What Frederick Douglass Teaches Us About the Meaning of Juneteenth
Juneteenth is rightly remembered as a celebration of freedom. But Douglass’s life and thought point us toward a deeper meaning: freedom is the opportunity to become self-directed, self-reliant, and responsible for one’s own destiny.
Every year, Americans celebrate Juneteenth as a commemoration of freedom finally reaching the last enslaved people in the Confederacy. Such an occasion is worthy of celebration by anyone who loves freedom. But this holiday invites a more profound purpose than remembering the end of slavery. It raises an important question: “What was freedom supposed to make possible?” or “What kind of people did emancipation seek to create?” If Juneteenth marks the birth of black freedom in America, then it also marks the de facto birth of black agency: the opportunity for formerly enslaved people to direct their own lives and shape their own destinies.
No historical figure embodies the concept of black agency like Frederick Douglass. Born into slavery, Douglass willed himself into becoming one of the most influential abolitionists, reformers, and Americans in this country’s history. His life illustrates a vision of freedom rooted in liberation and the cultivation of individual capability, responsibility, and self-determination. For Douglass, the ultimate purpose of freedom was the opportunity to become fully human through the exercise of one’s own agency.
I argue that this should be a salient aspect of every Juneteenth celebration. Currently, Juneteenth is often commemorated less by a celebration of freedom and more as a referendum on black pain and suffering, emphasizing a general lack of opportunity for black Americans. This is fine, but we should make a concerted effort to also focus on the potential for empowerment, agency, and self-reliance provided by classical liberal values. Frederick Douglass is the embodiment of all these things.
Toward Self-Making
Douglass, a slave turned popular orator and abolitionist, had every reason to reject everything he deemed “white” or “white adjacent.” The metaphorical (most of the time) enslavement progressives claim is the condition of today’s black people was quite literal for Douglass. I am sure his autobiographies did not tell the whole story about the atrocities he witnessed and experienced. Yet, he became the consummate patriot. Why? Because he believed in the tenets of classical liberalism, even if his Southern white contemporaries did not. Within Enlightenment ideals he saw a road to liberty, self-actualization, and success. He wanted that for himself and risked life and limb for the chance to get it.
Douglass was quite clear about his respect for classical liberal values and determined to do his best to ensure black people had access to empowerment. He was, indeed, a self-made man and wanted to make sure that black women and men could make themselves as well. However, Douglass knew that for that to truly happen, all blacks needed was access to these classical liberal values, especially equality before the law. That is it. Nothing else. No special treatment.
In a speech aptly titled “Self-Made Men,” Douglass does not mince words about his own belief in self-reliance. His words are worth quoting at length.
Self-made men are the men who, under peculiar difficulties and without the ordinary help of favoring circumstances, have attained knowledge, usefulness, power and position and have learned from themselves the best uses to which life can be put in this world, and in the exercises of these uses to build up worthy character. They are the men who owe little or nothing to birth, relationship, friendly surroundings; to wealth inherited or to early approved means of education; who are what they are, without the aid of any of the favoring conditions by which other men usually rise in the world and achieve great results. In fact they are the men who are not brought up but who are obliged to come up, not only without the voluntary assistance or friendly co-operation of society, but often in open and derisive defiance of all the efforts of society and the tendency of circumstances to repress, retard and keep them down. They are the men who, in a world of schools, academies, colleges and other institutions of learning, are often compelled by unfriendly circumstances to acquire their education elsewhere and, amidst unfavorable conditions, to hew out for themselves a way to success, and thus to become the architects of their own good fortunes. They are in a peculiar sense, indebted to themselves for themselves. If they have travelled far, they have made the road on which they travelled. If they have ascended high, they have built their own ladder.
Douglass wants former slaves to be self-made people that are all the more successful if they are given the affordances Douglass’ “self-made men” were not. Today, we are given these affordances. Even if one believes that institutional forces are an obstacle to success and fulfillment, that person still has more than Douglass and his black contemporaries had. Much more.
Accident Theory: The Salience of Privilege and Positionality
I believe Douglass saw the time period that would be called Juneteenth as the birth of black agency in America. Yet, then, like now, people of his day embraced privilege, or what contemporary social justice scholars and activists call “positionality,” as the primary driver of success. “But what about white privilege?” progressives of both Douglass’s time and our own have asked. “Is it fair that white people have a leg up, a head start based on the racial privilege of whiteness?” Douglass called this privileging of privilege “accident theory” and saw it as an obstacle to upward mobility. In his “Self-Made Men,” speech, he said, “I do not think much of the accident or good luck theory of self-made men. It is worth but little attention and has no practical value.” Douglass lamented the accident theory’s popularity among his contemporaries, who saw privilege as a primary driver for individual success. This, thought Douglass, robbed black Americans of the sense of agency necessary for self-actualization, especially after being held in bondage. Douglass said accident theory “divorces a man from his own achievements, contemplates him as a being of chance and leaves him without will, motive, ambition and aspiration.” For Douglass, accident theory was poison to black aspiration.
Douglass insisted that one has to use what one has to get what one wants. Complaining about another’s good fortune is a waste of time and energy better spent on self-empowerment. Such privileges enjoyed by others would probably motivate someone of Douglass’s disposition to work harder and smarter. The glory of outperforming someone is a familiar theme in black Americans’ history.
If this were Douglass’s view in nineteenth-century, pre-Civil War America, he would surely feel that arguments about the prevalence of concepts like “privilege” and “positionality” in explaining systemic racism and disparate impacts in today’s world are overstated. For many contemporary progressives, a middle-class person is privileged and should check that privilege and acknowledge his positionality when talking to a lower-middle-class person. Does the middle-class person have more material possessions? More than likely. Is it so much more that hard work on their part was unnecessary?
Allow yet another analogy. If you and I are running a marathon and I, for whatever reason, have a one-foot head start on you when the race begins, and I cross the finish line three hours before you do, that twelve-inch head start wouldn’t have made much of a difference. Yet, some advocates of social justice would say that the one-foot head start is the reason I beat you. As Douglass said in “Self-Made Men,”
We are stingy in our praise to merit, but generous in our praise to chance. Besides, a man feels himself measurably great when he can point out the precise moment and circumstance which made his neighbor great. He easily fancies that the slight difference between himself and his friend is simply one of luck. It was his friend who was lucky but it might easily have been himself.
The overemphasis on luck and circumstance, i.e. privilege and positionality, seems salient among social justice activists and scholars.
Douglass’s Tough Love
If I haven’t insulted progressive activists profoundly yet (Who am I kidding? They’re not reading this), wait until you read my favorite passage from “Self-Made Men”: “I have been asked ‘How will this theory affect the negro?’ and ‘What shall be done in his case?’ My general answer is ‘Give the negro fair play and let him alone.’ If he lives, well. If he dies, equally well. If he cannot stand up, let him fall down.” How’s that for tough love? Douglass wrote that in the nineteenth century!
There is more to this. In a speech titled “What the Black Man Wants,” Douglass adds a little more to the above answer: “Everybody has asked the question, and they learned to ask it early of the abolitionists, “What shall we do with the Negro?” I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us!” Douglass thought that the good-intentioned help offered and given by abolitionists and reformers was doing more harm than good by robbing newly freed Americans the opportunity to develop their own agency. That interference, said Douglass, was doing black Americans “a positive injury.”
“For his own welfare, give him a chance to do whatever he can do well. If he fails then, let him fail! I can, however, assure you that he will not fail. Already has he proven it.” Douglass pointed out the good work black Americans had already done and were doing: military service, education, the acquisition of property, etc. “In a thousand instances has he verified my theory of self-made men.” For Douglass, black Americans did not need help; they needed unhampered opportunity.
Douglass believed that, as long as black Americans are afforded the inalienable rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution, especially those of individual sovereignty and equality before the law, they could embark on their own upward mobility, fueled only with the desire for life, liberty, and happiness. “He well performed the task of making bricks without straw” speaking of the newly freed black Americans by using “black man” metonymically, “now give him straw.” Douglass asked only for the right to compete and to have access to the same resources as white people, which was the original rationale behind the concept of affirmative action. “Give him all the facilities for honest and successful livelihood, and in all honorable avocations receive him as a man among men.” He continued,
And if the negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone! If you see him on his way to school, let him alone,—don’t disturb him! If you see him going to the dinner-table at a hotel, let him go! If you see him going, to the ballot-box, let him alone,— don’t disturb him!
Douglass believed in his brethren. They survived chattel slavery! That resolve combined with the resources of a free people should lift the black American to great heights. If Douglass did believe in “survival of the fittest,” it seems clear that he thought black Americans were among the fittest.
I agree with Douglass’s sentiments for modern-day black Americans as well. We should not block the road to a better life already open to others. Do not hide valuable information. That is all. To level the playing field and allow civil society to act in the form of outreach, mentorship, strong families, entrepreneurial spirit, and other ideal qualities for American life that can be provided to black people by black people. That is what was seen over the horizon during the dawn of black freedom.
The Mission of Juneteenth
When I read Douglass, I glean a primary mission of Juneteenth given to every black American: do not want for heroes; be your own hero. Douglass knew no one was coming to save him, so he saved himself. He taught himself to read and carefully planned his escape. He again became a hero when he dedicated his life to traveling the North, speaking powerfully on the evils of slavery. This level of agency may be rare, but it does not take this level of agency (a level that leads to escaping slavery and becoming a renowned orator) to accomplish things in today’s America. Again, things are not perfect, but I have to believe they are better than chattel slavery and living for years as a fugitive.
So, Douglass’s story inspires me to compose a disposition that is as fortified, confident, and astute as his. That said, I want to make clear that the charge to “not want for heroes” included heroes like Douglass. As much as I respect and appreciate Douglass, I won’t go as far as to ask “What would Douglass do” when strategizing an ideal disposition for a free, civil, and liberal society. In fact, I think part of the problem is that we look outside of ourselves for role models, heroes, who can show us, through their own challenges, the way out of our current circumstances. I think we should be our own heroes. I will take Douglass’s attitude and fortitude as a generalized starting point for how to best navigate this world, but I think it is best to describe a disposition in a way that allows people to make it their own, to personalize whatever works best for a particular person in a particular situation.
This understanding of freedom offers an important lens through which to view Juneteenth today. While contemporary discussion emphasizes barriers, disadvantages, and systems of privilege, Douglass consistently emphasized the individual’s power to rise, create, and flourish when granted equal opportunities. Douglass’s work suggests that the greatest gift emancipation offered was access to individual rights, not assistance and dependency. Frederick Douglass was the kind of American citizen Juneteenth was meant to produce.