Troubling the white supremacy–black inferiority paradigm: Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown in Europe

Abstract

This article examines the geographical and metaphorical journeys of such nineteenth-century antislavery lecturers as Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown, who crossed the Atlantic to visit Great Britain, France, and Italy. Black travellers crossed the ocean, as Douglass put it, to combat ‘American prejudice against the darker colored races’. Douglass and Brown used different strategies that were available to black men to perform racial protest against discrimination and prejudice. As they moved across the ocean, they challenged American white supremacist ideology by reinventing their identities as cultured cosmopolitans engaged in a journey from discrimination to acculturation, moving toward acceptance and equality.