American Enterprise Institute

Slavery, Equality, and the American Revolution

The Founding of Frederick Douglass Notes

  1. Frederick Douglass, “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro,” speech, Rochester, NY, July 5, 1852, in Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. Philip S. Foner (Lawrence Hill Books, 1999), 188. These opening paragraphs are drawn from a wide array of sources. See David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (Simon & Schuster, 2018), 59–67, 134, 229–36; William S. McFeely, Frederick Douglass (W. W. Norton & Company, 1991), 44–48, 108–12, 172–73; James A. Colaiaco, Frederick Douglass and the Fourth of July (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 1–2, 7–8, 12, 23–24, 119–21; Brent Staples, “Frederick the Great,” The New York Times Book Review, November 11, 2018; and David Levering Lewis, “The Great Frederick,” The New York Times, February 17, 1991, https://www.nytimes.com/1991/02/17/books/the-great-frederick.html.
  2. Blight, Frederick Douglass, 236.
  3. See Andrew S. Bibby, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?,” The Wall Street Journal, July 2, 2014, https://www.wsj.com/articles/andrew-bibby-what-to-the-slave-is-the-fourth-of-july-1404342530.
  4. Randall Kennedy, Say It Loud! On Race, Law, History, and Culture (Pantheon, 2021), 233.
  5. McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 173.
  6. Blight, Frederick Douglass, 230.
  7. Blight, Frederick Douglass, 236.
  8. Kennedy, Say It Loud!, 234.
  9. Kennedy, Say It Loud! See also David W. Blight, “How the Right Co-Opts Frederick Douglass,” The New York Times, February 13, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/13/opinion/right-coopts-frederick-douglass.html.
  10. David A. Graham, “Donald Trump’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,” The Atlantic, February 1, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/02/frederick-douglass-trump/515292/.
  11. Kennedy, Say It Loud!
  12. Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, 536 US 639, 676, 684 (2002); Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 US 306, 349–50, 378 (2003); and McDonald v. City of Chicago, 561 US 742, 849–50 (2010).
  13. Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, 600 US 181, 320, 386, 393 (2023).
  14. “Black people called him the Great Frederick.” Lewis, “The Great Frederick.”
  15. Annette Gordon-Reed, “Comment on Frederick Douglass and the Two Constitutions: Proslavery and Antislavery,” California Law Review 111 (December 2023): 1909, 1913, https://www.californialawreview.org/print/comment-on-frederick-douglass-and-the-two-constitutions-proslavery-and-antislavery.
  16. Charles W. Mills, Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (Cornell University Press, 1998), 200.
  17. Blight’s biography effectively emphasizes this point. Blight, Frederick Douglass, 232.
  18. Douglass, “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro,” 189.
  19. Douglass, “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro,” 191.
  20. Douglass, “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro,” 194.
  21. Douglass, “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro.”
  22. Douglass, “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro,” 194–95.
  23. Douglass, “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro,” 196–97.
  24. Kennedy, Say It Loud!, 235–37.
  25. See ABC News, “Obama’s Pastor: God Damn America, U.S. to Blame for 9/11,” March 13, 2008, https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/DemocraticDebate/story?id=4443788.
  26. For examples of the revisionist approach, see Diana Schaub, “Frederick Douglass: The Constitution Militant,” The Georgetown Journal of Law & Public Policy 22, no. 1 (2024): 137, 140, https://www.law.georgetown.edu/public-policy-journal/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/06/GT-GLPP240006.pdf; Bibby, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”; and Stephen Sachs, “Good and Evil in the American Founding: The 2023 Vaughan Lecture on America’s Founding Principles,” Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy 48, no. 1 (2025): 283, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4843831.
  27. Jack M. Balkin and Sanford Levinson, “Frederick Douglass as Constitutionalist,” Maryland Law Review 83, no. 1 (2023): 260, 279, https://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3984&context=mlr. “We gladly affirm that Douglass’s Glasgow Address deserves a place in the canons of constitutional pedagogy.” J. M. Balkin and Sanford Levinson, “The Canons of Constitutional Law,” Harvard Law Review 111, no. 4 (1998): 1019, https://openyls.law.yale.edu/bitstream/handle/20.500.13051/1931/The_Canons_of_Constitutional_Law.pdf. For excerpts and a discussion of Douglass’s Glasgow speech, see Sanford Levinson et al., Processes of Constitutional Decisionmaking: Cases and Materials, 8th ed. (Aspen Publishing, 2022), 292–97.
  28. Frederick Douglass, “The Constitution of the United States: Is It Pro-Slavery or Antislavery?,” speech, Glasgow, Scotland, March 26, 1860, in Foner, ed., Frederick Douglass, 380–89.
  29. Frederick Douglass, “The Right to Criticize American Institutions,” speech, American Anti-Slavery Society, May 11, 1847, in Foner, ed., Frederick Douglass, 77–78.
  30. Douglass, “The Constitution of the United States,” 381.
  31. Most originalists today, of course, march behind the banner not of “original intent” but instead of “original public meaning.” Douglass’s move here bears a strong similarity to the move that Justice Antonin Scalia made regarding originalism in the 1980s. For a note explaining that Scalia re-centered originalism’s focus, moving the search from “original intent” to “original meaning,” see Justin Driver, “Divine Justice,” The New Republic, September 29, 2014, 40–42.
  32. Douglass, “The Constitution of the United States,” 387.
  33. Douglass, “The Constitution of the United States,” 388.
  34. Douglass, “The Constitution of the United States.”
  35. US Const. art. I, § 2, cl. 3.
  36. Douglass, “The Constitution of the United States,” 384.
  37. US Const. art. I, § 8, cl. 15.
  38. Douglass, “The Constitution of the United States,” 384.
  39. Douglass, “The Constitution of the United States,” 385.
  40. See US Const. art. I, § 2, cl. 3; and US Const. art. I, § 9, cl. 1.
  41. US Const. amend. III.
  42. For grounding the right to privacy in the Third Amendment, see Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 US 479, 484 (1965).
  43. For quoting H. Rap Brown’s statement that “violence is as American as cherry pie,” see John Herbers, “Violence; It Is as American as Cherry Pie,” The New York Times, June 8, 1969, https://www.nytimes.com/1969/06/08/archives/violence-it-is-as-american-as-cherry-pie.html. I will leave it to others to parse whether apple pie is the more prototypically American dessert.
  44. Mary McLeod Bethune, “Certain Unalienable Rights,” in Rayford Logan, ed., What the Negro Wants (University of North Carolina Press, 1944), 248, 249.
  45. Bethune, “Certain Unalienable Rights,” 249–50.
  46. Bethune, “Certain Unalienable Rights,” 250.
  47. Roy Wilkins, “The Negro Wants Full Equality,” in Logan, What the Negro Wants, 113, 130.
  48. Roy Wilkins, “The Conspiracy to Deny Equality,” in The Voice of Black America: Major Speeches by Negroes in the United States 1797–1973, ed. Philip S. Foner (Simon & Schuster, 1972).
  49. Martin Luther King Jr., “I Have a Dream,” speech, Washington, DC, August 28, 1963, in A Call to Conscience: The Landmark Speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. Clayborne Carson and Kris Shepard (Grand Central Publishing, 2001), 81, 82, 85. (Audience responses cleaned up.)
  50. Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (Times Books, 1995), 437.
  51. Obama, Dreams from My Father, 437.
  52. Barack Obama, “The Audacity of Hope,” speech, 2004 Democratic National Convention, Boston, July 27, 2004, in We Are the Change We Seek: The Speeches of Barack Obama, ed. E. J. Dionne Jr. and Joy-Ann Reid (Bloomsbury, 2017), 5, 7.
  53. Obama, “The Audacity of Hope,” 7.
  54. Danielle Allen, “A Forgotten Black Founding Father,” The Atlantic, March 2021, 42, 44, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/03/prince-hall-forgotten-founder/617791/.
  55. Allen, “A Forgotten Black Founding Father,” 44.
  56. Allen, “A Forgotten Black Founding Father.”
  57. Blight, Frederick Douglass, 368.
  58. Douglass, “The Slaveholders’ Rebellion,” speech, Himrods Corners, Yates County, NY, July 4, 1862, in Foner, ed., Frederick Douglass, 495, 496.
  59. Douglass, “The Slaveholders’ Rebellion,” 495, 496.