It’s a small newspaper– just 8 pages–in a small town–Linden, Alabama, population 1,936 at most recent count. This week it’s caught wider attention, and not in a good way. After its editor-publisher wrote an editorial calling for a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan and lynchings, I found myself thinking not for the first time about the brilliance of Frederick Douglass.
Frederick Douglass has fascinated me since I saw an exhibit of photographs of him. He was the most photographed person of the 19th century; a poem in my newest book is based on his belief that the democracy of photography would mean the end of prejudice and hatred. Well….anyhow…
So in the past few weeks I’ve been reading both a new biography, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, by David W. Blight and Douglass’s own work, the first two of his three autobiographies, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave and My Bondage and My Freedom. Blight is a major authority on Douglass and his book has won rave reviews everywhere. I’m not sure why it doesn’t seem as outstanding to me, but it feels far from the intellectual, moral, and emotional power of Douglass’s own writings. So I turned back to them, and found the cautionary tale I was reminded of by the Alabama editorial
Douglass points out over and over how the system of slavery degrades both slave and slaveholder. He writes of how his “owner’s” wife, who had never before held enslaved people, was kind to him when he first arrived in the household at about age 8. She even began teaching him to read. But, as Douglass described, slaveholding was incompatible with kindness, eroding the souls of slaveowners as it devastated the bodies and spirits of the enslaved. She ended the reading lessons became a harsh and unforgiving taskmistress.
He writes of the overseers, the class of men, too poor to own slaves themselves, whose economic value rested entirely on how much work they could get out of the slaves they managed and who, therefore, were focused on using whatever horrifying level of cruelty could drive that production. Said Douglass, “They have been arranged and classified by that great law of attraction, which determines the spheres and affinities of men; which ordains, that men, whose malign and brutal propensities predominate over their moral and intellectual endowments, shall, naturally, fall into those employments which promise the largest gratification to those predominating instincts or propensities. The office of overseer takes this raw material of vulgarity and brutality, and stamps it as a distinct class of southern society.”
But Douglass saved special condemnation for slaveholders who clothed themselves in religious piety. Only a few decades ago Martin Luther King called 11 o’clock on Sunday “the most segregated hour in America.” Only a hundred a years before that, Douglass wrote that the worst fate that could befall an enslaved person was to have a religious person as his or her “owner.”
“Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ,” he wrote, “I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked… The man who robs me of my earnings at the end of each week meets me as a class-leader on Sunday morning to show me the way of life, and the path of salvation….He who proclaims it a religious duty to read the Bible denies me the right of learning to read the name of the God who made me. He who is the religious advocate of marriage robs whole millions of its sacred influence and leaves them to the ravages of wholesale pollution. The warm defender of the sacredness of the family relation is the same that scatters whole families—sundering husbands and wives, parents and children, sisters and brothers…. We see the thief preaching against theft, the adulterer against adultery. We have men sold to build churches, women sold to support the gospel, and babes sold to purchase Bibles for the poor heathen! “
It’s not hard to imagine any eager readers or the editor-publisher as the logical spiritual descendants of those self-righteous slaveholders and vicious overseers. To their credit, the citizens of Linden, Alabama don’t seem to be reading the local paper very much these days. And on the current issue’s masthead the position of editor-publisher is listed as, ”to be announced.” It’s a start.