![]() But he was less of an enthusiastic feminist in his personal life. “He recognized that that was a problem even then,” Professor Gates says.Īs an activist, Douglass was an adamant supporter of women’s rights. Wells criticized the convict lease system, which basically stipulated that southern municipalities could just round up black men, arrest them, and then lease out their labor.” As Professor Gates tells Teen Vogue, “He predicted what we now call mass incarceration by criticizing the convict lease system in 1893 in his pamphlet, “The Reason Why the Colored American is not in the World’s Columbian Exposition,” in which he and Ida B. It sounds kind of brutally conservative in a way: What he’s really doing is he’s exulting the place of blacks saying, ‘We deserve all these rights because we’re not fleeing into anything,’” Professor Blight tells Teen Vogue.ĭouglass and his contemporaries anticipated contemporary America’s issues with mass incarceration.ĭouglass was prophetic in foreseeing one of modern America’s most glaring problems - mass incarceration. “Douglass is saying that in a context of exulting the place of black people in the United States as true Americans and as modern people. In one particularly brutal section, the abolitionist said, “There is no resemblance in the elements that go to make up the character of a civilized man between the Indian and the negro… sees the ploughshare of your civilization tossing up the bones of his venerated fathers, and he retreats before the onward progress of your civilization…he abhors your fashions, he refuses to adopt them. In an 1866 speech titled “We Are Here and Want The Ballot-Box,” Douglass spoke to a Philadelphia audience regarding the differences between black Americans and what he called “the Indian.” Douglass professed striking racism toward indigenous peoples in America.ĭespite being a staunch abolitionist, Douglass used a kind of racialized othering against indigenous peoples similar to what white supremacists had used against him.
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