Hidden Practices: Frederick Douglass on

Segregation and Black Achievement, 1887

Frederick Douglass, ca. 1870 (Gilder Lehrman Collection)

Frederick Douglass recalled his feelings when slavery came to an end, after so
much work and so many sacrifices. I felt that I had reached the end of the noblest
and best part of my life, he admitted. But Douglass hardly underestimated the
challenges facing the four million people emancipated in part by his labors. Even
during the Civil War, he foresaw that sullen, silent, and gloomy but subdued hate
shall settle upon the Southern mind. In the face of what was sure to be white
resistance to every step of black freedom, a profounder wisdom, holier zeal, than
belongs to the prosecution of war, will be required.
Once freedom came, Douglass offered surprising counsel to Northern whites who
asked what should be done with the Negro: Do nothing with us! ... All I ask is,
give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone! Douglass wanted black
Southerners simply to have a fair chance. He wanted them to be treated like other
Americans, with equality in the courts, at the polls, and in the marketplace.
Douglass felt confident that black Americans would succeed if they had the
opportunity.
Fittingly, Douglasss major theme in the lectures he gave in the postwar era was
Self-Made Men. He gave that speech fifty times, before every kind of audience.
The talk echoed the themes of his great speeches of the antebellum years, when he
told the story of his own self-fashioning as he made himself free. Douglass saw the
harsh trials of the post-Reconstruction South as a test for black Americans, a
crucible in which their greatness would be forged. He wanted his fellow black
citizens to prove themselves, without aid and without excuse. Poverty stood as the
greatest enemy of African Americans, he told a black audience in the middle of
Reconstruction, because poverty makes us a helpless, hopeless, dependent, and
dispirited people, the target for the contempt and scorn of all around us. As soon
as black Americans could display a class of men noted for enterprise, industry,
economy and success, he assured another African American audience, we shall
no longer have any trouble in the matter of civil and political rights. In his emphasis
on individual accomplishment and on the power of the marketplace as the ultimate
judge of worth, Douglass shifted the responsibility on to black shoulders. His words,

perhaps to our surprise, sound more like Booker T. Washington than W.E.B. Du
Bois.
Douglasss consistent view of black progress is clearly on display in letter from
1887. Use the opportunities before you, it counseled its unknown recipient, and
have confidence that effort and experience will succeed. A wonderful revolution in
the public sentiment of the Southern states had taken place because black
lawyers were permitted to practice in Southern courts, Douglass heard.
In the schools of the South, though, he reported, African American people faced
discrimination in funding; as a result, black schools suffered from shorter days and
lower-paid teachers. Douglass wanted black teachers for black schools, fearing that
the only whites who would teach black students were forced to do so by their
necessities rather than by dedication.

Frederick Douglass to an unknown recipient, November 23, 1887. (Gilder Lehrman

Collection)

Frederick Douglass, speaking in the determined language of American self-help, did

not anticipate such a campaign against black people, brought on by the fears their
very success unleashed. But, in his remaining years, he would fight against
discrimination just as he had fought against slavery, as a violation of American
ideals. In this letter, so balanced between hopefulness and despair, Douglass
observes that Our wrongs are not so much now in written laws which all may see
but the hidden practices of a people who have not yet abandoned the idea of
Mastery and dominion over their fellow man. Unfortunately, the ideas of mastery
and dominion were soon to take legal form. White southerners, worried that their
control was being eroded by the very forces of black advancement Douglass
celebrated, began to create an elaborate system of laws for all to see, that
instituted white determination to sustain dominion over their fellow man. Even as
Douglass wrote this letter, legislators across the South were forging laws of
segregation and disfranchisement that would shackle the South for generations to
come. In the late 1880s, unsatisfied with leaving black people alone and seeing
them prosper, white southerners segregated one public space after another and
systematically undermined black voting.
Edward L. Ayersis president of the University of Richmond. He has authored or
edited ten books, several focused on the history of the American South and the
legacy of the Civil War, includingThe Promise of the New South: Life after
Reconstruction(1992);In the Presence of Mine Enemies: Civil War in the Heart of

America, 18591863(2003), which received the 2004 Bancroft Prize for

Distinguished Book in American History; andAmericas War: Talking about the Civil
War and Emancipation on their 150th Anniversaries(2011).