This week The Extraordinary Times caught up with David W. Blight, Sterling Professor of History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. In 2018, Simon and Schuster published his biography Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, which won the Pulitzer Prize in History, the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize, the Bancroft Prize for History, and the Francis Parkman Prize. Blight will give the 2023 John E. Dolibois History Prize Lecture, “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom,” at Miami University’s Hamilton Campus this Thursday, March 30 at 7 p.m. Free public event, Q&A and booksigning to follow.
* You describe Frederick Douglass as America's "Prophet of Freedom." How did his prophetic nature help him foresee the future? Douglass did not foresee the future. But in the tradition of the Judeo-Christian Hebrew prophets, whom he greatly admired and modelled, he was one of those rare people who could find the language, the voice, with which to capture the meaning of events, however traumatic or triumphal. He was a prophet in his use of words, his ability to explain the predicaments of his era. And he saw deeply into the story, the experience, the horror, and the human transcendence of slavery. * Why is Douglass such a resonant figure in American culture? Douglass is so important today because he gave us, better than anyone in the nineteenth century, an analysis and a story about race, America's most enduring issue. If one looks carefully at the dilemmas, the problems, the great issues he faced and endlessly analyzed in such remarkable prose, it is clear that most of those questions are still very much with us in our lives every day. * How might Douglass be remembered differently had he followed fellow abolitionist John Brown in the 1859 raid at Harper's Ferry? If Douglass had really joined John Brown and the attack on Harpers Ferry, he would have been captured and hanged by the state of Virginia. We would remember him only as the abolitionist who died on the gallows after Brown. * How do you characterize Douglass's changing relationship with Abraham Lincoln? Douglass and Lincoln started in very different places ideologically about slavery and its future. But they grew toward one another between late 1862 and the spring of 1865. That process of growth and change from being a fierce critic of Lincoln to a supporter and admirer in 1864 is one of the great stories in Douglass's life. * You taught High School in Flint, Michigan for several years before pursuing a career in academia. What lessons have you taken from the classrooms of Flint to the classrooms of Yale? I love this question. I learned how to teach in Flint. I learned how to fail and succeed in the classroom. I learned to take my students seriously but also not suffer fools. I learned then, and still discover it every day, that teaching is one part personality and one part knowledge. You must have both, but students will quickly know if you do not have the knowledge. My Yale students take their learning very seriously most of the time. At the high school level in an industrial working class city, I had to find some way every day to inspire my students. That is the best training experience for teaching one can have.
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AuthorMatthew Smith, PhD (History). Public Programs at Miami University Regionals. Historian of Appalachia, the Ohio Valley, & the early American republic. Archives
February 2024
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