December Book Report: Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

David W. Blight’s thorough and thoughtful study of the life of Frederick Douglass is a heavy lift - literally.  At more than 750 pages, it’s not a quick read.  But it should be essential reading for our nation’s civic well-being, especially now, when our leadership’s collective ignorance about our racist history is so damaging to our ability to move forward together.

But I digress and that’s not fair to Frederick Douglass., whose incredible life and words are at the center of this book.

Born enslaved to a mother from whom he was separated before he ever had a chance to know her, Frederick Bailey learned to read thanks to Sophia Auld, a kindly slave mistress who had a fondness for the young boy who worked for her family.  When her husband learned that the enslaved boy had been taught how to read, he angrily ended the lessons, telling his wife that Frederick the reader was now, “forever unfit” for life as a slave.  The lessons stopped, but Frederick continued to read.

By then, the enslaved child’s fondness for and joy in reading was a settled fact.  In the coming years. as he was frequently denied the ability to read, Douglass’s fury about slavery would grow.  When he made his escape to the North at the age of 20, his ability to read helped him to make the journey successfully.  For the rest of his life, words that he read, spoke, and wrote would be at the center of Frederick Douglass’s existence.  His enduring importance and influence in this nation is a direct result of the words that fed his reader's soul and then poured from him.

The power of reading is not the only lesson to be taken from Blight’s amazing portrait of Douglass.  The book is a discourse on Douglass and his many contributions to the freedom that America celebrates.  There is abundant and shameful irony in the fact that those freedoms were given much greater meaning by a man born into slavery, and that reality was never lost on me as I read about Douglass’s life and his contributions to our national history.   My copy already has multiple pages marked to use as I teach about Douglass later this school year.

But to me personally, one of the most poignant aspects of Douglass’s story is in the simple power of reading.  I was a late reader as a child.  When the spark finally caught in the third grade, I was consumed by it.  Reading became my most absorbing passion and it opened worlds for my imagination.  I am a history teacher and thoughtful citizen because of the books I read.  Reading informs the person I am and the person I try to to be.  In so many ways, books fuel my world.  To know that Douglass’s world was similarly inspired by the power of the written word is thrilling.

As thrilling as the story of Douglass; as thrilling as the power of this incredibly important book.  In my mind, it's required reading for this nation.