Frederick Douglass. - book reviews

African American Review, Fall, 1994 by John Sekora

Although the English building on my campus is not at all prepossessing, it is served by businesses with grandiloquent names: Master Key, Master Lock, Master Chem, Master Towel, Master Door, Master Glass, Master Brick, Master Casting, and Master Temp. Maintenance for the building--it lacks sufficient stature to be a Hall--is contracted to Master Craftsmen, repairs to Master Builders and Master Plumbers. With a Master-Card, of course, one has available equally lofty services: Master Assist, Master Purchase, Master Travel, Master Rental, Master Legal, and Master Medical. This is the shortest of short lists, yet it makes the point. As word and concept, master has a long and complex history, much of it interwoven with the history of slavery. The least one can say about it at the moment is that Americans are ambivalent about power relations under slavery. They might cheer the underdog in a sports event, but slavery is a different matter altogether.


Such an attitude is the more understandable when one realizes that the black figure most closely associated with slavery and writing about slavery is Booker T. Washington. Up from Slavery has never been out of print, nor has Washington's imprint upon American life. In the late 1970s I did an unsystematic search for towns, schools, and the like named for Washington. I stopped when the list went over 700; meanwhile, I found about fifty namings for Frederick Douglass, thirty for W. E. B. Du Bois, and ten for Malcolm X. Washington's eclipse of Douglass is a prominent feature of the politics of literary history in the 1890s. The expanded edition of the Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1st ed., 1881) appeared in 1892 and did not do well, selling only 399 copies in two years. Douglass's health was failing, and his death came in February 1895. Washington's Cotton Exposition address followed in seven months and gave him a national platform. Up from Slavery completed the apotheosis in 1901. The final stage came with Washington's recreation of Douglass in his own image in a biography of 1907--a book Washington cajoled and coerced publishers for the exclusive right to do, against Du Bois's superior, competitive claim. For three generations thereafter he would hold the mantle of destiny. Douglass's works all remained out of print until the watershed of 1960, when Benjamin Quarles published his edition of the Narrative for the Harvard University Press. do continue...