Frederick Douglass Denounced Slavery in a 1974 Letter
Remember when, in 2017, “President” Trump said that Frederick Douglass is an up-and-coming person who “is being recognized more and more”?
Well, laugh if you will. Going through some old clippings today, I discovered alternative facts that indicate that the report of Douglass’s death in 1895, like that of Mark Twain’s demise two years later “was an exaggeration.”
The evidence I uncovered in my attic is a letter to the editor of the Jackson Daily News in July 1974. In it, as one would expect, Mr. Douglass denounces the institution of slavery, which an editorial in that un-esteemed afternoon paper had defended at great length in an editorial a few days earlier.
At issue was a proposed living history plantation to be opened near Greenwood, Mississippi. The plan seems to have been to have African Americans playing the parts of enslaved people, presumably in a manner similar to that displayed by the “faithful souls” in the 1915 film Birth of a Nation and the 1939 epic Gone with the Wind.
Mr. Douglass took exception to the presentation to visitors of such a false depiction of the brutal institution from which he had escaped. “It was within the legal right of a slaveowner to whip his ‘property,’ to brand them, or to do virtually anything else to them,” the letter noted. And, in the genteel language that was considered proper for family newspapers in 1974, he pointed to the evidence all around us of the extent of the worst horror of enslavement by saying that the skin color of most African Americans makes clear “what one of the most frequent services slaveowners required of their female slaves was.” Caroline Randall Williams would make the same point much more directly in her 2020 New York Times essay, “My Body Is a Confederate Monument”: “I have rape-colored skin. … I am a black, Southern woman, and of my immediate white male ancestors, all of them were rapists. My very existence is a relic of slavery and Jim Crow.”
Mr. Douglass also took the editors to task for attacking abolitionists. “You make it seem as if those who opposed slavery were worse than those who held human beings as property. I hope few of your readers will be fooled.”
“Slavery needs to be remembered, but as the evil it was, not as just another economic system,” he concluded 43 years ago, nearly eight decades after the reports of his death.
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Let me explain.
We had moved to Mississippi in 1973 so I could take a teaching position at Millsaps College. Things were no longer as bad as they had been in 1964, when NAACP President Roy Wilkins declared that Mississippi was “the most savage, the most uncivilized state in the entire 50 states. There is no state with a record that approaches that of Mississippi in inhumanity, murder, brutality and racial hatred. It is absolutely at the bottom of the list.” But racism was still in abundant supply in the 1970s. To cite one example, we were dumbfounded to see Klansmen in their robes and hoods collecting donations at a busy intersection one Saturday morning.
The state’s dominant newspapers, the morning Clarion-Ledger and afternoon Jackson Daily News, were considered “the most racist newspaper[s] in the nation.” Ten years before our arrival, the Clarion-Ledger covered the “1963 march on Washington with a picture of the mall littered by trash and a headline that proclaimed, ‘Washington Is Clean Again With Negro Trash Removed.’”
I began writing letters to the editor to oppose some of the more outrageous statements and positions taken by the papers. The first few I signed with my name. Then, since I was joining in the ongoing effort to bring revolutionary change and freedom to Mississippi, I got the idea of writing a letter, as many of the American revolutionaries of the late eighteenth century had, under a nom de plume. Writing about the necessity of impeaching Richard Nixon (who in May 1974 made his last political trip before he was obliged to resign in disgrace to Jackson, perhaps the only place in the United States where he could find a friendly crowd—though not without many of us vociferously protesting against him when he arrived), I decided to use the name “Phillip Freneau.” Freneau, known as the Poet of the American Revolution, had lived in my hometown, Matawan, New Jersey, and the section of the town in which I had resided is called Freneau. I wasn’t surprised that the editors had apparently never heard of the poet and published the letter with his name.
Writing in opposition to an editorial that took delight in the protests against bussing in Boston and saying it showed that the north was more racist than Mississippi, I chose the pen name of Boston abolitionist Wendell Phillips. The editors didn’t recognize that one, either.
To oppose the despicable editorial on depicting slavery in a positive light—as many Republicans in 2022 are trying to have schools do again—I decided the appropriate nom de plume was “Frederick Douglass.” I thought the editors would surely recognize that name, but it seems that they were as clueless about Douglass in 1974 as The Former Guy was in 2017. They published the letter.
After those three letters, I ceased the pen name practice and everything I have written since has been under my own name.
Happy Holidays.