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Frederick Douglass inspires resistance in the face of Trump oppression

Photo: Jonathan Ah Kit/flickr

The good news is that President Donald Trump opened Black History Month by mentioning the renowned abolitionist Frederick Douglass. The bad news is, he doesn't seem to realize he's dead. "Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who's done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice," Trump said at his "African-American History Month Listening Session," which he hosted at the White House. Whether it was a misstatement or genuine ignorance of who Frederick Douglass was, or, perhaps, one of Trump's notorious "alternative facts," is not clear. What is clear is that the spirit of resistance for which Frederick Douglass is best remembered is alive and well, and is directed squarely against the Trump administration.

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black history anti-oppression anti-slavery Frederick Douglass trump administration Muslim ban racist policies

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history

Lincoln, Marx and the struggle against slavery

An Unfinished Revolution: Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln

by By Robin Blackburn
(Verso Press,
2011;
$19.95)

Marx did not support the North because he believed that its victory would directly lead to socialism. Rather, he saw in South and North two species of capitalism — one allowing slavery, the other not. The then existing regime of American society and economy embraced the enslavement of four million people whose enforced toil produced the republic’s most valuable export, cotton, as well as much tobacco, sugar, rice, and turpentine. Defeating the slave power was going to be difficult. The wealth and pride of the 300,000 slaveholders (there were actually 395,000 slave owners, according to the 1860 Census, but at the time Marx was writing this had not yet been published) was at stake.

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Black History Month book lounge Slavery Karl Marx lincoln anti-slavery abolitionists

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