May 23, 2021
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.
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.
My gratitude to you, dear Prof. HCR, for having taken on so many extra students this past year. You have taught us, enriched us, made us dialogue and think again in ways that allowed us to experience the vim and vigor of youth, pride for our country and for an historical past that many of us had forgotten or were learning for the first time.
For all of the above, I thank you. But tonight, my thanks are even more profound. You validated the risk I took to leave my homeland on 24th December, 1979, and again, to pack everything, step on a plane, and say goodbye to my adopted European home in 1990. The years in-between, those spaces of unknowing and unknowns, have been fraught with joblessness, pennilessness, fear of failure, moving from abode to abode, losses of friends and the security of family -- worrying because I also put the lives of my two sons in jeopardy.
Tonight, I know that those gambles were were not for naught. Thank you!
It's been 9 months since I became aware of you and your writing. Most of those were the dark months of the last administration. Your writing was a beacon in a howling wilderness. So I suppose I didn't think anything could beat that. Till you wrote this.
I think we who survived the last gruesome 15 months—and all the days since Jan. 20th, 2017—are going to be a long time processing what all that's done to us and how we proceed. As I've emerged from Covid isolation that's felt monumental and overwhelming. Then a post like this comes along. It's like the brush of a mother's hand on a cheek. It's going to be ok. Not easy; work to be done. But we'll get there.