Profs and Pints Northern Virginia presents: “The Fire of Frederick Douglass,” a dramatic look at the life of the greatest American of the 19th century, with Richard Bell, professor of history at the University of Maryland.
Frederick Douglass was a visionary—a prophet who could see a better future that lay just beyond reach. His talents were nothing short of extraordinary, combining in one man the oratorical skill of someone like Barack Obama or James Baldwin, the single-mindedness of Cesar Chavez or Bernie Sanders, the moral authority of Rev. William Barber or Rev. Martin Luther King, and the personal history of someone like Malala Yousafzai or the survivors of Sandy Hook.
Douglass put his exceptional gifts to use in the service of freedom, driving American slavery into the grave. After the carnage of the Civil War, he played a central role in the re-founding of the American Republic, and he spent decades afterwards defending and perfecting it.
Douglass, though, is so much more than another great man on a pedestal. He was the slave who dreamed of being a senator. He was the unlettered child with no formal schooling who wrote three autobiographies, becoming one of our greatest literary figures. His life bursts with contradiction and with change. He was the dignified, brilliant, and courageous freedom fighter who could sometimes be insecure, vain, and arrogant. He was the outspoken feminist who treated his own long-suffering wife like his servant. He was the fire-breathing insurgent who would eventually become an out-of-touch elder statesman. To understand how the boy born into bondage in 1818 became the Frederick Douglass that we hold in such esteem today, we must understand this man’s visionary genius not as innate, God-given, and infallible, but instead as the imperfectly beautiful product of growth, of change, of self-doubt, and of struggle.
Richard Bell, a history professor who has given thrilling Profs and Pints talks on the Hamilton musical, African Americans in the American Revolution, and other subjects, returns to its stage to explore a many-sided man’s life, family, and career, and to consider his impact upon our modern struggle to advance the cause of black freedom in the United States. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. Talk starts 30 minutes later.)
Image: An 1879 photo of Frederick Douglass by George Kendall Warren (National Archives and Records Administration).