Prophet Of Freedom Research Articles

Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. By David W. BlightFrederick Douglass: America’s Prophet. By D. H. Dilbeck

Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. By David W. BlightFrederick Douglass: America’s Prophet. By D. H. Dilbeck

Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight

Reviewed by: Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight L. Diane Barnes (bio) Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. By David W. Blight. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018. Pp. 888. Cloth, $37.50.) David W. Blight dons his public intellectual hat in this long-awaited new biography of Frederick Douglass, one of the nineteenth century's most important human rights activists. The first major biography of Douglass [End Page 642] in more than a generation, Blight's book was ten years in the making, and well worth the wait. The last major Douglass biography, William S. McFeely's Frederick Douglass (1991), overreached in interpretation and introduced a host of minor and unnecessary inaccuracies into the canon of Douglass scholarship. Blight's volume adds to other recent works in providing a major corrective to the historiography dominated by McFeely and others who relied almost exclusively on Douglass's own writings, especially his three autobiographies. This mellifluous biography joins Women in the World of Frederick Douglass (2017), by Leigh Fought, and The Lives of Frederick Douglass (2016), a close read of Douglass's own words by Robert Levine, to demonstrate that there is still much to learn about the Lion of Anacostia. By incorporating the copious correspondence surrounding Douglass's circle of reformers, friends, family, and even critics, Blight and other recent Douglass scholars are opening a new window into the life and experiences of this oft-studied American. Blight's hefty volume offers a considerate portrayal of Douglass's "life and times," contextualizing his familiar life story in the larger history of the century in which he lived. In so doing, it brings Douglass's story to life in a way that will appeal to both scholars and general readers. With a sometimes-flourishing writing style, Blight moves readers into Douglass's world and lets them walk through his years as a slave in Maryland, as a free man, and as a famous orator and reformer. When necessary, Blight deviates from the biographical narrative to explain the larger scope of nineteenth-century history, which will be useful for general readers. For example, he details just how Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation led to the formation of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Regiment and Douglass's role as a recruiter of black troops, and later offers a rundown of the power struggle between Andrew Johnson and Congress in the early days of Reconstruction. Blight envisions Douglass as a prophet of freedom, and throughout the book he places more emphasis on the great man's connection to religion and Christianity than previous scholars have allowed. Yet this seems to work more as an organizing device than as an actual argument guiding the biography. Douglass maintained an association with the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church and at one point acted as a lay preacher, but Blight uses Douglass's command of the text and parables of the King James Bible to provide an organizing thread. Beyond pointing out Douglass's frequent use of Bible quotes and allusions in his speeches and writings, however, Blight offers little convincing analysis to contradict received scholarship on Douglass's tangential connection to organized religion throughout most of his adult life. Indeed, for Douglass, scripture was one of many literary [End Page 643] canons in his repertoire. Douglass quoted an amazing range of literature, including works by Lord Byron, Shakespeare, Alexander Dumas, and others familiar to his nineteenth-century audiences and readers, yet Blight gives those influences almost no attention. Tracing the full narrative of Douglass's life and immersion in the annals of nineteenth-century American history, the first two-thirds of Blight's book forms a comfortable retelling of the great man's life familiar to scholars. But in the last third of the book, which corresponds to Douglass's post–Civil War experiences, Blight's unique access to a treasure trove of privately held materials affords him a means to offer a new telling of the last decades of Douglass's life. His access to Walter O. Evans's private collection of family-created scrapbooks and correspondence allows Blight to comment newly on the postwar relationships between Douglass and his growing extended family of children and their...

Frederick Douglass: America's Prophet by D. H. Dilbeck

Reviewed by: Frederick Douglass: America's Prophet by D. H. Dilbeck Robert S. Levine Frederick Douglass: America's Prophet. D. H. Dilbeck. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. ISBN 978-1-4696-3618-4. 208 pp., cloth, $28.00. With the 2018 publication of D. H. Dilbeck's Frederick Douglass: America's Prophet and David W. Blight's Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, the two hundredth anniversary year of Douglass's birth has taken on a prophetic cast. For Dilbeck, Douglass is best understood as a Christian writer and activist who "cherished the words of the prophet Isaiah and the gospel of Jesus Christ" (3). Dilbeck develops his argument by emphasizing the importance of Christianity to Douglass's autobiographies and speeches. As a result, there is much here that is familiar for those who know Douglass's writings. Rather than considering the autobiographies as artfully crafted works that may not always represent how Douglass felt at the moment of the events he describes, Dilbeck notes the many scenes in which Douglass mentions or emphasizes his Christian perspective. Because Douglass claimed such in a later autobiographical account, Dilbeck says the young Douglass wanted to learn how to read so he could read the Bible story of Job on his own. In one of the oddest moments in the book, Dilbeck includes a full-page illustration from the 1881 Life and Times of Frederick Douglass of the docile child Douglass, with hands behind his back, standing before the seated Sophia Auld who is reading from a book that appears not to be the Bible. That illustration, which Douglass loathed and cut from all subsequent printings, along with statements such as "A bright child like Frederick could see only so many vicious beatings and murders before asking the hardest questions," give the early chapters the feel of a young adult–market biography (18). Douglass's famous apostrophe to the sailboats on the Chesapeake Bay is presented as "a psalm of lament" that Douglass literally composed and uttered on the spot, rather than wrote years later (37). It is good to be reminded that Douglass became a licensed AME preacher, and Dilbeck is especially good in explaining what was at stake for Douglass when he became involved with the controversies concerning the Free Church of Scotland and the Evangelical Alliance. But Dilbeck's discussion of Christianity remains just a bit vague throughout, even as he consistently portrays [End Page 192] Douglass as a black leader who spoke in a prophetic Christian voice about the evils of slavery, racism, and other social ills. There are contradictions in Dilbeck's analysis of Douglass's Christianity, perhaps because of its vagueness. Dilbeck asserts that during the 1850s "Douglass anticipated slavery's immanent [sic] death because he believed God was just, merciful, powerful, and actively at work in human affairs" (94). But he later states that "Douglass resisted a too-easy view of God's providential rule in the world because he thought it did not deal honestly with the problem of evil" (143). He follows up on that remark by referring to "Douglass's deepest assumptions about God's providential presence in history" (151). Despite the concession about the problem of evil, Dilbeck argues that Douglass's prophetic Christianity led him to believe that God will make sure that good triumphs over evil. Accordingly, Dilbeck for the most part presents Douglass not as a pragmatic worker in the real world, and not as a performer, but as someone whom many readers might regard as naively committed to hope. In his introduction, Dilbeck claims that "Douglass never wavered in hope," and the word hope often takes the place of analysis (8, Dilbeck's emphasis). We see this especially in the book's third section, "The Hopeful Prophet: 1853–1895." True, Douglass regularly invoked hope, but was he as hopeful as Dilbeck describes, or was hope part of his rhetorical and pragmatic strategy? We're told that during this long period, Douglass "held fast to a distinctly Christian hope," a phrasing that begs the question of whether Dilbeck believes that hope is distinctively Christian (94, Dilbeck's emphasis). Dilbeck states that "during the four long years of...

Look at Lincoln: Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

Look at Lincoln: Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

Charisma and Counterculture: Allen Ginsberg as a Prophet for a New Generation

The cultural role of Allen Ginsberg does not fit a typical Weberian model of charisma. The avant-garde poet was an outstanding personality and possessed an unusual ability to affect people. He played a vital role in expanding the boundaries of personal freedom in America of the 1950s–1990s, blazing new paths for spiritual, communal and artistic expression. Serving as a father figure for the counterculture—a symbol of an alternative set of cultural norms, lifestyles and literary forms—Ginsberg was a charismatic counter-leader, with no clearly defined followers or movement. As a leader in a more liberated era, he offered energy, ideas, inspiration, and color, but no structure or authority. Instead he was a prophet of freedom, calling on people to express themselves openly, to expand and experiment. This role demanded charisma but of a different kind—one that was more spiritual and less organizational or hierarchical. This article follows Gary Dickson’s essay “Charisma, Medieval and Modern,” in offering a suggestive analysis of and supplement to Weber’s understanding of charisma. The article grapples with the concept of charisma in relation to a generation that resented rigid structures and authorities.

Freedom's Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers. By Richard S. Newman. New York: New York University Press, 2008. xxi + 361 pp. $34.95 cloth.

Freedom's Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers. By Richard S. Newman. New York: New York University Press, 2008. xxi + 361 pp. $34.95 cloth. - Volume 78 Issue 4

Freedom's Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers (review)

Reviewed by: Freedom's Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers Patrick Rael (bio) Freedom's Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers. By Richard S. Newman. (New York: New York University Press, 2008. Pp. 359. Cloth, $34.99.) In the pantheon of black heroes, Richard Allen looms large. He was a man of "firsts," founding the first independent black church, coauthoring the first black protest pamphlet, and organizing the first black national convention. Yet despite these accomplishments, Allen is difficult to know. He belonged to—indeed, heralded—the very first generation of free African Americans to step into American public life. As such, his traces in the historical record pale in comparison to the giants who followed him. Among luminaries such as Douglass, Washington, Du Bois, and King, Allen's name is rarely mentioned. Recent works have resuscitated the memories of figures such as James Forten and Mary Ann Shadd Cary, but Allen, perhaps first among firsts, has gone without a champion. This quintessential modern biography of an important African American is thus timely. In narrating the black founder's life, Richard Newman sets Allen in his time and place, engaging many critical debates animating the field. Newman tells Allen's story in passionate and lively prose, starting [End Page 551] with Allen's opaque early years in Philadelphia and Delaware, which climaxed with Allen's conversion to Methodism in 1777 and subsequent bargain with his master to free him after paying hefty compensation. In freedom, Allen continued his tireless campaign of work and self-uplift, eventually acquiring some capital and making a name for himself as an itinerant preacher. Allen's most famous moment arrived in 1787, when he (with Absalom Jones) led Philadelphia blacks out of the segregated St. George's Church and established Bethel Church, the first independent black church in the nation. In detailing the historical controversy over exactly when and how the walkout happened, Newman reveals Allen as a savvy architect of both public perception and historical memory. Allen's coauthoring of the first black protest pamphlet in 1794 further suggests the minister's emergence as a public politician. Published in response to accusations that Philadelphia blacks had exploited their roles as nurses during a recent yellow-fever epidemic, Allen and Jones's Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People marked a new era of black public resistance to racism, relying on the power of the written word. Allen proved to be a prolific pamphleteer, authoring tracts on topics ranging from the independence of the black church, to eulogies of famous Americans, to moral meditations on the black underclass. Throughout, he stressed themes of interracial harmony and moral uplift as key to achieving abolition and equality. By viewing blacks as "consummate representatives of republicanism" (149), Allen fostered a sense of black nationalism that could coexist with American nationalism. With the hardening of race relations in the 1810s and 1820s, Allen faced an ever more difficult challenge in reconciling black group solidarity with the unfulfilled promises of a prejudiced nation. He intensified efforts to secure the independence of Bethel, in the process uniting several independent black Methodist churches into the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Newman demonstrates how institution building at home in no way negated dreams of black nation building abroad. The prospect of black colonization had long animated Allen. When his optimistic strategies of moral uplift failed to roll back the tide of prejudice, Allen concluded that only outside of the United States could African Americans hope to replicate the very "elevation" that Allen himself represented. But—in an episode that signaled an emerging world of democratic politics among black northerners—black Philadelphians in 1817 overwhelmingly rejected elite schemes of colonization, forcing Allen to [End Page 552] retreat to save his position of leadership. Only later, when the AME toyed with the notion of Haitian immigration as a "safety valve" (253) for the release of blacks' frustrated energies, was Allen able to put forth colonization schemes that satisfied his "increasingly divided soul" (184). Meanwhile, challenges from below exercised Allen's evolving political skills. Prophetic itinerant preachers such as Jarena Lee confronted Allen with...

Freedom's Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers

Freedom's Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers

Freedom's Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers

Freedom's Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers

Freedom's prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the black founding fathers

Freedom's prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the black founding fathers

:Freedom's Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers

This book is a contextual biography of Richard Allen (1760–1831), minister (ordained in 1799 by Francis Asbury), first bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (founded in 1816), and defender of black rights in religion and society. Several substantial documents survive to help us understand Allen's life: a narrative, co-authored with Absalom Jones, of the yellow fever that plagued Philadelphia in 1793; an autobiography dictated shortly before Allen died; and a few addresses and execution-day sermons. There are also personal documents and brief comments on religion and on slavery. As Richard S. Newman notes, the gaps in the record are wide. About two-thirds of this work is a companion to the autobiography and the yellow fever narrative. Newman's strategy here is like Vincent Carretta's in Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (2005). Both write as detectives (not as skeptics), augmenting the writings of their subjects with further documentation. On the positive side, Newman's book is a model of contextual research that should be read by students, scholars, and lay people interested in Allen. On the negative side, the book, insofar as its intent is usually the confirmation of Allen's texts, rarely shows distance from its subject. Lay people reading this book will probably infer that the purpose of scholarship on early black abolitionists and early black Christians is celebration of their achievements. From a twenty-first-century perspective, some praise seems appropriate, but we should also pass beyond the individuals and assess the positive and negative implications of their ideas and values. Scholars have made such assessments of nineteenth-century abolitionists. We should measure eighteenth-century abolitionists, white as well as black, in the same way.

George Holmes Howison: "The City of God" and Personal Idealism

American Personalism is sometimes referred to as having East and West Coast varieties: Boston Personalism, founded by Bordan Parker Bowne and carried on by Edgar Sheffield Brightman, Peter Bertocci, and Martin Luther King, Jr. among others, and California Personalism, founded by George Holmes and carried on by Ralph Tyler Flewelling.1 But like so many shorthand notions it doesn't quite work. No one really carried on Howison's multi-personalitarian ism. created a radically democratic notion of personal idealism that extended all the way to God, who was no more the ultimate monarch, no longer the only ruler and creator of the universe, but the ultimate democrat in eternal relation to other eternal persons. It is no wonder found no disciples among the religious, for whom his thought was heretical, or the non-religious, who thought his proposals too religious; only McTaggart's idealist atheism or Thomas Davidson's Apeirionism seem to resemble Howisons personal idealism. By all accounts George Holmes was one of the great philosophical teachers of his age. He helped create the philosophy department at the University of California at Berkeley, started the Library with the gift of his books, and participated in one of the great philosophical debates of his age. But himself believed he had discovered a great truth and preached it. Ralph Tyler Flewelling called him a Prophet of Freedom (1957, 5). His biographers John Wright Buckham and George Malcolm Stratton, who compiled a selection of his articles, described him as an Old Testament prophet. William Ernest Hocking, who had been a younger colleague of at Berkeley, said Howison comes as near to Elijah the prophet, and in some ways to Simon Peter, as any human being I expect to meet in my time (quoted in Buckham and Stratton 1936, 13). This prophet label captures two aspects of Howison's life and character: his absolute belief in the person and, like Abraham, his wanderings from St. Louis to Boston, and to Germany, his one year appointments, and work as a philosophical tutor, until finally settling in California while discovering and securing a place to preach his doctrine. For Howison, personal idealism was more than a philosophical posi tion, it was the Truth. But he created no school and had no disciples. This was a

The Liberalism of Karl Popper

DESPITE ITS WIDE INFLUENCE, THE POLITICAL THOUGHT OF KARL POPPER has received, until recently, remarkably little systematic attention from academic political theorists. Hailed by Isaiah Berlin as the most formidable of Marxism's living critics and reviled by Marxists as a prominent luminary of that White Emigration whose pernicious influence is mainly responsible for the ideological rejuvenation of a moribund reactionary culture, canonized as a prophet of freedom and enterprise and lumped together with such despised conservatives as Oakeshott, Namier and Butterfield as one of those who want only ‘to keep that dear old T-model on the road by dint of a little piecemeal engineering’, Popper incontestably has been a storm centre of several major ideological controversies. Equally, Popper's dissident reinterpretations of the thought of Plato and Hegel, like his defence of value-freedom and methodological individualism in the social sciences, have generated massive and subtly ramified literatures, while the form of critical rationalism which has been developed by some of his disciples has been seen, both by its proponents and by its enemies, as the foremost contribution to the contemporary struggle against irrationalism.