Political Thought in the Shadow of Douglass

This introduction is meant to give the reader some background about the life and times of Frederick Douglass. He escaped from slavery in his twenties and for the rest of his life only grew in renown. Douglass is shown to be a multifaceted and versatile thinker whose personality was a mixture of contradictions, from being both an abolitionist and a statesman to being a romantic and a realist. Now he is a canonical figure in North American letters, and his influence is demonstrated to be more prominent than ever. The introduction describes factors that complicate assessments of Douglass’s political thought and outlines intellectual gaps in the scholarship on Douglass that require proper commentary. It also looks at the Black Lives Matter movement in conjunction with Frederick Douglass’s political thought. The two are compared and found to have much in common in that both focus on cultivating black dignity to insist on the value of black lives.