Douglass on Slavery
Talking Politics: HISTORY OF IDEAS
Talking Politics
4.8 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 16 February 2021
⏱️ 47 minutes
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Summary
My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) by the former slave Frederick Douglass was the second of his three autobiographies and the one that contained his most radical ideas. In this episode David explores how Douglass used his life story not only to expose the horror of slavery but to champion a new approach to abolishing it. The name for this approach: politics.
Going deeper.....
- David Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (2018)
- Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (1997)
- Colum McCann, TransAtlantic (2013)
- (Audio): Jamelle Bouie, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Rebecca Onion, 'Who Should Tell the Story of American Slavery?' (2015)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Catherine Carr, producer of Talking Politics. In this week's episode of History |
| 0:20.0 | of Ideas, brought to you in partnership with the London Review of Books, David discusses |
| 0:24.8 | the autobiography of Frederick Douglass, the former slave who became one of the most prominent |
| 0:30.0 | figures in 19th century America. Even as a child, Douglass knew that slavery was indefensible, |
| 0:37.1 | so why did America allow it to persist? |
| 0:57.3 | In the first of these talks, I said that Jean-Jacques Rousseau posed what is in some way the definitive |
| 1:02.6 | version of the why question or the how question. Why do the rich have so much and the poor have |
| 1:09.6 | so little but more to the point why are they the ones who get to make the rules? Why is it their |
| 1:14.2 | world and we just live in it? But in some ways the purest version of that question, the why |
| 1:21.1 | question which as we'll see is also a how question, is the one that was posed 100 years later |
| 1:27.6 | by Frederick Douglass. In the second of his autobiographies he wrote three, the second one is |
| 1:33.0 | called my bondage and my freedom. That's the one I'm going to focus on though I'll have a little |
| 1:36.8 | bit to say about the first autobiography too, but in 1855 in that book, Douglass posed a question |
| 1:44.4 | which in many ways was the defining question of his life and it was one that he asked in various |
| 1:50.1 | forms throughout his life or at least he posed it to his audiences. It was a very long life. |
| 1:57.2 | We don't actually know exactly when Frederick Douglass was born because he was born a slave. |
| 2:02.5 | He thought that he was probably born in February 1818, but even at the end of his life, |
| 2:08.1 | at the very end of his long life, he was still trying to find out the exact date of his birth |
| 2:13.0 | because birth dates were not marked for people like him. He died in 1895, so 1818 to 1895, |
| 2:20.5 | that is a life that traverses the 19th century and the year of his birth was the year that Andrew |
| 2:27.6 | Jackson invaded Florida to take it from the Spanish. The year of his death, 1895, was the year in which |
| 2:33.6 | the first patent for an automobile was registered in the United States. That is a long life and he |
... |
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