A Lesson from Frederick Douglass on Empowerment

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One of the benefits of talking — and, more importantly, listening — to a lot of people is picking up new insights and perspectives.  Yesterday, in a conversation with a colleague, I heard something that will stick with me.  She acknowledged something most of us have felt: a sense of being occupied, even overwhelmed with so many things we cannot control.  At such times, as she insightfully observed, we welcome learning about the things we can control.

This insight — thank you, Lezlie! — is not only an inspiration to those of us resolved to lead positive change, but also the perfect way to introduce a column on one of the most impressive human beings the United States has ever produced: Frederick Douglass.

We can rightly say that we face many challenges in our lives today.  They may seem to come — to borrow a metaphor from Stephen Crane's story "The Open Boat" — like waves that threaten our little boats on a savage sea, but few of us alive today can claim to face anything as challenging, as threatening, as physically and emotionally and spiritually destructive as Douglass and his fellow enslaved Americans before the end of the Civil War.  In books such as Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass described physical abuse, murder, family separation, oppression, and more.  He wrote, in powerful prose, of suffering he had seen, as well as suffering he had personally experienced.  Here's one example from My Bondage and My Freedom:

“I speak but the simple truth, when I say, I have often been so pinched with hunger, that I have fought with the dog — "Old Nep" — for the smallest crumbs that fell from the kitchen table, and have been glad when I won a single crumb in the combat. Many times have I followed, with eager step, the waiting-girl when she went out to shake the table cloth, to get the crumbs and small bones flung out for the cats.”

Such suffering — whether in the form of hunger, cold, abuse, or, to use one of Douglass's phrases, "mental darkness" — is the kind of uncontrollable affliction that would make anyone feel taxed, overwhelmed, defeated.

And yet . . .

Douglass chose to focus on what he could control.  For one thing, he could learn to read — and he did, despite the efforts of his master to keep him illiterate.  As I explained in "Do Like Douglass" in the December 9 issue of Mind Travel, Douglass recognized that reading was empowering.  It would equip him to rise above his lot in life.  In Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, he described his method:

“The plan which I adopted, and the one by which I was most successful, was that of making friends of all the little white boys whom I met in the street. As many of these as I could, I converted into teachers. With their kindly aid, obtained at different times and in different places, I finally succeeded in learning to read.”

Years later, after he had escaped and was working in a brass foundry, Douglass was again intent on improving himself through education.  He wrote:

“Hard work, night and day, over a furnace hot enough to keep the metal running like water, was more favorable to action than thought, yet here I often nailed a newspaper to the post near my bellows, and read while I was performing the up and down motion of the heavy beam by which the bellows was inflated and discharged. It was the pursuit of knowledge under difficulties, and I look back to it now after so many years with some complacency and a little wonder that I could have been so earnest and persevering in any pursuit other than for my daily bread.”

This commitment — in the face of challenges few of us will ever face — paid off handsomely for Douglass, who became one of the leading orators, writers, and activists of his day, as well as an inspiration to countless readers of his works.

Next week, we will examine other ways that Douglass controlled what he could control.  Until then, I encourage you to "Do like Douglass" and strive, through whatever challenges you face, to create positive change in your life and in your world.