Blight deals with this period at length on the page, fascinated by “this question of the radical outsider who becomes the political insider and what does that do to his own psyche, his own mentality, and his own sense of himself over time?” But most know less of his third act, the 30 years after slavery’s end in which white America lashed back and he saw much of his work torn down. Many Americans, Blight says, know the story of Douglass the slave, the fugitive, the campaigner for abolition. But our subject matter remains explosive. We’re not – at least not now, over espresso on West 36th. In the 19th century they called it “disunion”, in the civil war.

The life of Douglass, Blight says, contains “a tremendous set of lessons for today, whatever issue we’re discussing in this wildly diverse and amazing country we have here but a country completely divided. But it’s also true that readers always seek parallels with their own lives and times. It may be a cliche to say history teaches us to avoid the mistakes of the past, not least because we never do. I get asked this at talk after talk: ‘What would Douglass do about Trump?’ And I get asked this at talk after talk: ‘What would Douglass do about Trump?’ Or, ‘What about Douglass can we think of and use now?’” “He’s the subtext of almost anything,” he says, “whether we like it or not. In conversation, he duly concedes that the work of any historian is now coloured by the trials of the Trumpian age. Blight has already given his take: to the Washington Post on “the dangers of presidential ignorance” for the Guardian on Trump as “the gift that keeps on giving”. In February last year, marking Black History Month, Trump said: “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more, I notice.”Īs with anything the billionaire tweets or blurts, ballyhoo and controversy followed. He laughs again when I mention Donald Trump. It’s easy to imagine his subject saying as he does: “There are times I wonder, ‘Did I already say that to this audience? No, I said that yesterday.’”īlight laughs. Now he’s riding the rails, speaking from town to town. In stunning detail, with literary verve appropriate to his subject, Blight has written a scholarly biography that often reads like a novel by Melville. Douglass’s struggle against slavery and for black equality threads through 19th-century America, from plantation to whaling port, from the pulpits of Boston to the battlefields of bloody Virginia. But Blight’s perseverance is entirely befitting of his subject.

“I’m lucky there’s so much interest,” he says, “and I’m lucky to have a publisher that really cares to send me around. He takes off his lovingly battered Michigan State cap, picks up a coffee and sits down for another conversation. Such is the interest in his new biography of Frederick Douglass, a book 10 years in the writing and a whole career in the making, he will be on the road till December.

‘At first I didn’t want to,’ says the author of this magisterial biography of the great abolitionist, ‘it was so daunting’ĭavid Blight arrives in New York pulling his carry-on luggage, en route from Washington, soon to fly onwards to San Francisco.

Dr. david blight