Frederick Douglass on Revolution and Integration: A Problem in Moral Psychology

Abstract

The relation of revolution to integration, involving a twofold effort to overthrow an unjust order and then to reconstitute society on terms of equality and concord between the antecedent order’s ruling and subordinated classes, has long provoked controversy in Afro-American political thought. An exceptionally insightful analysis of this problematic relation appears in the political thought of the eminent nineteenth-century abolitionist and integrationist Frederick Douglass. In this article I explicate Douglass’s analysis. I first develop his arguments for the needfulness and nobility of the revolutionary spirit for Afro-Americans along with its proneness to dangerous excess. Next I consider his complex effort to sustain and to govern that spirit, or to render it supportive rather than destructive of the ultimate end of integration. In a concluding section, I consider how Douglass’s analysis may assist efforts to understand and to resolve ongoing race-related controversies in the post–civil rights era.