CLASSROOM
Frederick Douglass and the Next Generation of Black Activists
The 1840s and 1850s were a highly tumultuous and trying period for Black Americans. They also were a moment of generational transition for the Black activist community in the North. James Forten, the Pennsylvania sailmaker who had been at the center of the fight against slavery and the fight for Black civil rights since the late eighteenth century, died in 1842. Reverend Theodore Wright died in 1847, David Ruggles in 1849, and Reverend Samuel Cornish in 1858. Collectively, these individuals had contributed mightily to the American Anti-Slavery Society, the staging of public protest meetings, the organizing of state and national “colored conventions,” the writing and publishing of pamphlets, and the operating, in all aspects, of two major Black newspapers, Freedom’s Journal and the Colored American. They were the generation that had launched, expanded, and sustained the effort—ongoing for three decades at this point—to oppose the actions and ideology of the colonization movement. The new generation of activists that came onto the national scene during this period included Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, George Downing, Henry Highland Garnet, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Robert Purvis, and Charles Bennet Ray—as well as several children and grandchildren of James Forten, among them Harriet Forten Purvis, Sarah Forten Purvis, and William Forten. Most of these individuals had been born during the 1810s, putting them in their thirties during this time of transition. Over the next several decades, they would fight the colonization movement with just as much conviction and vigor as the prior generation had.
Frederick Douglass emerged, during the mid-to-late 1840s, as the most dominant voice of this new Black activist generation. Born into enslavement in Maryland around 1818, Douglass self-emancipated in the late 1830s, using Ruggles’s Lower Manhattan home as one of his northward waypoints. He eventually settled in Massachusetts, where, within a few years, he gained visibility and influence as a traveling orator working under the auspices of the American Anti-Slavery Society. In 1845, he published Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, one of the earliest and most influential firsthand accounts of American slavery. Two years later, after moving to western New York, he cofounded and edited the North Star, which he published on a weekly basis through 1851. In that year, he reorganized his journalistic endeavors under the heading of an eponymous weekly, Frederick Douglass’ Paper, which was in circulation through 1855. These papers were, without doubt, two of the most prominent vehicles of Black activism, and more specifically of Black opposition to colonization, during this period.
DOCUMENTS (add more)
North Star "Henry Clay" (Frederick Douglass's Critique of Clay's Public Letter) 1849
North Star "Great Anti-Colonization Meeting in New York" 1849
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