Frederick Douglass: The Trump administration needs to rewrite the historical past of slavery | EUROtoday

In Donald Trump’s United States, nice efforts are made to tear all of the pages from the historical past guide that don’t serve to construct and self -praise. The “National Park Service” has simply spent indications of black makes an attempt to self -exemption from its web site; Mountains of the shameful “fugitive slave act” from 1850, which decided that escaping slaves needed to be delivered by the north states to their gents. Overall, the impression is to be on condition that black individuals must thank the white on their knees for the advantages they’ve confirmed. An excellent cause to rediscover Frederick Douglass!

Douglass is the one American mental of the nineteenth century that has by no means commented racist, hostile to girls or anti -Semitic. In 1818 he was born in Maryland because the son of a black mom and a white father; He felt shameful that, in distinction to the white youngsters, he didn’t know his personal birthday. At the age of 20 he escaped underneath adventurous circumstances of slavery. It was not sufficient for him to lastly be a free man, all black Americans ought to see the sunshine of freedom. So he turned a pioneer of the abolitionist motion. At the identical time, he campaigned for the appropriate to vote for girls, which lastly stamped him as a radical for his time.

When Lincoln turned president, Frederick Douglass was skeptical about him. Finally, in his speech to his first inauguration, Lincoln had assured the racist southern state that he wouldn’t contact her “special institution”, slavery. But when the civil struggle broke out and black troopers fought for the Union’s trigger, Lincoln noticed that he couldn’t deny them full civil rights. Douglass turned a welcome visitor within the White House, he and Lincoln made friendship.

“Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave” appeared 20 years earlier than the top of the civil struggle. The guide was so brilliantly written that many white ones believed that it didn’t write it itself – nevertheless it instantly turned the bestseller. In Douglass’ guide, the viewers was in a position to learn that black males, girls and youngsters within the southern states lived underneath (as we might say right this moment) gulag-like circumstances: everybody was allowed to torture, rape, kill them.

The Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz wrote that the japanese mental differed from the Western intellectuals primarily by “he got something into the face”. According to this definition, America’s black intellectuals have been east of the east earlier than this class existed. In truth, it’s revealing to learn Douglass and Václav Havel’s essays in a row: the identical ethical urgency, the identical reluctance in opposition to Schönfärberi, typically sufficient, could be discovered right here.