“A Good Work for Our Race To-Day”: Interests, Virtues, and the Achievement of Justice in Frederick Douglass's Freedmen's Monument Speech

Peter C. Myers

American Political Science Review, 2010, vol. 104, issue 2, 209-225

Abstract: Frederick Douglass's Freedmen's Monument speech of 1876 is notable for its complexity, and commentators have offered widely varying readings. Critics have judged it an abdication of racial responsibility, indicative of an unwarranted optimism characteristic of Douglass's larger argument on racial reform. In this article, I explicate this speech, highlighting the complex rhetorical design in which Douglass forges a memory of Lincoln as a medium for issuing carefully targeted appeals to the interests and virtues of black and white Americans. In its hitherto underappreciated theoretical dimension, the speech epitomizes a theory of racial progress that challenges recent, pessimistic readings of America's racial history and prospects.

Date: 2010
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