Frederick Douglass is relevant now, more than you think

Unfortunately, I have to state this before anything else. This is not a story about who Frederick Douglass was, and there is no question that he has both been influential and dead for a long time. This is a story about what we can learn from Frederick Douglass and a disagreement that occurred between him and the Women’s Suffrage movement about the principals of their respective social movements. This disagreement ultimately created a rift between them and their social movements, although it didn’t have to. This is an opportunity for history to teach Americans an important lesson about how we can bring these current social movements together to create sustainable change in the 21st century.

If we are going to talk about social justice in the 21st century, it’s necessary to take a step back and and look at two social movements that are raising a lot of attention now, but have actually been in existence for almost two hundred years: The women’s rights movement and the black lives matter movement. In general, social justice movements are not linear, and they take a long time to develop and gain support. In trying to come to grips with what is going on now and how we can all get involved, I keep thinking back to this history lesson I learned, about the rift that happened between Frederick Douglass and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B Anthony.

Let me set the scene. Born into slavery in 1817 or 1818, Frederick Douglass became one of the most outspoken advocates of abolition and women’s rights in the 19th century. He believed that, “Right is of no sex, truth is of no color,” and he was a prolific writer and speaker on the subjects. If you go through many of Douglass’ writings throughout his years, it is clear that he urged an immediate end to slavery and supported women’s rights activists in their crusade for suffrage as well. Because of this conviction, he gained the attention of the Suffragette movement and later on teamed up with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Douglass strongly supported suffrage for women, but also noted that white women, already, enjoyed some amount of electoral privilege through the family, something which both black women and black men did not have access to. However, Stanton argued that one should not go without the other and these were unalienable human rights. Both were advocates for emancipation and equal voting rights, but there was disagreement about which social norms were more oppressive to an individuals identity and human capital.