Kirt H Wilson. Howard Journal of Communications. Volume 29, Issue 3. 2018.
Unaware of their coming defeat in the November election, Democrats declared their 2016 national convention a tremendous success. Speeches by Michelle and Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Joe Biden, and Khizr Khan inspired the party faithful. Representative Bernie Sanders endorsed the presumptive nominee, and although his supporters chanted his name from the floor, they did not disrupt the inexorable march of Hillary Clinton to the party nomination. Outside the Philadelphia conference hall, activists from a wide array of organizations, representing a diverse set of ideas, gathered to protest what they viewed as a corrupt political system (Liu, Posey, & Reuning, 2016). Jay Newton-Small reported (2016),
There were a few dozen anti-mother frackers, several Palestinian supporters … a handful of climate change activists, pro- and anti-abortion campaigners, Black Lives Matters activists and folks representing various political schools: anti-Donald Trump, pro-Bernie Sanders, pro-Jill Stein, anti-Hillary Clinton, and even a group of Gary Johnson fans smoking pot by a snake charmer who performs local carnivals. In this new market of discontent, hope and fear pushers took many forms.
On Wednesday, July 27, the Green Party’s nominee, Jill Stein, joined protestors and said, “Whatever happens, you know my campaign is here.” “We are going to continue this movement” (Foran, 2016). And then, quoting a famous statement from Frederick Douglass, she declared, “Power concedes nothing without a demand and we are that demand” (Krayewski, 2016). With these words Stein sought to constrain all of the energy and diversity of the protestors into one expression, a demand that official power account for interests that were not its own.
When Stein spoke, she was borrowing from Frederick Douglass’s oration, “West India Emancipation,” August 3, 1857. A slightly longer version of the passage reads,
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. (1999, p. 367)
These words have inspired social and political protest since they were uttered, especially among activists who view their work as a confrontation of oppressive power. For example, on January 28, 1967, Stokely Carmichael quoted this passage at length in an address at Morgan State. In his speech, Carmichael adopted what he saw as Frederick Douglass’s radical political thought to argue that the philosophy of nonviolence, espoused by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., had failed (Carmichael, 1971). In contrast to King, Carmichael implied that activists should follow Douglass’s philosophy. They should demand justice. The civil rights movement had to create its own power, a Black power, to counterbalance the oppressive power enjoyed by Whites.
Today the phrase “power concedes nothing without a demand” has come to represent Frederick Douglass’s theory of political action. Douglass himself referred to these comments as a “word of the philosophy of reform” (Mieder, 2001, p. 340). But this fact is not without some irony. Douglass did speak truth to power, but his thought and action are not easily characterized at any single position on the political spectrum nor by one statement. It is difficult to derive a consistent sentiment from his public rhetoric, despite his reputation as an uncompromising champion for justice. This is partially because the famous abolitionist adjusted his claims to meet the exigencies of each speaking situation (Mcclish, 2012). His most famous speeches are critical of the United States, but some of his lesser known addresses express a faith and affection for U.S. institutions. Furthermore, his rhetoric evolved over the arc of his career. Angela Ray (2002) noted that his lyceum rhetoric differs remarkably from his abolitionist discourse. Merline Pitre (1979) contended that after Douglass became a political appointee, he was reluctant to critique federal policy when such criticism might undermine his official position. Finally, one must acknowledge that Douglass’s rhetoric is so copious and so deep that a number of different philosophies and modes of political behavior can be found within it (Buccola, 2012).
Douglass was critical of the federal government, slavery, the South, and mainstream religion, but he was also a nationalist who praised the Founders and the Constitution. Despite his censure, he believed that the United States was uniquely capable of leading the world to a new era of freedom and justice. So how does one account for Douglass’s contemporary reputation as an anti-patriot, a radical agitator who stood beyond the political beliefs of his era? Is it simply that Americans, including contemporary protestors, are “presentists,” that they either willfully or unintentionally extract Douglass from the specificities of his historical moment? Do we see in the great abolitionist only those elements that affirm his stature as a heroic champion who stood against the forces of slavery, segregation, and even patriarchy? No doubt there is some truth to this critique. Still, I think it is worth asking whether there might be something inherent in Douglass’s rhetoric that helps to explain this paradox.
Throughout his long career as a political figure, Douglass positioned himself between two seemingly opposite poles, a sharp critique of American racism and a deep commitment to the United States as a nation with a distinctive mission in the world. I contend that Douglass managed this balance through his oratory and, especially, through rhetoric that acted at both the lexical and social levels simultaneously. The content of his arguments shifted and evolved; nevertheless, Douglass consistently used the strategies of association and dissociation, division and identification over the course of his oratorical career. Douglass’s dissociations contrasted appearance and reality, altering the meaning of words and the definition of social identities. This, in turn, frequently led to a division of his immediate audience into two parts, comprised largely, but not solely, along racial lines. The combined use of dissociation and division made possible Douglass’s political critique and performative confrontation of European Americans. At the same time, through association and identification, Douglass united a particular reading of America’s past with the promise of a future free from the present’s division. Douglass identified the slave rather than the free citizen as the true inheritors of the Founders’ legacy and the secular covenant that God had made with America. These intertwined rhetorical strategies, which existed at both lexical and social levels, created the basis for his political action and his invitation to European Americans to join Douglass and African Americans in a renewed vision of national community.
The associative and dissociative, divisive and unifying strategies immanent in Douglass’s oratory are most evident when he used a secular form of the American jeremiadic form to craft a messianic vision for Blacks and the United States, generally. Building from the insights of Wilson Jeremiah Moses and David Howard-Pitney, I argue that through dissociation and division, African Americans are given a unique social function; they act as the nation’s moral conscience and the mechanism for its political and social redemption. In the latter case, African Americans become the means by which the United States fulfills its divine mission as the global leader of freedom. In the first instance, African Americans confront the nation with a moral vision of proper government when the country is failing to live up to its potential. Through these rhetorical strategies, Frederick Douglass’s oratory critiques the political norms of his era, but it also incorporates African Americans within a mythic narrative of America’s mission to remake the world in its own image.
But although this rhetoric served Douglass well and civil rights protestors have replicated it in subsequent generations, I contend that its effectiveness comes at a cost. Paradoxically, the strategies that are immanent in Douglass’s rhetoric displace the unique interests of African Americans at the very moment when the majority White community responds to the testimony of oppression that African Americans experience. Thus, even as the inventional logics of Douglass’s rhetoric make Blacks essential to the United States’ redemption and secular mission, the particular needs of Black people are obscured in a predominantly White nationhood. The interests of America’s Black citizens are redefined to affirm a view of the nation that slides back toward the interests of the White majority. This final paradox resides at the center of how Douglass uses dissociation and association, division and unity. Furthermore, I conclude that it helps to explain why the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement has resisted calls to imitate the methods that characterize past moments of the freedom struggle.
Association and Dissociation/Division and Unity in Douglass’s 4th of July Oration
The core assumption of this article is that the confrontational dimensions of Douglass’s rhetoric must be read alongside his positive affirmations of U.S. institutions and founding principles. One of the most obvious examples of his attempt to balance these two elements is found in his famous “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July” address (For an extended analysis of this speech, see Terrill, 2003). The first section of his speech proceeds according to the typical expectations of epideictic address; it is a celebration of the nation’s founding. Douglass declares, “Fellow Citizens, I am not wanting in respect for the fathers of this republic. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men too—great enough to give fame to a great age. It does not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time, such a number of truly great men” (1991c, p. 364). The admiration that Douglass expresses for the country’s founders is genuine. Yet even in his praise, the speech’s arguments admit two important qualifiers. First, he states that his point of view is not “the most favorable,” which implies that others, perhaps even members of his audience, might have a more favorable opinion of the Founders than he. Second, he praises the Founders not for their deeds but for their “good deeds” (p. 364). By praising the Founders for their “good deeds,” Douglass uses a dissociative argument that helps to answer a question that began his speech, “what have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence?” (p. 367).
Dissociation and its counterpart, association, comprise two general categories of argument discussed by Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca in their 1969 treatise, The New Rhetoric. “In dissociation,” according to Van Rees, “the speaker splits up a notion considered by the audience to form a unitary concept into two new notions, one of which comprises the aspects of the original notion that the speaker considers real or central [Term II], the other, the aspects that he considers apparent or peripheral [Term I]” (2006, p. 473). For example, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca noted that the introduction of prefixes such as pseudo, quasi, non-, or even entire adjectives like “real” or “truly” can split a formally unified concept so that one side of the pair becomes illusory while the other side is characterized as “authentic, true, real” (1969, p. 437).
Dissociation exists at the heart of every paradox and this is especially evident in Douglass’s 4th of July oration (1969, p. 443). In this speech, the dissociation of the Founder’s nation-building efforts divides their behavior into deeds (Term I) that appear to have benefited the country and “good deeds” (Term II) that actually benefited the country. This dissociation suggests a paradox. Because Douglass chooses to make this careful distinction, he implies that his audience does not truly understand the country’s moment of origin or the Founder’s actual importance. The audience may mistake all of the Founder’s actions as good when only some of their actions were good. Furthermore, in the process of implying a paradoxical condition for his audience, Douglass resolves the situational paradox that he, himself confronts. How can a man of African descent, a former slave, be asked to celebrate a nation that still keeps his race in bondage? In many respect Douglass cannot celebrate the nation, but what he can do is praise those deeds that were good at the moment of its origin. Specifically, Douglass can praise the Founder’s courage and genius for crafting the Declaration of Independence.
In the speech’s second major section, Douglass explains more fully the dual paradoxes that his speaking moment entails. He says that he cannot celebrate the 4th of July, because “standing there, identified (emphasis added) with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this Fourth of July” (p. 369). He states further, “I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common … This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn” (p. 368). Thus, just as Douglass’s praise of the Founders became possible only through a dissociation of their deeds, his identification with the “American bondsman” completes a division that separates Douglass from his immediate audience.
Kenneth Burke has written extensively about the relationship between identification and division. He says, “to begin with ‘identification’ is, by the same token though roundabout, to confront the implications of division. … Identification is affirmed with earnestness precisely because there is division. Identification is compensatory to division. If men were not apart from one another, there would be no need for the rhetorician to proclaim their unity” (1969b, p. 22). Douglass refuses to build identification with his audience, but chooses, instead, to create an association with a people who are not present, American slaves. In doing so, I contend that Douglass becomes “nothing” to the “being” that his privileged audience enjoys. Burke identified the being/nothing pair as part of the essence/existence pair (1969a, pp. 418-419). Being is synonymous with presence and a socially recognized existence. Conversely, nothing is associated with absence and the lack of a socially legitimate existence. Douglass uses division to not only established the ontology, the essence, of his White audience, but also to explain their affective responsibility—they may rejoice, because they are a recognized part of the nation’s glory. In contrast, Douglass’s identification with the slave separates him from his audience’s ontology and dictates a different affective expression. If they can rejoice, he must mourn, because in a Burkean interpretation of Douglass’s speech, Douglass’s identification strategy divides him from the audience and it makes him into “nothing.” He is a slave. He is a man without being, at least to the extent that being is structured by the legal and political status of national citizenship and inherence that the 4th of July is meant to celebrate.
The deep irony of Douglass’s speech is that it is precisely his identification with the slave and its “nothingness” that allows Douglass to shift this epideictic moment into a moral and political critique of the United States. In the hands of Douglass the slave, the speech of celebration becomes a deliberative analysis of the systems, ideas, and behavior that undermine the country’s original principles and the Founder’s “good deeds.” Douglass’s rhetorical strategy divides the U.S. population and condemns a significant portion of it. He states, “We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake … The hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.” This passage leads directly to Douglass’s famous declaration: “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity” (1991c, p. 368).
But while Douglass confronts his audience in strident language, his use of division excludes the country’s Founders from the sins of slavery’s present. Within the speech, Douglass separates the United States’ moment of origin from its present problems; consequently, the constitution and the nation’s core principles escape his condemnation. After Douglass has divided himself from his audience and the present moment from the past, he begins a process of creating a new identification that links people of African descent to the country’s Founders and the nation’s original principles. In the speech’s section devoted to “the past,” Douglass frames 4th of July celebrations as an analogue to the Jewish celebration of Passover. Just as Passover celebrates Israel’s “emancipation” from Egypt as described in the book of Exodus, the 4th of July is a celebration of how the colonies were emancipated from British rule. Here, the White colonists and the people of Israel are analogous in Douglass’s account. Several moments later, however, Douglass revisits his analogy to the Old Testament Jews. He states, “Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn you that it is dangerous to copy the example of a nation [Babylon] whose crimes towering up to heaven [enslaving the people of Judah] where thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrevocable ruin! I can to-day take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people!” (p. 368). In this instance, Douglass equates the White population of his immediate audience to Babylon, which enslaved the children of God and was punished for its crime. Here, people of African descent are the Jewish nation, held in bondage and crying out to God for deliverance in the United States.
The identification between Black America and Old Testament Israel as well as the division that transforms Anglo-America from slaves to British tyranny to Babylonian Masters of Black slaves are essential to the speech. First, they provide the ground on which Douglass condemns the current practice of slavery and all those who permit it, while, simultaneously, identifying Douglass and African Americans with the country’s mythic past and possible future. Second, even as he divides himself from the audience, declaring that he has no part in their celebrations, the argumentative logic of his rhetoric fosters an associative argument that the speaker and his race are more like the Founders than is his audience. This speech creates an implicit dissociation between “pseudo-patriotism” (Term I) and “true patriotism” (Term II). On the 4th of July, one might presume that patriotism is a single idea, a celebration of the country and a commitment to its well-being. Douglass demonstrates, however, that many in his audience who considered themselves patriots (Term I) were false. They do not adhere to the original principles of the nation, and they are harming the nation rather than supporting it. In contrast, people of African descent are true patriots (Term II), they are oppressed by tyranny and crying out to God for deliverance and they cling to the Declaration of Independence, the country’s original principle. In this context, the audience’s patriotic celebration becomes false, because it has allowed the British spirit of tyranny to replicate itself in the antebellum present. The fundamental irony of this famous speech is that if European Americans want to celebrate 1776 without hypocrisy, then they must identify with Douglass, abolitionism, and the enslaved Black race, for only they are the true inheritors of the American Revolution.
Black Messianic Protest Rhetoric and the Jeremiadic Form
Frederick Douglass’s rhetoric in “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July” is perhaps best characterized as an example of the messianic and prophetic traditions of American oratory. Wilson Moses (1982) and David Howard-Pitney (2005) have written extensively about the use of the jeremiad in African American civil rights protest. Building on the work of Perry Miller (1939) and Scvan Bercovitch (2012), Moses and Howard-Pitney locate an affinity between the rhetoric of Douglass and the puritan sermons of New England. The puritan colonists often portrayed themselves as God’s chosen people with a special, divine mission. Specifically, they viewed their “mission” in the New World as an obligation to create a space where God might perfect his covenant with human beings. Once that was accomplished, the colonists thought they would return to Europe to spread that perfection to the Old World. The success or failure of this endeavor implicated much more than the wellbeing of a single colony; the puritans believed they were responsible for the wellbeing of the entire world as they knew it.
From this messianic vision and divine purpose arose a particular rhetorical form that was used to bring the puritan communities back into covenant with God when they had strayed. According to Howard-Pitney (1986a), “the American jeremiad arose as a form of ritualistic complaint and self-reproach because of the apparent failure of Puritan society to fulfill its task of self-perfection and world redemption” (p. 482). Named for the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah, the speaker would first remind the audience that they were a chosen people with a unique mission in the world. The speaker would demonstrate then that the people had departed or even abandoned their divine mission, typically through collective sin or a disregard for God’s grace. Finally, the speaker would predict divine judgment in harsh terms unless the people repented and returned to the true path. Scan Bercovitch (2012) identified this three-part structure as the recitation of divine promise, the lamentation of present declension, and the prophecy of the promise’s fulfillment.
Since Perry Miller (1939) first described the Puritan jeremiad, historians and rhetoric scholars have argued that the oratorical form has continued in America’s civic life to this day. Of course, the jeremiad is no longer a strictly religious expression. After the colonial period, the jeremiad evolved into a secular line of argument, though it always maintained at least some of its spiritual or metaphysical tone. The notion of an original covenant and the threat that breaking the covenant leads to destruction is still a crucial part of the secular jeremiad. Communication Studies scholars have identified the jeremiad in such diverse rhetorics as the presidential discourse of Ronald Reagan and Robert F. Kennedy, and in the cultural productions Saving Private Ryan and Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax. (See, e.g., Johannesen, 1986; Murphy, 1990; Owen, 2002; Wolfe, 2008). But although most of the research in communication studies has focused on how the jeremiad functions in the hands of elite orators or political leaders, relatively little attention has been focused on how the jeremiad operates among communities who are oppressed.
In 1982, Wilson Moses’s book, Black Messiahs and Uncle Toms established the importance of messianic imaginaries and the jeremiadic tradition for Black protest rhetoric. Moses argued that messianic traditions typically emerge from the experience of social and/or political oppression. This is one reason why it became an important part of puritan thought, but it is also why the messianic tradition can be found among Jewish and African American communities, as well. African Americans of the early republic embraced the idea that they, too, had a divine purpose. They created a collective identity that was linked to but not determined by the experience of oppression. In the process, they refashioned the experience of slavery from a curse into a larger redemptive plan that God had ordained for both African Americans and the United States. Blacks of the early republic, according to Moses, viewed themselves as “a chosen or anointed people” who would lead the rest of the world toward redemption by their campaign for freedom. Moses concluded that “the use of the jeremiad” among African American writers and speakers of the early republic, “showed a clever ability to play on the belief that America as a whole was a chosen nation with a covenantal duty to deal justly with the blacks” (p. 31).
It is from this position that Howard-Pitney (1986b; 2005) has argued that the Black jeremiadic tradition is an enduring form of political and social protest. He identifies Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Mary McLeod Bethune, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X as important orators in the Black jeremiadic tradition. Furthermore, Howard-Pitney (1986a) wrote that “Frederick Douglass … was a prime example of those blacks who had voiced powerful jeremiads,” both before the war and then, later, during the Reconstruction era (p. 484). For evidence, Howard-Pitney identified Douglass’s 1857 oration protesting the Dred Scott decision, the editorials in Douglass’s Monthly during the civil war, his speech at the 32nd annual convention of the American Anti-Slavery Society, and his 1894 pamphlet, “Why is the Negro Lynched?” As I have demonstrated above, Howard-Pitney could have included Douglass’s Fourth of July oration, as well.
But although Moses and Howard-Pitney have focused on the jeremiad as a pattern in African American protest rhetoric, I am more interested in how that form is constituted through recurring arguments of association and dissociation, identification and division. Or, to put it differently, I am focused on how Frederick Douglass balanced his commitment to some American ideals while he simultaneously maintained a public persona of radical confrontation and even estrangement that is sometimes read today as a rejection of those national commitments that the jeremiad seeks to create. The ritual of reciting a divine promise, lamenting a present declension, and prophesying the promise’s fulfillment helps to explain this strategy to some degree, but it is the rhetorical labor at a micro-level, the lexical and social dimensions, that make it both an effective and problematic strategy for social protest. Allow me to illustrate by focusing on a speech that Douglass gave toward the end of the Civil War.
Douglass’s Use of the Jeremiad to Account for the Civil War
The Civil War’s bloodshed and destruction touched the lives of almost every citizen, and as the war dragged into its third year it became increasingly difficult to imagine how the country might be reunited. Throughout the winter months of 1863 and 1864, Douglass became concerned that the Northern public did not yet understand the true nature of the division that it was experiencing. That is, he wanted audiences to appreciate not only why the war had happened but what the fundamental division had been. In a lecture that he gave several times entitled, “The Mission of the War,” he argued that secession and the military conflict were not, in fact, the source of social division. Slavery, a condition that preceded the war, was the material dissociation that had divided the country; consequently, the complete and utter abolition of slavery was necessary before peace and the reconciliation could transpire.
Douglass began his lecture with a question, “Now, for what is all this desolation, ruin, shame, suffering, and sorrow?” (1991b, p. 5). He answered, “It is worthy of remark that Secession was an afterthought with the Rebels. Their aim was higher; Secession was only their second choice. [Henry] Wise was going to fight for Slavery in the Union. It was not separation, but subversion. It was not Richmond, but Washington. It was not the Confederate rag, but the glorious Star-Spangled Banner [that the South desired].” The United States had not been whole prior to the war, according to Douglass. It had been divided between slave states and free states. The primary aim of the South, then, had been to absolve that division in a new identification that made slavery the law of the land everywhere. Understood thusly, the war was not to blame for the nation’s current division or the extensive destruction that accompanied military action. Yes, the war had brought the “destruction of human life and property” that “rivaled the earthquake, the whirlwind and the pestilence that walketh in the darkness, and wasteth at noonday” (p. 5). But the war was just an after-effect, a consequence of the South’s desire to transform a divided White nation into a whole people molded after its own image. “From no source less foul and wicked could such a Rebellion come,” Douglass explained (p. 6).
By focusing on slavery rather than the war as the reason for all the destruction and death, Douglass reestablished the rhetorical division that he had used in his “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July” speech. He again argued that slavery divided the country into two parts—physically, politically, temporally, and morally. Furthermore, he defined that dissociation as a contest between a commitment to the country’s original mission, grounded in the Declaration of Independence’s principle of equality, and a new mission, the perpetuation of slavery grounded in the principle of inequality and a legal system of oppression. Of particular note is the fact that if the whole nation were to embrace slavery as, according to Douglass, was the South’s true intent, then the “being”/“nothing” pair that existed between White masters and Black slaves would become complete. The regional unification of European Americans under the system of slavery would, simultaneously, enshrine the division of African Americans from European Americans into the very fabric of the entire country.
Just as he did in 1852, Douglass admitted that his position both united and divided him from his White audience. He declared,
I know that many are appalled and disappointed by the apparently interminable character of this war. I am neither appalled nor disappointed. … Say not that I am indifferent to the horrors and hardships of the war. I am not indifferent. In common with the American people generally, I feel the prolongation of the war a heavy calamity—private as well [as] public. There are vacant spaces at many hearthstone which I shall rejoice to see filled again by the boys who once occupied them. (p. 7)
Though Douglass wanted peace just as much as his audience, he said that he could not accept peace until slavery, the real cause of national division, was removed entirely.
Peace without Black freedom was a fiction, because it would not address the national division that had led to civil war. “Slavery has proved itself the strong man of our national house. In every Rebel State it proved itself stronger than the Union, stronger than the Constitution, and stronger than Republic Institutions. It overrode majorities, made no account of the ballot-box, and had everything its own way,” Douglass said (p. 9). Given the strength of slavery and its political motive to refashion the country in its own image, the war’s length and devastation were not to be avoided but embraced. War was a blessing. He concluded, “Let, then, the war proceed in its strong, high, and broad course till the Rebellion is put down and our country is saved beyond the necessity of being saved again!” (p. 19)
As he had before the war, Douglass’s strategies of dissociation and association, identification and division were linked to his commitment to America’s original covenant as Douglass defined it. That covenant made the United States responsible for more than just its domestic citizens. He told his audience,
The blow we strike is not merely to free a country or continent—but the whole world from Slavery—for when Slavery falls here—it will fall everywhere. We have no business to mourn over our mission…. We are writing the statutes of eternal justice and Liberty in the blood of the worst of tyrants as a warning to all after-comers. We should rejoice that there was moral life and health enough in us to stand in our appointed place, and do this great service for mankind. (p. 8)
For Douglass, the devastation of war was an indication of God’s original promise. It was, in terms of the jeremiadic tradition, a “sign” that the covenant between the United States and God remained possible. So long as the North did not pursue peace before slavery was dead, then the country might still be able to complete the grand purpose for which it was formed.
The future that Douglass wanted for the country was, simultaneously, a renewed association with America’s founding principles and a new association between African and European Americans. To renew the country’s original covenant with God would require not just the emancipation of all slaves everywhere, but also the legalization of Black suffrage, Black political office holders, and the removal of “all discriminations against his rights on account of his color, whether as a citizen or as a soldier” (p. 12). In short, the country needed to be refashioned through political actions that made the former slaves “our countrymen—valuable in peace as laborers, valuable in war as soldiers—entitled to all the rights, protection, and opportunities for achieving distinction enjoyed by any other class of our countrymen” (p. 11). Within the framework of Douglass’s Black jeremiad and his argumentative strategy of association, the Black population became full citizens, the United States was rescued from spiritual destruction, God’s covenant with the country was renewed, and slavery would end around the world.
The Paradox within Douglass’s Dissociative/Associative Strategies
It is here at the very center of Douglass’s jeremiad, that moment when the country’s treatment of African Americans becomes a test of its simultaneously divine and secular missions, that I would like to consider a possible problem with Douglass’s rhetorical strategies. At the most basic level, Douglass’s strategy divided the country in two, a country marked by its complicity with slavery and a country free from tyranny as promised by the Declaration. He associated Black equality and, especially, African American people with the latter, while he condemned those who opposed equality within the first. It was through abolition, the White citizen’s purposeful identification with the oppression of Black men and women, that national redemption was possible. In other words, the suffering of the Black community, the oppression caused by slavery and discrimination, was the sign of shared sin and the prompt for national, collective redemption. Once Whites “recognized” that suffering as a violation of the Founder’s principles and chose to align themselves with the slave, redemption became possible and the association of a renewed covenant could ensue.
In Douglass’s hands, the Black jeremiad did create room for African Americans within one of the most important mythic narratives of American identity, but it also subsumed the particular interests and needs of the Black population underneath the transcendent, atemporal purposes for the country’s divine mission. What begins as a rhetoric grounded in what Charles Taylor (1992) has called the politics of recognition—a view of Black identity that acknowledges its difference and unique lived experience—becomes an act of mis-recognition as Black identity is reworked to serve the interests of a White majority that may or may not see its own end as commensurate with that of Black America. Douglass’s immanent philosophy of protest confronts power and injustice through acts of dissociation that transform uniquely Black experiences into moral corrective. But, at the same time, it also resolves this dissociation through an association where the lived experience of African Americans serves the country’s divine mission as articulated at its moment of origin. One might hope that the standards of justice and participation that Douglass attributed to the Founders would be a sufficient to ensure equality and justice for African Americans moving forward, but even Douglass seemed to have his doubts.
In yet another 5th of July oration, this time in 1875, Douglass addressed a crowd of largely Black Washingtonians. He said, “Now when this mighty quarrel has ceased, when all the asperities and resentments have gone as they are sure to go … when this great white race has renewed its vows of patriotism and flowed back into its accustomed channels, the question for us is: in what position will this stupendous reconciliation leave the colored people?” (1991a, p. 417) Despite the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, despite the fact that African Americans were now citizens, Douglass noted that European and African Americans were not associated in the same way that people of European origin were united among themselves. Douglass said, “They are of the same color. United by blood, by a common origin, by a common language, by a common literature, by a common glory, and by the same grand historic associations and achievements. So sure as the stars shine in the heavens, and the rivers run to the sea, so sure will the white people North and South abandon their quarrel and become friends” (p. 417). When they become friends again, Douglass said, the brief moment of cross-racial association that characterized the Reconstruction era would be abandoned. A new or, perhaps more accurately, an old dissociation—Black from White—would emerge again. Given these facts, the only path forward, explained Douglass, was for the African American community to gain as much political and economic independence as it could. Speaking in 1875, Douglass could not know how prophetic his speech would be; nevertheless, he clearly foresaw a future when the oxymoron “separate but equal” would become the law of the land. Expressed in Burkean terms, the Being/Nothing pair would continue, even as the official language of slavery disappeared.
Conclusion
Today, Black Lives Matter protestors will sometimes state in media interviews, “This isn’t your grandmother’s civil rights movement.” What they mean by this phrase differs, of course, depending on the activist and the organization. Black Lives Matter is not a single voice but a multifaceted coalition of individuals and nonprofits attempting to shift public opinion on issues that range from neighborhood policing to inner-city education. Nevertheless, when contemporary activists say that they are not going to make the mistakes of the civil rights past, I suspect that they are reflecting a concern with the dissociations and associations I have outlined in this article.
Contemporary protestors have embraced the dissociative strategies used by Frederick Douglass. They see themselves and the Black community as estranged from a majority culture marked by an invisible Whiteness and the current norms of our political system. But, at the same time, they steadfastly refuse to associate their movement with the nation’s origins. They do not look to the Founders for inspiration nor do they use the Declaration of Independence as evidence for the legitimacy of their demands. One might argue that this is one reason why the Black Lives Matter movement does not have a broader appeal. But, on the other hand, the protestors are explicit that they do not want broad appeal if it means that they are co-opted by the political establishment, White or Black. They fear precisely the final paradox that I’ve discussed in this article—that in the process of associating themselves with distinctively “American” principles and myths their interests will be subsumed within a mostly White understanding of citizenship and national interest (see Wilson, 2016).
But beyond this point, the diverse set of protestors who coalesce around the Black Lives Matter movement don’t believe it should be necessary to appeal to America’s original goodness or divine mission. They contend that the basic humanity of Black people should prevent the too frequent deaths of Black youth at the hands of police. There is no need to appeal to the Founders when a Black body lies in the street for hours after it is murdered by police. In their rhetoric, basic human decency and not uniquely American configurations of equality and freedom should be sufficient reason for every citizen, regardless of color, to demand changes to the current system. Perhaps, then, the manner in which Frederick Douglass is rendered in contemporary political protest is not so much based on a poor understanding of his actual position. Rather, it reflects how contemporary political protest has embraced the dissociative dimensions of his rhetoric, while, simultaneously, rejecting his use of an associative strategy where Black lives are rendered as the vehicle for America’s redemption.