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Example research essay topic: African American People Bondage And My Freedom - 1,042 words

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Frederick Douglass tried to evoke a desire for Liberation amongst the African-American people in his writings and oratory. To many people, Douglass appeared to be the black Moses, leading his people to freedom not only physically, but mentally and getting there by non-violent means. Douglass believed that if he could successfully show that blacks were in fact equal to whites, he thought that in turn everyone would recognize this and put an end to slavery. Frederick Douglass has emerged as the representative black male writer of his time period. As is well known, Douglass, the son of a slave woman and a white slave master, spent the first part of his life as a slave in Maryland, escaping to New Bedford, Massachusetts in 1838 (Levine 3).

Fearing fugitive slave hunters, Douglass sailed to the British Isles, and when he returned in 1847, he established the North Star, thus beginning a sixteen-year career as an editor and publisher of three different antislavery newspapers. In the middle of this journalistic career, he printed an expanded version of his autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), a text that articulated some of the key tenets of his newspapers temperance and the importance of pursuing black elevation in the United States. As a slave himself, Douglass in his person embodies the possibilities of regeneration. In My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass signals his entry into revolutionary tradition. And thus he presents himself in his autobiography as a national representative, fighting not only for its moral and political principles but for the very civilization that served as a foundation for the development of those principles. In this work, Douglass implying that blacks, by following Douglass s representative example, can overcome what Douglass refers to as the ten thousand discouragements which best their existence, in this country (Holland 58) he nonetheless presents a disturbing picture of the ways in which intemperate whites, by enslaving and degrading blacks, have created a separate black caste in the United States a nation within a nation.

Images of unrestrained mobility and unlimited freedom appear everywhere in his autobiography. As a slave child Douglass has the short lived joy of running wild on the plantation with virtually no restrictions; in doing so he experiences what the older Douglass regards as the veriest freedom. Desires for mobility are central to his famous apostrophe to the sailboats on Chesapeake Bay You are loosed from your moorings, and free; I am fast in my chains and am a slave! and the achievement of mobility is central to his life as a freeman. (Levine 138) Douglass also points out that blacks, particularly those who were once enslaved, develop special ties (or roots) to their native land which would make a sort of transplantation. The argument that Douglass early works were geared to blacks who were previously enslaves is evident (after criticism from fellow blacks i. e.

Martin Delany) when Douglass argues that a free black man (like Delany) who has never been a slave has little understanding of the anxieties attending flight and mobility. It is difficult for a freeman to enter into the feelings of fugitives. He cannot see things in the same light with the slave. Douglass seems to stress the thought of A free state around me, and a free earth under my feet (Jacobs 189).

Douglass famous speech What to the Slave is the Fourth of July (July 5, 1852) showed Douglass fight for the moral and political principles that rightfully belonged to the African-American people. In one of the best known passages of the lecture, Douglass inquires rhetorically: What to the American Slave is Your Fourth 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; . To him, your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery. Douglass says that freedom can seem like the quick blaze, beautiful at first, but which subsiding, leaves the building charred and desolate.

The point, I think, that Douglass is trying to make here is that the escaped slave has achieved freedom not only from slavery, but from home as well. One of Douglass s central beliefs is that blacks have contributed to the development of the United States and thus have the right to call it home (Blight 104). He also believes that blacks come to develop an attachment to a place that, because it constitutes such a central part of their individual and group identity, neither can nor should be so easily dispensed with. Frederick Douglass made it his goal to lead the black people to freedom not only physically but mentally as well. He knew that in order to move on in life, one must overcome any obstacles that have, are now, and will continue to face them. Douglass tried to bring about this liberation by non-violent means.

He held the two wrongs don t make a right belief. Many other black thought that, that method was a waste of time. Some people were even furthermore disgusted because of the fact that Frederick Douglass actually interacted with whites. And he also took a liking to some parts of white culture. Douglass found this necessary because he felt that solving the problem, required understanding the cause. The cause turned out to be white culture.

So he took care of the problem the fastest and easiest way that he could. He believed that America could transcend racial differences by blending into a composite nationality. Douglass had always been driven by the quest for knowledge; nothing had given more meaning to his life than the freedom, self-understanding, and power he had attained through language and learning. Works Cited Page Blight, David W. Frederick Douglass Civil War: Keeping Faith In Jubilee. Louisiana State U.

Press, Baton Rouge, 1989. Jacobs, Donald M. (ed) Courage and Conscience: Black and White abolitionists in Boston. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1993. Holland, Frederick May.

Frederick Douglass: The Colored Orator. Haskell House, New York, 1969. Levine, Robert S. Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity. UNC Press, Chapel Hill, 1997.


Free research essays on topics related to: bondage and my freedom, frederick douglass, fourth of july, white culture, african american people

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