Blight has offered the reader a powerful knowledgeable account of Douglass's life and efforts with compassion. However, my advice would be to have already read one of Douglass's autobiographies or to read one of them in tandem with this work. If a reader has done this extra reading he might find the first 100 pages of Blight's lengthily book tedious and little more than useless filling in what one has already read in the autobiography. After the torturous beginning Blight offers strengthening insightful material to the great abolitionist polemicist, recruiter of black soldiers for the Civil War, and early civil rights leader for the black vote and against the lynching craze. One gets a real sense of Douglass's character and issues confronting him and he, in turn, confronted them. No doubt the length, 750 pages, of this biography is a big minus, sometimes getting in the way, but, otherwise, is profoundly useful in helping one understand Douglass and his times.

Quote: (page 742) “The 'new charge' of rape, Douglass maintained, had tainted everything about race relations across the land. He especially argued that alleged sexual assault and the violence exacted against blacks meant ' paving the way for our (blacks) entire disenfranchisement.' Slavery had always been a 'system of legalized outrage upon black women by white men, and ' no white man was ever shot, burned, or hanged for availing himself of all the power that slavery gave him.' The perceived loss of that power drove men to lynch mobs and ritual killings. Too many white Southerners still lived by a slaveholding mentality: 'Their institutions have taught them no respect for human life, and especially the life of the negro.' ...On the day of Douglass's speech in Washington, January 9, 1894, a black man named Samuel Smith was lynched in Greenville, Madison County, Florida. He had been accused of murder.” ( )