Penn Press Log

Activism After Douglass--a Guest Post by Shawn Leigh Alexander

This second guest blog post in our series on Frederick Douglass considers his legacy shortly after his death. Shawn Leigh Alexander, author of An Army of Lions: The Civil Rights Struggle Before the NAACP, observes that while the next generation of activists respected and honored Douglass for his undeniable achievements, many did not follow in his footsteps when it came to political strategy or party allegiance. Then, as now, African Americans questioned the value of affiliating with a single political party.

Activism After Douglass: Building on the Achievements, Departing from the Methods

Frederick Douglass, former slave, abolitionist, and Republican politician was the most prominent African American political leader and activist in years directly following the Civil War. In the early 1880s, however, his motto, “the Republican Party is the ship, all else is the Sea,” was losing favor among a growing segment of the black population. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s segregation increased and more importantly, African Americans were systematically disfranchised throughout the South. As blacks were stripped of their suffrage they lost the fragile footing they held in the political arena during Reconstruction and therefore the political tactics of Douglass’s generation were becoming increasingly less effective.

In response to this “revolution gone backwards,” a younger generation of activists began seeking a new model to agitate for their political and civil rights. T. Thomas Fortune, a journalist and activist in New York, was one of the most vocal advocates for change. “Enough!” Fortune argued. Douglass was a wise man but “in no sense a prophet.” Fortune urged the African American community to look out for itself first. “Throw away sentimentality in politics,” he urged, and act on the motto “Race first; then party.” In Fortune’s estimation, too many black leaders had sold out the race and themselves in the quest for power. As he explained, “Instead of loving the race, . . . each one of us seeks to get as far away from his African origin as circumstances will permit.” And in doing so, black leaders swallow “without a grimace every insult to their manhood or their rights which pseudo friends and avowed enemies have heaped upon them.” “You do not need” maintained Fortune, “to be a Democrat or a Republican to force from politicians your honest rights: You simply need to be men, conscious of your power.”

This political motto was pushed forth in 1887 when the fiery editor called for the creation of a national civil rights organization, the National Afro- American League. He had first raised the issue in early 1884 following the infamous Supreme Court decision on civil rights and the Danville, Virginia, riot of the previous year. With such backward steps taking place, the editor called for an organization that would stand as an “uncompromising defense of the race with which we are identified.” Using a line Douglass himself had used before, Fortune declared, “Let us agitate! agitate! AGITATE! until the protest shall wake the nation from its indifference.” “You must fight your own battles,” Fortune urged. “You must come together. Brave men, men of brains—these must come to the front, and laying aside all selfish and personal aims labor for the upbuilding of the race and the full concession to us of each and every right guaranteed to us by the Constitution of the United States. And the masses must sustain such men.”

The Afro-American League became the country’s first national civil rights organization, and though many were trying to move away from Douglass and his generation, they did not forget who laid the groundwork for them to protest for their rights. When the League delegates came to Chicago in January 1890 to form the organization, Douglass’ portrait was displayed on the stage as a symbol of race pride and civil rights activism. Despite many trying to find an alternative to Douglass’s model, he was still the father of the struggle and historic symbol of civil rights leadership and activism. As Fortune would later explain in poetic verse at the dedication of the Douglass Monument and the formation of the Afro-American Council:

We cannot measure here the dizzy heights he trod
To who this glyptic shaft is lifted from the sod,
Towards the matchless azure of sweet Freedom’s skies,
If we forget the depths whence God bade him arise,
Above the slave’s log cabin and a sireless birth,
To be a prince among the children of the earth!
No giant who has placed one foot upon the land
And one upon the sea, with power to them command,
To bid the angry turbulence of each be still,
And have them bend obedient to his master’s will –
Ever started lower in the social scale them than he –
This Champion of the Slave, this Spokesman of the Free!

Shawn Leigh Alexander is Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies and the interim director of the Langston Hughes Center at the University of Kansas. An Army of Lions: The Civil Rights Struggle Before the NAACP is now available.

Douglass and the Daguerreotype--a Guest Post by Marcy J. Dinius

Frederick Douglass, who was born on an unknown date in February 1818 and died on this day in 1895, plays a significant role in a number of forthcoming Penn Press books on American history and culture. To mark the life and legacy of the iconic civil rights activist, we invited a few of our authors to share their thoughts on Douglass with blog readers. Marcy J. Dinius, author of The Camera and the Press: American Visual and Print Culture in the Age of the Daguerreotype, writes on the surprising connection between Douglass's birth and the birth of photography.

Douglass and the Daguerreotype

Frederick Douglass’s first year of life beyond slavery’s grasp coincided with the birth of photography. Word of the daguerreotype, a wondrous new invention for making incredibly detailed and lifelike images, was published in every newspaper that the self-taught reader Douglass would have encountered in late 1839 and early 1840. When he became a newspaper editor himself just a few years later, Douglass’s work kept him up-to-date on the latest technological advances as they circulated through the periodical press. He was well aware of innovations in the daguerreotype process and their anticipated contributions to the medium’s popularly celebrated accuracy and affordability. 

In time, Douglass became so interested in the connection between  the visual arts, imagination, humanity, and progress toward liberty and justice that he wrote and delivered a set of lectures on the subject between 1861 and 1865. He began both the earlier and the later versions of his “Lecture on Pictures” with an extended consideration of the daguerreotype. After being daguerreotyped multiple times in the 1840s and 1850s, the former slave had become a man in his daguerreian portrait. His lectures suggest that if his audiences were to look at his or any other African American’s image and reflect on its likeness to their own, the daguerreotype would show them the reality of blacks’ humanity and awaken them to their own.

In the sun’s “picture gallery,” Douglass declares in the most complete version of his speech, “[m]en of all conditions may see themselves as others see them. What was once the exclusive luxury of the rich and great is now within reach of all. The humbled servant girl whose income is but a few shillings per week may now possess a more perfect likeness of herself than noble ladies and even royalty, with all its precious treasures could purchase fifty years ago.” The “ease and cheapness with which we get our pictures has brought us all within range of the daguerrian apparatus.”

Douglass compared the daguerreian portrait to the mirror. Mirrors were once luxuries for the wealthy that had become widely available over time. Both mirrors and daguerreotypes allowed people of “all conditions” to experience a full sense of selfhood by complementing one’s internal self-awareness with an embodied view of one’s self as it appears to others. In the uniquely reflective polished daguerreotype plate, this view itself is also double: one is able to see oneself in the moment of seeing oneself as a portrait on the mirror-like surface of the image.

In Douglass’s view, shaped by discussions of daguerreotypy in popular print, the democracy realized by the birth of photography not only rested in the daguerreotype’s affordability but also in its ability to make the full experience of selfhood available to all. The the daguerreian medium differed from other forms of photography in both material characteristics and in social and political consequence. For Douglass, the daguerreian medium had become the message of democracy.

Marcy J. Dinius is an Assistant Professor of English at DePaul University. The Camera and the Press: American Visual and Print Culture in the Age of the Daguerreotype will be available this spring.

Rainforest Warriors--Now in Paperback

Rainforest Warriors: Human Rights on Trial
Richard Price
280 pages | 6 x 9 | 41 illus.
Cloth 2010 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4300-0 | $55.00 | £36.00
Paper 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-2137-4 | $27.50 | £18.00
A volume in the Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights series

Rainforest Warriors is a historical, ethnographic, and documentary account of a people, their threatened rainforest, and their successful attempt to harness international human rights law in their fight to protect their way of life—part of a larger story of tribal and indigenous peoples that is unfolding all over the globe. Read more . . .

 

Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Saunders Robinson.

Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here.

This Month's Podcast: Anthropologists Explore Sustainable Lifeways

For the November podcast, we dip into the archives for a second listen to Naomi F. Miller, Katherine M. Moore, and Kathleen Ryan from University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. The group discusses the facets of Sustainable Lifeways, a volume which explores how humans adapt to changes in their environment over time.

Women's Health and the World's Cities--Now Available

Women's Health and the World's Cities
Edited by Afaf Ibrahim Meleis, Eugenie L. Birch, and Susan M. Wachter
328 pages | 6 x 9 | 29 illus.
Cloth 2011 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4353-6 | $55.00 | £36.00
A volume in the City in the Twenty-First Century series

"While global women's health has received serious attention from scholars, the profound impact of the environment on women's well-being has been poorly understood until now. Essential reading for anyone working to improve the lives of women."--Nancy Fugate Woods, University of Washington School of Nursing

This collection of essays, written by urban planners, scholars, medical practitioners, and activists, examines the impact of urban living on the well-being of women and girls in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the United States.

Read more . . .

Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Saunders Robinson.
Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here

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Forgotten Genocides--Now Available

Forgotten Genocides: Oblivion, Denial, and Memory
Edited by René Lemarchand
224 pages | 6 x 9 | 4 illus.
Cloth 2011 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4335-2 | $49.95 | £32.50
A volume in the Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights series

In eight case studies written by recognized experts this book offers a major contribution to the comparative analysis of genocidal phenomena. Besides tapping a rich vein of empirical data, this collective effort breaks new ground in analyzing how denial, oblivion, or manipulated memory tends to mask the hideous realities of mass killing.

Read more . . .

Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Saunders Robinson.
Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here.

The Anti-Slavery Project--Now Available

The Anti-Slavery Project: From the Slave Trade to Human Trafficking
Joel Quirk
320 pages | 6 x 9
Cloth 2011 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4333-8 | $65.00 | £42.50
A volume in the Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights series

Historian and human rights scholar Joel Quirk examines the evolution of political opposition to slavery from the mid-eighteenth century to the present day. He offers an original diagnosis of the underlying causes driving one of the most pressing human rights problems in the world today.

Read more . . .

Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Saunders Robinson.
Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here.

Uganda Fund Accepting Donations in Honor of Richard Pierre Claude

Penn Press staff were saddened to hear of the death of author, editor, and human rights education pioneer Richard Pierre Claude. Claude was Professor Emeritus of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland and founding editor of Human Rights Quarterly. He co-edited Human Rights Education for the Twenty-First Century with George J. Andreopoulos and Human Rights in the World Community: Issues and Action with Burns H. Weston. Claude was also the author of Science in the Service of Human Rights, which will be released in paperback this fall.

To honor the memory of Richard Pierre Claude, UgandaFund.org is accepting contributions to the Pader Girls Academy in northern Uganda.

The Making of a Mediterranean Emirate--Now Available

The Making of a Mediterranean Emirate: Ifrīqiya and Its Andalusis, 1200-1400
Ramzi Rouighi
248 pages | 6 x 9 | 3 maps
Cloth 2011 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4310-9 | $55.00 | £36.00
A volume in the Middle Ages Series

"This book is a much needed contribution to an understudied field. The use of narrative histories as source material is where Rouighi's remarkable talents as a historian emerge. He demonstrates that by asking the right questions, one can write social and economic history using sources focused on other agendas. Not only does he painstakingly extract information on land tenure, commerce, commodities, and rural life that the chronicles almost never address directly, he also explains the historical contexts in which the sources themselves came into being and what kinds of biases are embedded in them. Herein lies one of this book's major contributions: its simultaneous treatment of history and historiography."--Marina Rustow, Johns Hopkins University

This book argues that between 1200 and 1400 Ifrīqiya was not an economic or political region. It shows how Emirism, a political ideology that emerged at the end of the fourteenth century, led both medieval sources and modern historians to imagine Ifrīqiya as a region.

Read more . . .

Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Saunders Robinson.
Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here

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A Note from The Humanity Editorial Collective

Here's a note from the Humanity Editorial Collective about the latest issue of their journal.

Dear Readers:

The journal's second issue is out! Please see the table of contents here, which includes a dossier on piracy. Our website includes two teasers from the dossier, Daniel-Heller Roazen's introduction to our translation of Carl Schmitt's "The Concept of Piracy" (1937), and a journal interview with Lauren Benton and Dan Edelstein, authors of recent books on early modern piracy. The website also features an ongoing blog, along with the entirety of the inaugural issue.

The rest of the second issue is available to subscribers, and includes articles on piracy in contemporary Africa and international attempts to suppress it; a photo dossier from Nick Heavican on sites of genocide in Cambodia, linked to Brigitte Sion's ethnography from the scene; a piece on the law of war during the Mau Mau emergency and the Algerian war; and a critique of global constitutionalism in the name of legal pluralism.

You can find a personal subscription form here, and a recommendation to send to your local university librarian here.

Enjoy!

The Humanity Editorial Collective

Visit www.humanityjournal.org for more information.