Last year, the New York Times published the 1619 Project,
an immensely ambitious, influential and controversial reframing of American history.
The project's creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her work
argued that the U.S. Constitution was a decidedly undemocratic document,
and that anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country.
Our country says that we were founded to be a democracy,
but we were actually founded as a slavocracy.
This interpretation of the American founding has been the subject of a heated debate.
The 1619 Project has also been adapted into a high school curriculum that attempts
to reframe U.S. history by marking the year when the
first enslaved Africans arrived on Virginia soil
as our nation's foundational date.
After the 1619 Project was attacked by five eminent historians,
the Projects Editor responded by reiterating
Hannah-Jones' view, that advances for minority groups
have almost always come as result of political and social struggles
in which African-Americans have generally taken the lead,
not as a working-out of the immanent logic of the Constitution.
But this view of the Constituion and the Declaration of Independence,
is at odds with that of Frederick Douglass,
the escaped slave, abolitionist, author, and towering figure in American history.
In his new book A Glorious Liberty:
Frederick Douglass and the Fight for an Antislavery Constitution,
Reason Senior Editor Damon Root looks at the arguments that took place
in the middle of the 19th century over racism and America’s founding,
which are being replayed today.
If you look at what Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison were fighting over
in 1840s and 1850s, you see what people are fighting about right now, which was the founding.
Just a pro-slavery compact and Douglass completely rejects that.
As a former slave, Douglass had no illusions about racism, but his view of the constitution,
which he called a glorious liberty document would put him at odds
with many of its contemporary critics.
Douglass' challenged really is that the constitution and the Declaration of Independence
lay out these powerful principles, but why don't we live up to them?
Clearly, the nation is not living up to those principles.
Habeas corpus, due process of law, the right to keep and bear arms.
Any of those things if sort of fully enforced, slavery can't stand.
And he would point that out again and again and again.
Root argues that Douglass was a classical liberal,
who believed in the primacy of individual rights and economic freedom.
One of his intellectual adversaries was the
slavery apologist George Fitzhugh, Who's 1854 book,
Sociology For The South or The Failure of Free Society, defended slavery by repudiating
the principles of liberalism.
He has this attack on John Locke, attack on Adam Smith, attack on all these liberal principles,
and you see Frederick Douglass picking up the banner of those principles and making
it a bedrock of his all-out war on slavery.
He talked about the powerful experience of earning his first free dollar on the docks
in New Bedford, Massachusetts, when he escapes and what that meant to him,
that he was now his own master, a tremendous fact, he writes in one of his autobiographies.
It all comes back to this idea of self ownership.
In Locke's theory of self ownership, property rights begins with the ownership in yourself
and everything flows out from that.
Unlike many of his contemporaries, Douglass extended his beliefs in unalienable,
individual rights to women as well.
In 1848, he attended the Seneca Falls Convention that launched the women's suffrage movement.
There are 100 people at the Seneca falls convention.
He's one of 32 men, he's the only black person there.
He takes the radical position alongside Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
that women should have—not just a whole host of other legal privileges that they're denied at the time—
but women should have the right to vote.
Stanton said that was almost too radical for the convention, there were people who were against it.
They thought, "Oh, we can't go that far," and
Douglass was right there, shoulder to shoulder with her on that issue.
Douglass would have a bitter falling out with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other suffragettes
after the Civil War, when only former male slaves got the right to vote,
but he would reconcile with them later in his life.
The last thing that Douglass does the day he dies is he attends a womens rights meeting,
that's his last public act and he goes home and dies of either a heart attack or a stroke.
He falls dead in his home.
So he goes out doing what he always did, fighting for liberty and equality.
In a country that seems more divided along racial and ethnic lines than it has been in decades,
Root says that Frederick Douglass' belief in principles undergirding
the American founding have a lot to teach us about how to build a society
based on mutual respect, empathy, and individualism.
Douglass, he says, stressed that rights for one are rights for all,
ending slavery was also something that benefited the country as a whole,
because slavery is a pernicious institution,
it's economically crippling, all these sorts of things.
A free labor system benefits whites and blacks,
to the extent that a civil rights cause looks like it just benefits one group,
in fact, the benefits are far and wide to all involved.
That's certainly a lesson we can continue to take today.
The nation's founding doesn't need to be dialed back to 1619 to acknowledge the horrific legacy
of slavery and honor the major role played by African-Americans in the nation's history
we would do well not only to remember the example set by Frederick Douglass in his life,
but also to embrace his understanding of the Constitution as a glorious liberty document,
whose ideals of freedom and equality we must never stop fighting to realize.