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Friday, March 11, 2011

Frederick Douglas- The Lessons of the Hour

        Frederick Douglas, an African American ex-slave, abolitionist, and leader, delivered his last speech at the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church of Washington, DC, on January 9, 1894. "The Lesson of the Hour" begins by identifying"negro problem" as a problem of white violence. Especially in the South, mobs were mostly made up by the better classes. He then deeper talked about the whites  disenfranchise the blacks so they still lived like slaves. 
           Compared to Booker T. Washington's  and W.E.B. Du Bois's thought about the development of the freed slaves, Frederick Douglas agreed with Du Bois more on slavery situation. 
           Washington believed that political freedom was not the first aim of the development. He wanted the whites to provide vocational education for the blacks; even the African Americans have to begged for the work and claimed their inferior.
           However, Du Bois criticized Washington's idea, and stated that without the right to vote, they would not be different from their status before Civil war -- slaves. Douglas assented the opinion of Du Bois that the African Americans should not accept their subordination, but fight back for being a real American citizen. 

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