He honors the Declaration of Independence. He loves the principles of the Declaration of Independence. He makes that audience, and by the way, he's speaking to an audience largely of his friends. It's 600 people in Corinthian Hall in Rochester. He's invited by the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society. But then comes the hammer down. Two or three times it comes down. And he says, "Pardon me, why have you invited me here?" And you'll record the lie. And then come the reigning of the "you" and the "your" and the "you" and the "your." The forces yours, not mine. "You may rejoice, I must mourn." On and on and on and on. And then, of course, it has numerous uses of the Bible in this speech. Anyone who doesn't believe Douglass was so well-steeped in the Hebrew prophets, just read this one speech. The two uses of—no, excuse me, three uses of Isaiah, two uses of the Psalms, at least one of Jeremiah. My favorite moment in the speech, it's just the perfect move, is where he just suddenly says, "What we need is sacrilegious irony." Floats into the 137th Psalm: "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. You made us—you made us hang our harps upon the willows, and you demanded of us a song." You've invited me here to sing, but I ain't going to sing. I mean, I am singing, but I'm going to make you hurt. And then for the next whole—this the middle movement of the speech, the long movement of the middle ten pages and more, is this litany of the horror of everything from the African slave trade to the holds of slave ships to the auction blocks, and on and on and on. It's just like a hailstorm down on that audience. There's not going to be much left of that audience, you think, before long. And he ends that section with this image that is—that does—I always say it does Jonathan Edwards one better. Ends with an image of there is a reptile coiled up at your nation's heart, about to eat out your heart. What are you going to do? You know? And then the whole middle section, the middle movement, like the hailstorm, just stops. I don't know, maybe passed out towels or something. Then comes the last short section of the speech, where he lets them back up, lets them back up, says, as you just said, it's not quite too late. Your your country is malleable, it can still be changed. And then almost unbelievably, he ends with a long section out of William Lloyd Garrison's poem, which was also done as a hymn, "Go, Sound the Jubilee." I mean, it's just a—it's a complete work of art. I mean, it's a complete work of oratory in its style, its structure, not least of which is its argument. Which this is the classic Jeremiah. He's calling the flock to the altar. They may not yet save themselves, but they have one chance. As you said, he had that baby printed up and ready to take down the road. Our man was a marketer. Yeah. He knew he had a serious piece of work in that speech, and he told it. And it is, by the way, it's 1852. The context is everything here. *Uncle Tom's Cabin* just came out in the spring. Everybody's reading it. Election year. Fugitive slave rescues, they're happening all over the place. He's been involved in himself, right? So the slavery question and the fugitive slave question, he's on everybody's mind. Yeah. And so when he gets invited to do this Fourth of July speech, I don't know for sure, but I have to imagine he thought, "Hmm, this is a really good moment to do the Fourth of July speech. This is my moment." And there is a letter where he says he had worked harder on that than anything else he'd ever done. And well, it shows. It shows. But I tell you, it's a work of art. Your analysis, my friend, is a work of art as well. And the first time I heard you analyze it in this way, well, it was when I was reading the draft of your chapter, and I thought, "Whoa, Blight is smoking, man. Like, why is he out there?" Then I heard you during our dialogue, and I just was stunned at how brilliant your analysis is. You know, we give you a joint appointment in the English department. That would be a promotional game.

Speech number four, now with the middle Civil War. It's 1863. Emancipation. "The Proclamation and a Negro Army."

"There are certain great national acts which by their relation to universal principles properly belong to the whole human family, and Abraham Lincoln's Proclamation of the 1st of January, 1863, is one of these acts. But I hold that the Proclamation, good as it is, will be worthless, a miserable mockery, unless the nation shall so far conquer its prejudice as to welcome into the army full-grown black men to help fight the battles of the Republic. That paper Proclamation must now be made iron, lead, and fire by the prompt employment of the Negro's arm in this context. I know it is said that the Negroes won't fight, but I distrust the accuser. I know the colored men of the North, I know the colored men of the South. They are ready to rally under the Stars and Stripes at the first tap of the drum. Give them a chance."

This was performed in our film by Colman Domingo. This is perhaps the most hopeful speech of the five that we've chosen. Yeah. Douglass is responding to the Emancipation Proclamation by saying that Black men should be welcomed into the Union Army, should be treated as equals. He gave this speech many, many times over that crucial, pivotal year in the Civil War, 1863, and it was the kind of recruitment speech. And in fact, not mentioned in the film, is that of course, he recruited his own sons to join the fight. And in contrast to the other actors who are expressing anger and frustration, Colman Domingo has a more relaxed, more assured demeanor. The Civil War has given Colman's Douglass reason to hope. This is middle-aged Douglass. He's becoming more and more famous, a statesman.

David?

Well, yeah. I love this speech partly again because of the context, the hope as well. But it's the context here again, you know. Well, Skip, this has been a hard road to get to this point. Douglass has been a ferocious critic of Lincoln's in the first year of the war, year and a half, down to at least the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in September '62. He was especially bitter about the policy of the Union Army, Union government, to send back fugitive slaves if they could find the owners, and a policy that was never really workable. But Douglass went ballistic over that. He also had gone ballistic over a meeting Lincoln held with a handful of Black ministers in August, in August, in Washington D.C., crazy thinking, Lincoln's worst racial moment, to say the least, inviting these Black ministers to lead efforts to colonize and remove Black people out of the country and so on and so on. Within a month of that, he issues a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. Yeah. And that was his—his tone changes. And of course, the tone changed again after that hundred days in between the preliminary and the final proclamation. And what does Douglass do? Again, after the Emancipation Proclamation? Well, after his dramatic appearance in Boston on the night of emancipation, but we don't have to go into that. He goes home to Rochester, goes to his desk, sits down, writes up this speech. What's this proclamation? Proclamation mean now? Well, one huge difference between the preliminary and the final proclamation is it called for the enlisting of Black men in the Union Army and Navy. That's right. Proclamation and the Negro Army. And you're quite right, it's very important to note this speech became the prototype. He gave variations on this all over the place, but it became the prototype for his recruiting speeches over the ensuing months for the 54th Massachusetts and the Union Army more generally. It also is the prototype for that famous broadside, "Men of Color, To Arms!" is a masterpiece of public propaganda. I mean, it's amazing. And they even had huge versions of that that they hang—they hung as banners in some cities. Wow. But one other thing about this speech, one of the reasons I like it is that he gave it, well, he gave it all over the Midwest that winter. And one of the passages in it, he says, I wish I had the exact quote here, but I can paraphrase it. He says, "This proclamation frees Black people, it frees the slave, it frees the free Black person, it frees white people, it frees Confederates, it frees the country from its history. It can free it now." Is the proclamation alone going to do that? Of course not. But he uses it now. And that's what he always did with Lincoln. He used Lincoln's power, Lincoln's pen, to try to make policy into reality. Yeah. That passage, that idea that emancipation could free the whole country, it's something we're still trying to make complete, right? Of course. Make that complete. And it's right there in January of 1863. And that's an extension of an idea that he, um, he floats in his 1845 narrative. It's the flip side, which is saying slavery is bad for you as well as me. Slavery is bad for the master. Slavery perverts and corrupts the master, just like it is horrific for the slave. I think that's one of the biggest themes of the narrative is his ability to penetrate the slaveholder's mind. That's right. It's true.

And I'll tell you something, and ladies and gentlemen, I want you to think about this. You all might know this, but I confess that it had never occurred to me until we did with Eric Foner, we did the great Reconstruction series for PBS. I love that show. And I'm fascinated by class tensions within the African-American community. And so, and they start—what, one big division in the community was between free and enslaved. Right? So roughly 10 to 12% of the Black population is free after certainly after 1830. I mean, I'll give you the statistics. In 1860, the 3.9 million enslaved African Americans are 488,000 free. And of the 488,000 who are free, 262,000 of those live in the slave states. Right? So that leaves 220,000 in the northern states. Now, hold those numbers in mind. 200,000 Black men serve in the military and the Navy, the Army and the Navy during the Civil War. Where did they come from? I—and because of the 54th, because of "Men of Color, To Arms!", because of Douglass, because of this speech, we think that they are the free Black population. It's not true. There weren't enough free Black people. 80% of them are former slaves. That's right. The estimates vary, yeah, but it's certainly 140 to 150,000 of the 200,000 were enslaved Black men freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. That is the biggest surprise, other than the fact that there were more free Black people living during the Civil War in the slave states than in the free states. Right? And they weren't, by and large, they weren't—the Klan didn't burn—well, the Klan wasn't invented until December 1865, but you know, they lived peacefully, went on about their business. So it must have been very stressful. Other than that fact, is the fact that the army was made up by the contraband, the people who managed, because of the Emancipation, to get behind Union lines. And they were largely illiterate, as we know, because it was illegal to teach our enslaved ancestors to read and write. That is amazing, ladies and gentlemen. That is one of the most amazing facts in the history of the military, in the history of the American Republic. And David, how come we don't focus more on that? You know, that's astonishing.

Well, I don't know why we don't. A lot of historians have tried. You know, that whole extraordinary process of recruiting Black men into the Army and Navy, which is so well-documented. You know, the famous *Documentary History of Emancipation* project, it's multiple volumes, six, seven volumes of it now, at least two of them are on the military experience alone. We know now that, you know, a

Per capita of the state of Kentucky had more black men in the Union Army than any other state. It's amazing. If you were a black male in Kentucky, in Kentucky, of course, was a terrible place to be during the Civil War. Hopelessly divided, whole families divided. And my God, you know how many black men, what percentage of black men in Kentucky ended up in the Union Army? A major percentage. So, and there's nothing, arguably, more revolutionary about this war, this experience, than those black soldiers. Yeah, that's true. Revolutionary to white Southerners? Well, it's true. I mean, it, it, it gave black men the license to kill white men. Rifles in the hands of black men. Yeah. Most people have never seen that. Well, and look what happened at Fort Pillow. Yeah, Nathan Bedford Forrest. Black men, um, surrendered. He lined them up, murdered them. Uh, yes. Since it was a race war, it was the worst kind of civil war is that which becomes this kind of race or ethnic war. Yeah. And it was in certain areas, in certain places. Uh, but yeah, but you know, in the wake of the war, too, that military experience in, in black community memory and so on would be so important. And we know a lot about that, too, from different kinds of sources. But just, just the fact, you know, dwell on that just a second. The idea that you're going to take the risk of going, putting on some kind of uniform, you're going to learn that you don't, you don't have the best officers, you don't have the best equipment. Uh, if you're captured, you're in very serious trouble, right? You could be enslaved or worse. You could be killed. And then that Douglas recruits two of his own sons. You know, one of the things I, I wanted to find more about, he never says a word about it, like many things he never says a word about in his private life, in the autobiography. Is there anywhere else? Is what did he say to his own sons, 19 and 21, when he recruits him to go to war? You know, who are they going to war for? Right. Themselves? For him? You know, they couldn't tell him no. No, no, no, Dad, sorry. Go have your Civil War. I'm sorry, I'm not, not in it. In fact, he didn't have, ran two of his sons. And even Rosetta, the daughter, flirted with immigration. I know they were thinking about leaving the country. Rosetta was ready to go to Haiti right before Fourth Century. All right, they bought, he had bought tickets. Yeah, yeah. You and Rosetta were going to go check out Haiti. So this idea, these, oh, of course, they went to war. Uh, you couldn't think of a thing, of a thing more dangerous. Yeah. Abby, we're going to, we're going to run over a little bit because I want David to talk about speech number five. In fact, we're going to be here for three hours. It's going to be like a Frederick Douglass speech. That was my question. I'll go off camera again. All right, okay. One more to go here. All right, one more to go. I've got it. The longest. It is speech number five, "Lessons of the Hour." Strange things have happened to Blake and are still happening. Some of these tend to dim the luster of the American name and chill the hopes we once entertained for the cause of American liberty. Principles which we all thought to have been permanently settled by the late war have been boldly assaulted and overthrown by the defeated party. The moral sense of a nation begins to decline and the wheel of progress to roll backward. There is no telling how low one will fall or where the other may stop. "Lessons of the Hour," 1893, is performed by great Jeffrey Wright. It's Douglass's final major speech, written after the fall of Reconstruction, the rise of Redemption, three years after the Mississippi Plan, which you ladies and gentlemen remember is the beginning of the re-writing of a new and ratification, new state constitutional conventions throughout the former South, which without, without using them, sorry about that, that's my, my clock in my kitchen, without using the word Negro or black or African-American or race, effectively disenfranchises, um, the black male voter throughout the South. How effective was it? 1898, or 130,000 black men registered to vote in Louisiana. 1904, after the ratification of the new state constitutional convention in Louisiana, that number had reduced precisely to 1,342. Voter suppression, voter suppression then and voter suppression now. Um, Douglass is lamenting the rise of lynching across the United States, spurred back into activism by a young friend, Ida B. Wells. Actor Jeffrey Wright channels the older Douglass. He's ailing, he's exhausted, and God knows he's frustrated. Can you imagine, ladies and gentlemen, of being there when the telegram comes that Lincoln has signed the Emancipation? Uh, being there when Lee surrenders at Appomattox, being there at the ratification of the 13th, the 14th, and the 15th, and then seeing the Supreme Court, Cruikshank, 1876, begin to neuter the power of the 14th Amendment, the Slaughterhouse cases before that, and then the infamous Civil Rights Cases of 1883, which basically rendered null and void the Civil Rights Act of 1875, Charles Sumner's last gift to, to freedom and liberty and in America. And then starting with the Mississippi Plan to see, uh, the right to vote systematically, uh, taken away by, um, by these, uh, redemptionists, you know, the former Confederates, um, disenfranchising the black male community throughout the South. And never forget, until 1910, 90% of our people lived in the Black Belt in, in the former South. As in most of his speeches, even the most strident, Douglass tries to hang on to some kind of vote. Just as he wrote in the last pages of his third and final autobiography, which David, nobody has read. [Laughter] Even in the 1880s, nobody has read that book. And I quote, "It is my faith that a better and brighter day will yet come." The scenes for his speech, ladies and gentlemen, were planted in Douglass's "Colored People's Day" address. And that's, it's the name of the day, um, designated by the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, when he said, and I quote, "Men talk of the Negro problem. There is no Negro problem. The problem is whether the American people have honesty enough, loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough to live up to the Constitution." Unquote. David says that Douglass likely delivered the first full version of "Lessons of the Hour" in Detroit in October 1893. So, as in the case of many of his other speeches, it, he, he read and revised it on the road. I mean, it was a working project, like a jazz musician, right? And that's the form that we have is, uh, is the final version. David, well, he first writes this in '93, gives it over and over and over again in late '93, and then on and off all over the country in '94. And let's remember, he's a 76-year-old man by then. He's got a certain palsy in his hands. He's got heart disease. He doesn't quite know it, I guess, but he's not well at all. And but he is finally driven to take up this question of lynching. The speech is ultimate. It's about many things, but it's ultimately his analytical and moral demolition of the idea of lynching. Uh, to be quick about this one is hard because it's such a, it's a such a long and also at times beautiful speech, but it's got despair in it. There's a very discouraged Douglass here. This is an an aging Douglass who is seeing, as you just suggested, Skip. He's seen the project of his life, the meaning of his life, reach this kind of eclipse. It's, this is the '90s now, and there are 250 to 300 recorded lynchings a year between about, about 1890 and '95. And so he takes up this question. And in it, uh, he, he announces that this is despairing. He wonders if he, you know, he says, look, I'm with you. I understand it. It is hard to understand how human beings can be so beast-like to do this to other fellow human beings. Um, and he has these metaphors about, you know, about vultures and, oh God. But in the middle of it, he offers a kind of three-part analysis. It's almost like he's suddenly the sociologist, a little Du Bois in here. He says, you know, there have been three excuses for the control of black people and violence against black people. The first, under slavery, was, if you don't, they'll have an insurrection. He calls it the excuse of insurrection. The second was, oh, you have to control these people now that they've been freed by the war and emancipation, because the fear is Negro rule. They're going to take over politically, right? Now, he says, there's yet a new excuse, and the excuse is the allegation of sexual abuse and rape by black men of white women. That's right. And he says, it's been the story of essentially three excuses. That's a pretty good analysis, actually, about why lynching has happened. And he has an economic argument in there, yeah. You don't want these people to get this job and that job. Well, that's a good way to control them. And he has a political argument. He says, in effect, over and over in this speech, a dead black man can't vote, right? And not one of my favorite lines in it, I just have to have it here. Opened it up. He says, you know, he doesn't call it the big lie, but he calls it "the lie." We've heard a lot about big lies of late. He says, a lie is worth nothing when it has lost its ability to deceive. And if it is at all in my power, this lie shall lose its power to deceive. Yeah. And he, he rounds that speech out by basically trying to kill the lie, right, about rape. Uh, he's, you've got to kill this lie. Yes, because he says, he says, how come there are not one reported? I taught this speech on Tuesday in my graduate, um, English department class. Right. He, he says, there's not one reported incidents of rape during the Civil War. Yeah. When, yeah, when we're leaving the plantations. Yeah, yeah. You guys were off fighting the, the North, and we were there protecting your family. How come, if we are a rapist, how come there were no recorded instances of rape? It's, it's really powerful. And, you know, he ends a classic Douglass way. This speech, he brings it back. He's looking for some smidgen of hope. And he brings it back to essentially the natural rights tradition, right? Basic God-given liberties and rights. No matter what you do to us, you cannot kill these natural rights. Well, that might have rung a little hollow with some audiences, I don't know. But it, the context again, is this, this old man trying to hang on to, uh, the triumph, right? He lived through in the middle of his life. And there's, there's a sense in this speech that a lot of that's being lost. He was generally a pretty sanguine guy, even in old age, but boy, he let out, he let out the discouragement and the anger and the pain in this speech. And he, he's still giving it right into like December of '94. He's going to die by, uh, two months later. Yeah. Two months later. Yeah. The, uh, no, it just, it's, it's, it's one of the saddest works of, um, literature in the American tradition to me. Just to think about all of that hope. He's so brimming with hope in, in even during the Civil War and after the Civil War, and it's all going to come about, you know, it's just a matter of time. And then he realizes, you know, one day, I often think he's shaving, you know, and he goes, oh my God, this can't be. I had this nightmare. No, I have to suppress this. They're not going to drag us back. It's not, they're not going to snatch away our freedom. They're not going to implement slavery by another name. And by the time he rewrites, writes "Lessons of the Hour" and starts performing that in 1893, he knows his worst nightmare has come to come to bear. Abby, Wolf, you want to come on? And while you do, and Abby's been curating the questions, David, I want to take the liberty of asking you, um, a question that I haven't asked you yet, which is, what did you learn about Douglass that you didn't know before you completed, um, your masterpiece of biography? You're way too kind. Oh, oh, Lord. Well, one of the things I learned that I don't think I did understand before is the sheer endurance of this man. By, by that, I don't mean just physical endurance, all the travel and all that, but the ability to endure racism, to blunt it sometimes with humor, sometimes with aggressive rhetoric, sometimes with satire, to convert it somehow back onto the, to the racist. But his ability to, and I mean, it's hard for 21st-century people to realize just what it was like in 19th-century America to be this, an increasingly famous black man who was, who was especially after he was on the cover of Harper's there, and what was it, 1871 or '72? That's like being the, the lead picture in Google or something, you know, so visible. And, and so, you know, famous, and had all the perils that came with that. His endurance of all of this did surprise me. I was also surprised to learn so much more about, I guess what we would call his vanity, his pride. I mean, you do that as a biographer, you look for all of that, and boy, there's plenty of it. He had, he had these, as you know, bitter rivalries, especially with the next generation of black leadership, John John Mercer Langston, right? Oh, and Richard T. Greener, the first Harvard, and a bunch of others who all wanted to knock him off. And that stuff gets really ugly. He hated them. He hated him. Oh, and he loved being on the pedestal. You tried to knock him off, he would throw it back at you worse than you threw it at him. So there's a real human being here. And his, I also learned a lot about, I think, although it's still a little hard to get totally at it, his, his real difficult struggles with that extended family, the children, their children, and how they all became dependent on him. He woke up every day by the 1870s and 1880s with a huge brood, you know, four surviving adult children, 21 grandchildren, a bunch of other hangers-on, all but Lewis, the oldest son, basically financially dependent on him. And I got access to two sets of his account books where you really begin to realize how much money he's giving out to everybody. Oh my God, no wonder, no wonder he went on another speaking tour. He couldn't stand to be home. Yeah, yeah. Uh, and, well, but I think I kept learning too. I still keep learning about this guy's phenomenal power with language. It is why we keep reading. It's the words. It's not, it is, it's not any office he held. It's not any big event he was, well, part of some big events, but it's the words. That's why we're always reading, right? It is the power of his language, the master of his life. And what you said about the King James Bible, if, um, the silent second text of African American literature, certainly from Frederick Douglass through Toni Morrison, is the King James Bible, without a doubt. You can just love the Hebrew prophets. He couldn't craft a speech without Isaiah. And you know, one of the things I got access to was not just the list of books he owned, well, they had a list, but at the National Park Service, but they let me go out to that warehouse in Landover, Maryland, where the National Park Service keeps all of its treasures, and they have all of Douglass's book collection in these accordion shelves. It's a big collection, huh? And I was hoping to find, you know, loads of annotations. He didn't annotate much, which a lot of 19th-century people didn't. Books were really precious, right? What he owned, individual guides to individual books of the Bible. He had like two or three guides to the Book of Isaiah, guides to the Book of Jeremiah, guides to these Old Testament prophets. Wow. That was very important to him. He had texts he could look things up in. He could read commentaries about it. He also owned three complete works of Shakespeare. You know, complete works of all sorts of people. Did, did he believe in God? Oh, absolutely. Early in his life, I mean, that's pretty clear in the narrative. Yeah. I mean, he says he believed in a, a God as a deliverer and, and so on. Uh, in his old age, that no doubt changes. There's no question that changes. I don't think Ottilie's ever converted him totally to atheism, as she, right, whatever that even meant to her. But, but he still couldn't, he just couldn't use language without that source, you know, that source of storytelling, which was the Hebrew prophets. That's, that's just his, that's his method and his source. So it's true. And he never gave up on this kind of providential view of history either. He desperately needed that. It's a common 19th-century view. Yeah, absolutely. Uh, Abby, we'll go like 15 minutes, go to 4:30. Sounds, yeah, sounds great. Um, we have gotten a lot of questions and thank you. First, let me say thank you both for that. That was, this is quite a way to spend a Friday afternoon before a long weekend. It's wonderful, it's exhilarating. Um, so I'm going to try to combine questions as much as possible and choose some representative questions because we have gotten quite a few in. Um, one to start with, on the subject of performance, which you spoke about in terms of Douglass and also the actors who were who were brought in to read the speeches. Um, one, one per, a couple of people would like to know if you, uh, provided the actors any notes about how to deliver Douglass's speeches, and did engaging with these actors' readings of the speeches bring anything new to your own relationship with or your understanding of Douglass's work? Oh, yeah. I called Jeffrey Wright and said, "Hey, Jeffrey, this is how you're supposed to read 'Lessons of the Hour'." Any time we had him do anything, yeah, we had them all, you know, of course, read David's book. We hope. Um, but no, I didn't give them any notes. Did you, David? No, I had, I, I suspect Julia, the director, who was amazing in this, actually, the way she crafted the structure, I suspect she must have fed them, uh, all sorts of, I don't know, whatever tips or something, but they all put their own, at least in my viewing of it, they all put their own imprint on those speeches. Yeah. Um, um, kind of related to that is a question from one of your Harvard colleagues, Peter Sachs. Oh, good. Hi, Peter. Hi, Joy. Given the dramatic linguistic development of rhetoric, style, stance, emotion, and emotion throughout the speeches, can we track a similar development in his photographic portraits, given how deliberate and crucial they were to understanding who he is and to his self-presentation? How might we describe the various kinds of appearance and self-presentation, and how are they differentiated by more than age? Oh, that's interesting. And Peter Sachs is, ladies and gentlemen, my colleague in the English department, fellow African, he's a, well, African brother, South African, and is not only a literary critic and a poet, but also a major contemporary painter. And I happen to, I'm in my kitchen, and you walked right into my living room, you'd see four paintings by, by, uh, Peter Sachs. David, how would you, you've been looking at all those, um, images of Douglass for a long, long time. How would you respond to Peter's question? I was hoping you would. You wrote an essay in that book, "Picturing Frederick Douglass," but I, you know, as we now know from the analysis of, uh, Stafford Trodbernay and Gates in that collection, this was a man photographed many, many times, over 160 times that they're extant, and who was very interested in the technology of photography, right? Very much manipulated. He had favorite photographers. It was that one in Philadelphia. He had, I think he said, 11 or 12 times for that same photographer because he liked his work. I don't know. What I find astonishing about the, the range of Douglass photography is not only the aging, but the, the very different kinds of images that do appear, very different in different contexts. For example, one of my favorite photographs, and I sort of, I suppose, manipulate its meaning a bit, but he had it done on the tour while he's giving the Proclamation in the Negro Army. It was taken in Hillsdale, Michigan, of all places. The local photographer said, "Would you come sit for me?" All over the place, Kokomo, Indiana, it doesn't matter. They're the photographer, they want to shoot him. He sits, and man, that photograph shows, uh, a weary Douglass. It shows a worn Douglass, but you can sense about him. He has his legs crossed, he's in a studio, and he's got, he's been on the road. You can tell it, but there's something new about him. There's something new about the face. I, I mean, I'm reading it too much, perhaps, but he's out there on the road with this Emancipation speech. Now, then there are other speeches where you can just see the beauty of this man. Oh, yeah. Some of those profiles. And then the aging Douglass, the old Douglass. Some of those photos, it's the eyes now. Some of that is the technology of photography, some of that is probably the ability of the photographer, but you can't help wondering the self-images that Douglass is constantly trying to portray. It's why we had, my publisher allowed me to have, what do they call them, bookends? There's a photograph inside the cover of the book, right on the page, on the inside of the, literally on the cover, which is a young Douglass. And then the last photo on the inside of the back cover of the book is the last known photograph of Douglass, right? You open the book, you see him young, and then you see him, the oldest we have him. And that last photograph of Douglass, the eyes just penetrate you. So, you know, it's partly the technology, but it's partly his own self-making, I think, is what Stafford calls it. Yes. And he, he, he almost never smiles. No. Well, in the daguerreotypes, it took too long. I mean, yeah, if you smiled, it would blur, right? Yeah. There's one or two where you see the hint of the smile. Yeah, I think it's the one with the grandson. Yeah, the one that's grandson. The, uh, I think that the, and you're right, I'm, I'm, I had enormous amount of pleasure. I'd like to thank Zoe and, uh, John for asking me to write that essay. Um, it gave me an enormous amount of satisfaction because I did it over spring break in Miami, that year, and that's all I did for two weeks. I just thought about Douglass and looked at, uh, looked at those images. There certainly was, Peter Sachs, there certainly was either an anthropological function or an, um, simultaneously a polemical function in his positioning of his features and his hair, in the early photographs, because he wanted to show that his father was my, he says four times in the first chapter, in one way or another, "My master was my father. My father was my master." Right? And so, and he did that for complex reasons, but to show the vulnerability of black women, at the hands of, um, the master. And, but also he did it to deconstruct, um, essentialized categories of race, too. And, you know, the best way for him to do it was to show aquiline features, to show his, you know, obviously mixed hair, his color, etc., etc. So he was positioning, um, himself as an example of race mixture, um, and also he, he saw himself as a noble person, a person of great bearing and command. And that, that, um, visual expression reflected the physical expression reflected a metaphysical, um, essence behind the physical. And he was very concerned with communicating that. You know, a man who could give the first commencement address at what's now Case Western Reserve in 1854, and stand before scholars with no formal education, total autodidact, and give one of the most brilliant speeches, "The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered," that took a lot of hustle to be able to do that. And you never dressed down. He always dressed up. And he always dressed up. Yep. He did. Dr. Wolf, um, a lot of, I'm trying to really condense some questions here, but there are a lot of questions that came in comparing Douglass's time and, I mean, you tracked the progression of, of his own experience, of what was happening in the country so beautifully. Um, a lot of questions are calling, pair or noting parallels between what was happening at the end of Douglass's life to what's happening now, in terms of dismantling of things. So a lot of people are wondering, what can we take from Douglass to help us understand and navigate these treacherous times that we're in right now? David, well, to be quick, that history's never over. When you think you've won, you may have, but watch out. You got a victory, hang on to it, because the forces of reaction are coming. History's never over. Uh, Douglass was all about taking the long view, long view, long view. Deeply interested in history, but always using it, using it, using it. You know, history's waiting for you, even especially when you think you've, you've won a victory, right? And look at what, what we're going through now. White supremacy, whatever you want to call it, is a, is a terrible, crazy, wily cat, and it never goes away. It has all kinds of forms, and boy, did he know that. So, Zora Neale Hurston, talking about the flood in, uh, near the end of "Their Eyes Were Watching God," says, "The monstrous beast has left his bed, and that monstrous beast is white supremacy." I would say, think he would say, yeah, I don't decide with a broken heart. I mean, you, he had to, anybody black alive in 1895 had a broken heart because he was a believer. He was a radical patriot. Yeah, he was a believer in the creeds, and the creeds were in deep trouble. Yeah. I, I would think that his, what was on his mind was, you, you can't let your guard down. You know, you can't relax. It is, um, white supremacy, anti-black racism are just part and parcel of the, the history, the fabric of these United States. And as soon as you let your guard down, wham, you get slammed. Okay. Well, maybe we can try to end on a more, yeah, don't end there. One last question, um, pointing directly to what we will all be doing next Wednesday at 9:00 PM. A couple of people have asked questions along this line. If there's anything you didn't have time to discuss today, is there anything that you didn't have time to discuss today that you would like us to pay special attention to when we watch the HBO documentary? I think for me, and then David, I think it's appropriate for you to end, but for me, just the artistry of our director, Julie Marchese. Undergrad, she graduated from Yale. She and I worked together for years. I mean, we first met, um, when I was filming what became "African American Lives," which, um, eventually morphed into "Finding Your Roots." We've grown together, and she's taught me quite a lot. I love, um, working with her. She is one of the most brilliant documentary filmmakers, uh, at work, uh, today. And the subtle way that she shapes this film. David and I have completely different ideas about our first Douglass film. And I remember with, he and I were making lists of essential stories, which we always do when you're starting a documentary. You're right. You're right. Yeah, yeah. You know, don't forget this, don't forget that. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, ladies and gentlemen, you have, if you have an hour, basically, you're telling 12 stories over an hour. You have five minutes. Just think of, think of the documentary as, and our documentary is, uh, consisting of 12 chapters, right? So that's all you can tell. And now you, you, uh, make your list of tonight, when you're watching TV, you make your list of 12 stories, only for Frederick Douglass, or for Du Bois, or Booker T. Washington, or Zora Neale Hurston, or Anna Julia Cooper. 12 is not a lot. And for Fred, my God. So Dave and I agree, this is funny. We agree the one thing that has to be in there is this battle with Edward Covey. That's not there. You're right. It's not there. Well, you know, it's such a good point about Julia, because I think originally you wanted two hours and more of the full life and so on and so on. When she realized she only was gonna get one hour for whatever reasons, I don't know, she said, "All right, words, speeches. Let's build it." That was, that was her idea. Yeah. But it was, and it, and it made it work, I think. It made it work. Yeah. And now we'll do four to six hours when, you know, long form on, on Douglass's life from the beginning to the end, for PBS. I also want to thank Lisa Heller, who is a very good friend, the person with whom I've worked on several projects at HBO. Without her, this film never would have happened. And Richard Plepler, former head of, of HBO, who greenlit this, and our Black Art film, which aired, um, a year ago. So shout out to them. Shout out to HBO. We hope that you will watch. Um, maybe we can have another session after everyone's watched, David, and we can, we can listen to their, their, uh, reactions. Abby, thank you so much for being, uh, such a generous, gracious. Thanks for letting the GLC co-sponsor with you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. And everyone, thank you. All right, take care. Thanks for coming, everybody. Happy Du Bois birthday film.