Heather Cox Richardson, who teaches history at Boston College, writes "Letters From An American," a daily commentary on American politics and government. On May 23, 2021, she wrote a lovely tribute to Frederick Douglass, who is pictured above:
Frederick Douglass wrote his autobiography three times, but to protect the people who helped him run away from enslavement, he did not explain how he had managed to get away until the last version.
Douglass escaped from slavery in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1838. In his twenty years of life, he had had a series of enslavers, some harsher than others, and one who almost killed him. But by 1838, he was a skilled worker in the local shipyards, earning good money for his master and enjoying a measure of freedom, as well as protection. He had good friends in the area and had fallen in love with the woman who would become his wife.
It was enslavement, but within that existence, it was a pretty good position. His peers in the cotton fields of the Deep South were beaten like animals, their deaths by violence unremarkable. Douglass himself had come close to being "sold down the river"—a term that referred to the slave convoys that traveled down the Mississippi River from older, worn out lands in the East to fresh, raw lands in Mississippi and Louisiana—and he knew that being forced to labor on a plantation in the Deep South would kill him.
His relatively safe position would have been enough for a lot of people. They would have thanked God for their blessings and stayed put. In 1838, Frederick Douglass was no different than they were: an unknown slave, hoping to get through each day. Like them, he might have accepted his conditions and disappeared into the past, leaving the status quo unchanged.
But he refused.
His scheme for escaping to freedom was ridiculously easy. In the days of slavery, free black sailors carried documents with them to prove to southern authorities that they were free, so they could move from northern and foreign ports to southern ports without being detained. These were the days before photos, so officials described the man listed on the free papers as they saw him: his color, distinguishing marks, scars. Douglass worked in shipyards, and had met a sailor whose free papers might cover Douglass... if the white official who looked at them didn't look too closely. Risking his own freedom, that sailor lent Douglass his papers.
To escape from slavery, all Douglass had to do was board a train. That's it: he just had to step on a train. If he were lucky, and the railroad conductor didn't catch him, and no one recognized him and called him out, he could be free. But if he were caught, he would be sold down river, almost certainly to his death.
To me, Douglass's decision to step aboard that train is everything. How many of us would have taken that risk, especially knowing that even in the best case, success would mean trying to build a new life, far away from everyone we had ever known? Douglass's step was such a little one, such an easy one... except that it meant the difference between life and death, the difference between a forgotten, enslaved shipyard worker and the great Frederick Douglass, who went on to become a powerful voice for American liberty.
This is almost all of Richardson's text from her May 23, 2021 letter. I am saving her closing words - the best part - to follow my own comment.
My comment is this. We who are alive today, and I think particularly Americans, must summon up all of our personal courage - above every other thing. We need courage because we are called - we are required - to step away from the familiar existence in which we find ourselves. We are called upon - we are required - to transform our world.
If we don't summon the courage to make radical changes in how we live, global warming is going to destroy our world - our human world, as well as the World of Nature.
Our nation's long history of racial injustice must also be rectified in some fundamental way. We must move beyond the accomplishments of the Civil Rights Movement, as significant as they were. They were not enough. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. got us to the mountaintop. We need to move down to the promised land he spoke of, and we need to move together. No more delay!
The domination of our society and economy by the corporations and those of great personal wealth must also be overcome. We cannot allow that proverbial "one percent" of the population to gather in and sequester the overwhelming majority of the resources that flow from a society and economy that depends upon the contributions of us all.
We must disarm. We must end the perpetual wars in which we are engaged. We must end the nuclear terror that threatens our world and all of us who are alive right now. This terror is, as William Faulkner said in accepting the Nobel Prize in 1950, a "tragedy ... a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it."
None of these things - and there are others, too, of course - will be easy to accomplish. But they must be done, and none of these things can be achieved if we don't have the courage to change, to risk ourselves, to risk our current lives, and to leave behind what seems to be a "pretty good position" to arrive at the place where we need to be.
Here is how Heather Cox Richardson ends her story about Frederick Douglass:
Tomorrow, my students will graduate, and every year, students ask me if I have any advice for them as they leave college or university, advice I wish I had had at their age. The answer is yes, after all these years of living and of studying history, I have one piece of advice:
When the day comes that you have to choose between what is just good enough and what is right... find the courage to step on the train.
"When the day comes...."
But don't we all know, really, that the day has come? Don't we all know, deep down, that the time to travel on has now arrived? Now is the time in which we need to summon up our courage to make great changes. Individually. And together.
Let's not pretend that our "pretty good position" (for those lucky enough to be in such a position) is a "good enough" place to be.
Step On The Train
Image Credit:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/oct/28/david-blight-on-frederick-douglass-i-call-him-beautifully-human
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