Usually I’m really happy when history becomes part of the conversation. And normally, I’d be thrilled that Frederick Douglass was being talked about in the national media. After all, he was one of the most formidable people in American history. I love to teach his writings and to write about his impact on the fight for voting rights and the battle against racial segregation.
So this week it was sad to see Douglass’s legacy cheapened as members of the right wing sought to use his name as some kind of political racial shield. This week, the annual Conservative Political Action Conference hosted a breakout session entitled “Trump the Race Card: Are You Sick and Tired of Being Called a Racist When You Know You’re Not One?” Yes, that’s really the title.
The session, hosted by K. Carl Smith, founder of The Conservative Messenger, right-wing pundit, and self-described “Frederick Douglass Republican,” taught attendees how to deflect racism, using their handy-dandy Frederick Douglass shield.
Smith uses Douglass’ historic alliance with the Republican Party of the 1860s and 1870s to try and make claims about the party’s racial bona fides today. Its fine to admire Douglass or want to use his life as a model for advocacy, but it seems that Smith has decided that Douglass’ name alone is enough to silence critics concerned about questions of race in the Republican Party of today.
Born into slavery in 1818 in Maryland, separated from his mother as an infant, never knowing — but believing — that his father was probably his white master, Douglass found his way to freedom and literacy despite tremendous odds stacked against him. Once free, he became an abolitionist and a brilliant orator, speaking throughout the North and abroad. He risked his own freedom as an escaped slave to advocate publicly for the freedom of millions of enslaved African-Americans throughout the American South. But Douglass was more than an abolitionist. He used his platform to become an author, speaker, and advocate for not only the rights of black Americans, but also women’s rights, and the rights of people of color abroad. He became black America’s first statesman; a tireless advocate for justice until his death in 1895.
At his session last Friday, Smith tried to frame Douglass in terms of today’s politics. According to the Washington Post, Smith claimed that Douglass was “born below poverty” and suffered at the hands of slave masters, who were Democrats. Smith then tried to draw comparisons between Douglass’ life and today’s political debates by saying that Douglass suffered under “slavemaster-run health care” and “slavemaster entitlements.”
The historical record shows that the enslaved did not receive any “entitlements” in exchange for their free labor, nor were they enslaved because they were members of the Republican Party. They weren’t recognized as citizens at all, so they certainly weren’t suffering because of any supposed political affiliation. Also, slavery wasn’t an anti-poverty program. In fact, the wealth generated by inter-generational chattel slavery made thousands of slaveholders obscenely wealthy in both land and property. So I’m pretty sure this comparison doesn’t work.
Smith’s presentation also skips over the dramatic shifts in both the Democratic and Republican Parties since Douglass’s death in the 1890s.
Although the emancipated slaves did initially vote for the Republican Party that worked diligently to ensure citizenship and voting rights during the Reconstruction, the majority of black southerners were stripped of their right to vote in the decades before and after the turn of the twentieth century. Southern Democrats ushered in an age of terror, disfranchising African American voters, passing segregation laws in state legislatures, and enforcing these changes through the threat of lynching.
In the effort to attract white voters, the southern Republicans began the Lily-White Republican movement in the 1880s and 1890s in order to oust black politicians and appointees from the party. By the early 1920s, black voters in the South had no viable political alternatives in either party even if they managed to overcome the poll taxes, literacy tests, and all-white primaries in order to register to vote.
Black voters voting outside of the South in the wake of the Great Migration began to shift toward the Democratic Party. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal policies that tried to remedy the crisis of the Great Depression were the first real opportunities for fair employment and civil rights in decades. However, this political shift made southern segregationists increasingly uncomfortable within the national Democratic Party.
Angered by Present Harry Truman’s establishment of the President’s Committee on Civil Rights and the addition of a civil rights plank to the Democratic Party Platform, a group of southern Democrats walked out of the 1948 convention and formed the State’s Rights Democratic Party, commonly known as the Dixiecrats. This segregationist party nominated South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond as its candidate for president. While the Dixiecrats won only four southern states and failed to effectively split the vote, their campaign cemented white southerners’ discontent with the national Democratic Party.
The campaign of Republicans like Barry Goldwater in 1964 and Richard Nixon in 1968 attracted many former segregationist “State’s Rights Democrats” to the national Republican Party and repelled the majority of the few remaining black Republican voters. Many southern Democrats like former Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond switched to the Republican Party while the Republican “Southern Strategy” stoked racial resentment for electoral gain.
So a great deal has changed since Frederick Douglass voted Republican.
However, if there has ever been a moment when it would be good for the Republican Party to remember Frederick Douglass, this would be it. Perhaps these Douglass Republicans might fight for voting rights and women’s rights to contest recent moves to limit both. Perhaps a contingent of Frederick Douglass Republicans can contest the recent wave of state laws limiting access to the polls. Perhaps the Frederick Douglass Republicans can censure those who are passing new laws attacking women’s reproductive health care. A real Frederick Douglass Republican would seek to change today’s Republican party from one that seeks to limit rights, to one that is expanding them. But the conclusion of the “Trump the Race Card” session leaves me doubting.
During the question and answer period, an attendee asked why the Republican Party couldn’t embrace Booker T. Washington, who spoke in support of southern segregation, rather than Douglass. While Smith was responding to the question by citing a letter in which Douglass forgave his master for enslaving him, the attendee shouted out a comment wondering why the slaveholder needed forgiveness for “feeding and housing” Douglass for all those years.
This was the moment when Smith’s “inner Frederick Douglass” should have awakened. Douglass condemned slavery as a “gross injustice” that caused children to be “snatched from the arms of [their] mother[s]” and decried the institution as a “blasphemy” against the teachings of the Christian church. Douglass, also an avid opponent of racial segregation and a leader in the movement to contest the segregation of trains in the North, once nearly destroyed the seat of a train car as he held on to his seat in an effort to stop conductors who forcibly ejected him from the first class car and threw him in with the baggage.
Douglass was no friend to those who made excuses for slavery or segregation. He risked his life for justice and equality for all Americans. I hope that somehow the real spirit of Douglass can be revived. Given today’s political landscape, we definitely need it.
Blair L. M. Kelley is an associate professor at North Carolina State University. Follow her on Twitter at @ProfBLMKelley