DAY 3: AAIHS Frederick Douglass Roundtable

Black Perspectives, AAIHS, Frederick Douglass Forum, 26-30 Nov 2018

Today's entry in the AAIHS Black Perspectives Frederick Douglass Forum comes from Noelle Trent, Director of Interpretation, Collections, and Education at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee. If you ever get the chance to visit that museum, bring Kleenex. The experience will astound you, taking you through the narrative of the Movement and the people who made it happen. No surprise, then, that someone who works there has also written a dissertation on Douglass and American exceptionalism, which I hope she publishes quite soon.

In "Frederick Douglass and the United States Constitution," Trent traces Douglass's interpretations and reinterpretations of the Constitution. She also pulls out a great quote from the Revolution that makes defending Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton very difficult during the late 1860s and early 1870s, a legacy that still haunts feminism to this day. More importantly, Trent reveals the ways that, even after the Reconstruction amendments passed, African Americans remained marginal in this idea of an American nation. The Liberty Party's vision of abolition may have passed, but the Garrisonian vision still had -- has -- a long way to go.

Tomorrow, I'm up, hoping to evoke sympathy for Anna Douglass as she was rather than as so many people then and now wanted and want her to be.

By the way, the mural there, as the caption on the AAIHS website note, is from Belfast. Here is the full mural from 2011, when I lived in Ireland for the year.