Citation Needed - Frederick Douglass

Episode Date: October 6, 2021

Frederick Douglass (born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, c. February 1817[a] – February 20, 1895) was an American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. After escaping from slavery in Maryland, he became a national leader of the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts and New York, becoming famous for his oratory[5] and incisive antislavery writings. Accordingly, he was described by abolitionists in his time as a living counterexample to slaveholders' arguments that slaves lacked the intellectual capacity to function as independent American citizens.[6][7] Likewise, Northerners at the time found it hard to believe that such a great orator had once been a slave.[8] Our theme song was written and performed by Anna Bosnick. If you’d like to support the show on a per episode basis, you can find our Patreon page here.  Be sure to check our website for more details.

And so I say, why would you bring up your husband as dead if you don't want me to ask how he died? I mean, I think she was explaining that you were just at the wrong funeral. Well, right, but there wasn't a right funeral. I was just going there for the free food. Not better, man. You see how that's not better, right? I do not see how that's not better. You should maybe be obvious. Surprise! Surprise what, man, what's with the sheet? Okay, so you guys know how Noah's essay this week is about Frederick Douglass, fearless abolitionist, and more importantly,

guy who beat the shit out of his slave owner? Mm-hmm, yeah. Yeah, what about him? So I figure what better way to start the episode than by doling out a little justice of our own? Ta-da! Eli, who are these people? Oh, okay, it's been a while. I get it. These are your bullies. So on the end here, this is Ricky Dylan. No,

you told me he used to take your lunch money every day before school. Uh, this car whole lend a hand, Cecil, right? You told me how much he bullied you in high school. Hi, Carl. How's it going? And look, Tom, Tom, this one was tough, but I found him. I got that kid who pushed you off the swings and kindergarten. Phil, Phil Rolls-Strand. Man, how you doing? It's been forever. Phil. Okay, guys, guys, guys, no, no. You're not supposed to catch up with these people.

Phil. Supposed to beat him up like Frederick Douglass would have wanted. What? Eli, Frederick Douglass is a hero Not because the ass he kicked but because of the goodie did the point of his legacy isn't petty vengeance. It's justice dude It is Yeah, I mean you can read the essay the day before the show before we get yeah studio you know that right? It's there ah we being swell fine. I guess I'll send them all home then.

Oh, who home? Oh, yeah, I didn't explain that part. Uh, in the other room, I have everyone that I bullied in high school, ready to kick my ass is like the, you know, finale. You know, Frederick Douglas actually did beat up a lot of guys. So several different people in the right. After everyone came all this way, if we just let them go, yeah, and I would also like to watch you get punched just right in the right. After everyone came all this way, if we just let them go. Yeah, and I would also like to watch you get punched just right in the face, just right in the face.

All right, just okay. Everyone we are good to go. Now, let me start by saying, I think we can all agree. They a lot of you deserved it for being weird. I'm going to go hell. Yeah, bring them a studio chair if you can, Noah. Ow! Helen!

I did not say go yet. Root! Hello and welcome to Citation Needed Podcasts where you choose to subject read a single article about Wikipedia and pretend we're experts because it's the internet. And that's how it works now. I'm your critical race theory group facilitator and I'll be hosting this sensitivity training but I'll need my participants. First up, a guy who thinks critically about race for every D&D character he rolls, and a guy who probably is going to ask what D&D is, Eli and Tom.

Okay, Teethlings are red or skin colored. Read the goddamn player's manual, you liberal cocks. Skinny. I know what D&D is, Cecil. It is a story game about elves played by people without retirement accounts. Well, other people also play. Also joining us tonight, a man who studied critical race theory since he beat Gen 1 pole position Noah. That's pretty good analogy actually. I would get into it, but in

pole position, turning left is safer than turning right. Everybody's had to get you and you have to keep proving yourself every 45 fucking seconds. Yeah. This episode is going to be a very terrible tale of people forced to work for no monetary gain. If you would like to stamp out that idea right out of existence, you can become a patron of this show. And an abolitionist. And I may edit that out later. I love it. I may just edit that. I don't know. Look better on paper when I wrote it. So a lot better on paper. I think it's funny. If you like legal, I'd show my jacket off. It's the picture. Be sure to stick around till the end of the show. And with that of the way, tell us Noah, what person, place thing concept phenomenon or event we'll be talking about

today. Fredrick Douglas. What person place thing concept phenomenon or event will you be talking about today? Fredrick Douglas. And Noah, you probably read the article in Wikipedia, listen to and read like seven books on the topic. Are you ready to abridge this so it fits in 30 minutes? I know about 30 minutes. I'll see what I can do. I'll see what I can do.

Okay. All right. Well, we're on the subject by the way. If you want to learn more, I highly recommend the first three quarters of David Blitz biography of Douglas. And if you really want to know what kind of arguments he had with his kids when they were in their 40s, the other quarter of it is pretty good too. I know why Frederick Douglass.

Well, obviously because he's an example of somebody who's doing an amazing job and is being recognized more and more. Oh, one of the perks of running into the script first is you get to make that job. Yeah. Exactly. So, but for reals, is the history doesn't offer up many real heroes, especially not American history. It's like every time you try to admire a historical figure, you read what he had to say about

Jews and that fucks it up for you. But Frederick Douglass is one of the few figures in American history you can unabashedly admire. Now I'm not saying he's without faulty cheated on his wife to the point of having a live in mistress twice. Okay, I think at that point that's just another wife. If they live there, they're just another wife. Yeah, and one of his chief arguments for giving black people the vote was, come on, you even let the Irish have that shit. So, it has an Irishman, I would be offended, but then I look at my family and I'm like, you know what, maybe this isn't the group that should be deciding stuff. I don't know. Only should be asked. But so, but judged against

the standard of his time, Frederick Douglass is one of the most progressive, brilliant, effective and just generally badass reformers this country has ever produced. Okay. All right. So who was Frederick Douglass? He was an order and a social reformer who escaped from slavery and became one of the most important abolitionists in American history. He was also a prolific autobiographer, which like buy it, so seems like a weird thing to say about. Somebody is, right? But the dude wrote three autobiographies and basically spent the last 15 years of his life tweaking the last one along the way.

He dined with presidents broke hundreds of color barriers and was the vice presidential candidate for the first woman to ever run for president. Okay. And there it is. The only thing Tim Cain and Frederick Douglass have in common. Yeah. Tim Cain ran with Hillary in 2016, podcast listener. It's okay.

I didn't remember his name. I also want to do good. Right. No judgment here. Safe space. I was, while I was voting for him, I was forgetting his name. So. Now, normally starting a biographical essay with the person's birthday, it's just

kind of a convenient way to start the story and also give you a time, Primo, at once. But in this instance, it actually tells you a lot about the person because the best we can do for Frederick Douglass's birthday is a circa. He was probably born around February 14th of 1817, but we're not even 100% on the year. Douglas himself celebrated his birthday on the 14th, but he would spend a great deal of his time dedicated to the futile effort of pinning down that exact date. No accurate records were kept, of course, because Frederick Douglass was born a slave. And the name he started his life with was Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey. So now Frederick didn't really know

his mother, Harriet Bailey. He was effectively separated from her as soon as that was physically possible, which was kind of the standard operating procedure at the time. His mom did make some effort to be part of his life by walking to the quarters he lived in after her work was done. And though his remembrances conflict a bit from one on all biography to the other, at one point he said he had never seen his mom in the daylight. Now, if you think that part's fucked up and hard to write humorous interjections into what you hear about his father. I do.

Yeah. That's why there's silence. No. Yeah, right. Yeah, don't apologize for that. So and it gets even worse. What we know for sure about his dad is that he was a white rapist, probably his master Aaron father.

And then the white rapist in question, it was probably Harriet Bailey's master Aaron Anthony, though that's never been confirmed. Yeah, which was too bad because Mori Povitch was alive at the time. Early 40s. Yeah, which was too bad because Mori Povitch was alive at the time. Early 40s. Yeah. A young guy. Now, the early part of his life takes place in the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay

in Talbot County, Maryland. For the first few years of his life, he was more or less raised by his maternal grandmother, Betsy Bailey. And even at a young age, Frederick was noticing an advantage that was going to serve him the rest of his life. He was really smart. Like he was put to work at the brutal fucking age of six, it was as a playmate to some of the white kids that needed smartening up. Like, like I guess they figured his intelligence would really be a little bit more intelligent than any other kids, even the educated white kids that were older than him. So when he was put to work at the brutal fucking age of six, it was as a playmate to some of the white kids that needed smartening up.

Like, like I guess they figured his intelligence would rub off on their dumbass progeny. Okay. So now as a parent, this is why I make my kids play with the rich kids. I'm hoping that'll rub off. Also, their parents always by lunch. It's great. Exactly. Exactly. It's just as long as you have a gator on that chair. Correct. Yeah.

So a few years later, the guy who was probably Frederick Douglass' biological dad died. Little Freddie was shuffled around a bit and eventually loaned out to a guy named Hugh Alde for basically the same smart and up your dumb kid, Purp. Okay. How do they think learning happened to know? Do they think it was through us Moses who just put smart puts, well, they have to be experienced at themselves. Yeah. So, yeah.

Is anybody's guess, but they had nothing to build on. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So, but the odds lived in Baltimore. So instead of continuing this life on a plantation, little Freddie wound up in basically the closest thing this out of the 1820s had to a cosmopolitan city. Douglass said that compared to the plantations, anyway, slaves in the city were almost free men. What's more, Hughes' wife Sophia saw to it that he was properly fed and enclosed and gave him a comfortable bed to sleep in, which he'd never had at any point in his life to that, to that time. And unless I make her sound saintly in my description, Douglass was quick to point out that she did little more than to treat him quote,

as she's supposed one human being ought to treat another end quote. And yet by the standard of her time, the bare minimum of morality makes her kind of leap off the pages of history. Yeah, somehow you already know she's going to be played by Sandra Bullock and the movie. Exactly. How I know that she's just there. But in addition to feeding the dude and not generally treating him like livestock, which again, to be clear, was his experience to that point in his life. She also taught him to read, or at least she got as far as she could before her husband

found out she was doing that. And then like the dumbass study was, he gave her this big lecture about how well if he learned to read, he'd figure out how to break out a slavery and escape, but like he was there. He was standing in front of the English and had ears. So yeah, so if he had to stop teaching him, but he already knew the alphabet and he added on pretty good authority that getting good at reading would break him out of fucking bondage. So from that point on, whenever he saw it discarded piece of paper, whether it was a political pamphlet, a newspaper or an advertising

flyer, as long as it had words written on it, he would squirrel it away from practice. And then he took that stack of paper and used it as a step to climb out his window. Yeah, we can't have him learn to read. What if he reads about how he doesn't like being a slave, huh? Yeah, I'd be the only way to figure it out. All right. So, of course, once he was cut off from learning new shit, it kind of deflated the purpose of having them there to smarten up the kids. So soon after that, he was hired out to a plantation owner named William Freelit, whereupon he

immediately started teaching other slaves how to reap. And his lessons eventually got so popular that slaves started showing up from other plantations to learn from him after hours upwards of 40 and 50 at a time. So they wanted to be smart. Just not smart enough for first grade was he teaching white kids to be witty. I don't understand. You got to master the zinger. You got to get the zinger out here on the plantation. That's what's important.

Basically, yeah. So now Fred managed to keep all this shit under wraps for six months because of a combination of him being really smart and the white supremacists that were running the plantations. Never considering for a second that a slave might actually be smarter than them. But eventually word got out about his after hours lessons and all hell broke loose. Now, to his credit, and I'm talking about a guy who owned a plantation in the Annabelle himself, so that's very little credit, Freelens seemed to be okay with the idea of Fred teaching slaves to read, but several other slave owners nearby were outraged at the idea, so they broke up the lessons violently.

We heard Giajo no, just power everyone. Half the battle already won. Damn. So throughout this whole time, Frederick was effectively Hugh old slave. Like he worked on freelance plantation. But at the end of the day, Freeland paid his wages to Hugh. Frederick had been with that family since he was a kid, but he still technically belonged on paper to Hughes brother Thomas Ald and when Thomas found out that his slave was reading and knowing facts and shitty hit the roof. So in 1833, when Douglas was about 16 years old, Thomas took him from Hugh and sent him to work for a guy named Edward Covey. A Covey apparently had a reputation as a slave breaker. So I guess the idea was that he was going to beat all the education out of old Fred Bailey. Oh, so he's going to teach

him to play high school football. What? Exactly. But only they'd know about that at the time. And she's in the movie. She's going to teach him through a metaphor. You see that? That's your family. You want to be your family boy. Now, to this point, I've been spares on the brutality details because let's face it. It's already pretty fucked up. I'm asking these guys to write jokes into such a terrible

story. But suffice to say that as bad as being a slave in the American South was on the average, this was worse. Douglas was whipped frequently and mercilessly, but eventually he reached the limit of what he could take. And instead of breaking, he rebelled. He fought back and he whipped Edward Covey's ass. Now, he was only 16, but he'd been working in fields for several years at that point. He was tall for his age. He was a big dude. Right. And so I think this, we actually can take a moment on maybe a video reenactment see if we get Donnie Yen. Right.

The moon. There you go. Now after the fight Douglas ran off into the woods. At first he went to Thomas Alden, but begged to go back to the Freeland plantation. But once it was clear that wasn't going to work, he headed back to Kobe's place. But he waited in the woods an extra couple of days so they would be coming back on a Sunday when the devoutly Christian Kobe was less likely to infill like they violent retribution. And the plan worked. In fact, not only did Kobe not whip Beggles over the fight, but apparently he never laid a hand or lash on him again. The assumption is that

like a didn't want to get his ass kicked again, cuz getting your ass kicked hurts and b, he didn't want too many people to find out that he got his ask by a teenager, lest he loses reputation as a slave break. Oh, yeah. White supremacists that want it a little tougher than they actually were. There is an anomaly. Right. Yeah. All right.

So we're going to go ahead and call this one a draw. Right. Now, if you can hand me my teeth, I think there's still some in your knuckles there. That would be great. I think you're going to prime out. I want you's still some in your knuckles there. That would be great. I think you got warm in next to you. Now a few years later, Frederick would meet and fall in love with a woman named Anna Murray. She was a free black woman about five years his senior that lived in Baltimore. Now by then he'd already gotten mixed up in one thwarted escape attempt, but he managed to talk himself out of any real punishment by again, being

smarter than all the people questioning him about it. But between that and the insolent reading and teaching, he'd earned a reputation amongst the local slave owners as a troublemaker. So both he and Anna knew there was a target on his back. So on September 3rd of 1838 with Anna's help, he made one last attempt to flee and given his reputation to that point, it was clear that successful or not, this was going to be his last try. Well, I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm going to put my money on the guy who taught himself how to read from emptying their cycling bin and not the 75 IQ racist who Oh, right, Frederick. Now, what's this I hear about you teaching fellow African Americans to read? Well, well, hold on. Why would I sound like a Midwestern white guy? Also, why would he be referring to a slave

as African Americans? Okay, never mind, I've been informed by my editor that that's the only way this sketch is gonna fly. So, sorry, yeah, I didn't teach anybody how to read. You didn't. Well, then why did Mrs. Wickham say she saw y'all with books last night after supper? Oh, is that what those were. I, you know, I thought, this is the strangest Mount toilet paper I have ever seen books. Of course, I see you guys with a moment.

Okay. Well, what about Mr. Featherberry? He says you've been writing letters. Oh, no, I was trying to draw a picture of some fences that I saw. Mm-hmm. Okay, well, take the shop and listen to town, pick up the groceries for me. Do you mind? Sure, yeah, no problem. Ah, now I caught you. You did?

Yeah. So you forgot to ask for money. There's no way you're smart enough to read. No, of course. Of course, you got me. I sure did. Art. We left off, Frederick Douglass was penning his resignation letter when some rich white

slave owner looked over his shoulder and asked what those squiggles were, what happened next, Noah. Yeah. So, okay, so when we think about slaves escaping to the North, I think most of us probably envisioned people sneaking through forests and following the stars hiding out during the daylight, whatever. And no doubt that that's how a lot of slaves did escape. But in addition to the underground railroad, some escaping slaves could just take the over ground railroad. And that's what Fred Bailey did. Keep in mind that they didn't exactly have picture

IDs at that point. So all he needed to get by was paperwork from a free black man that was about his height. Anna Maria, a few friends helped him to obtain exactly that. And on September through to 1838, he boarded a train in Baltimore that was bound for Philadelphia. Now, of course, just because he had false papers, didn't mean he was in the clear, right? But obviously, even people whose papers weren't false weren't in the clear, but plenty of shit could go wrong for them. Like honestly, all it would take was a white person being nominally suspicious of him. Yeah, but when is a white person ever been suspicious and of a black person though? And then you'll be fine.

Yeah. Yeah. So it doesn't like try to walk a dog or drive a car, go swimming. Yeah. We'll be fine. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Or barbecue or hold a phone or sleep in his own bed. Yeah, we'll be for existence. We'll be fine. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Or barbecue or hold a phone or sleep in his own bed. Yeah. So the freedom papers he had that were from a guy that looked nothing

like him. So any close inspection would reveal his rules. And even though Baltimore was the second largest city in America in 1828, that just meant it had a population of 80,000 people, right? So it's kind of small, totally, it wasn't a question that somebody would just be on the train going like, Hey, Fred, the hell are you doing going to feel it? Fred, why are you making that throat cutting motion and waving your hand at me like that? Man, Frederick Douglass, you are a weird guy. Frederick Douglass. Yeah.

Frederick Douglass. No, okay. So for the two years leading up to his final escape attempt, Douglass, you are a weird guy. Frederick Douglass. Yeah. Frederick Douglass. Now, okay. So for the two years leading up to his final escape attempt, Douglass have been working in the city's shipyards, which left him in possession of amongst other things, a pretty thorough knowledge of sailorlingo. So when he needed to adopt a false persona for his escape, he went with a sailor, not only could he speak their language, but cities like Baltimore were like every business is kind of dependent on seafarers, tended to show a a bit of difference to sailors even when they were black.

And of course, a black sailor has every reason of the world be getting on a train and heading north. Now, of course, his disguise nearly fucked them when he ran into some really chatty sailors along the route, but ultimately less than 24 hours after he boarded the train, he de-borted in the free north. Now, of course, just because he made it to the north didn't mean he'd made it to safety. There were plenty of slave catchers that made their living rounding up fugitive slaves and collecting their bounties. So he abandoned his mother's name at this point, along with his two middle names and re-crested himself Frederick Douglass. Actually, he started off as Frederick Johnson,

but then like an anti-slavery activist friend of his told him that pretty much every escaped slave took the name Johnson. So he's like John Smith at that point. So he decided to go with something else. So, so now he actually plucked Douglas from Sir Walter Scott's The Lady of the Lake, though he added an extra S because he thought it was more dignified to have S at the end of his nails. It was a different time. So he spent a few days in New York hiding out with an anti-slavery activist while he waited for Anna Murray to catch up with him. And when she did, the two were married. Yeah. The only bride ever to walk up the aisle while making sure she wasn't followed.

Funding. Now, to be honest, I'm doing a great disservice to Douglas by focusing so much of the story on his time as a slave and his escape, right? I like we're more than halfway through the episode and we really haven't gotten to any of the historically important shit that he did, but, but all the important shit is so heavily rooted in this origin story that you can't really get to the one without going through the other. Suffice to say, I'm going to be in a bit of a hurry through the rest of the essay. No, last week he dedicated an episode of our podcast to

a book he doesn't like, but hasn't read. I think pacing's out the window. I think you're good. All right. So at first Frederick and Anna settled in new Bedford, Massachusetts, which was a bit more welcoming to escape slaves than most New England cities. Douglas became a licensed preacher, apparently they had licenses back then, and that was in 1839 and it became a regular all the nearby abolitionist meetings. It was through the latter that it became friends with famed abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Now Garrison was America's most prominent anti-slavery activist and his abolitionist newspaper, the liberator was the most widely distributed in the country at the time.

And of course, when he met Douglas, he was like, dude, you really need to travel around telling your story at anti-slavery meetings. So he took on a new career. Okay. I'll travel, but I got to approve the itinerary. This is going to be a northern states tour. Yes. The second he says, yes, some white person starts misquoting him to make themselves feel better.

Fred, how I'm not I'm in the other room. So in 1843, he joins Garrison and some other prominent abolitionists. And he set out on a tour of 100 meeting halls in the Eastern and Midwestern states in six months. Douglas was frequently accosted beaten. And at one point permanently injured by angry white mobs during the tour, but he never missed an engagement.

A Scottish guy once angrily walked out of a meet and greet I was doing and I considered never showing my face in public again. I was more embarrassed by the people who stayed. See, so I said, yeah, I feel sad. I just glad I could cry in your shoulder that night. That's all. That's nice. All right.

So it was around this time that he started writing his first autobiography as well. Published in 1845, narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave was an immediate bestseller. It was reprinted nine times in just the first three years. It was translated into French and Dutch for publication in Europe. And keep in mind that like the American Revolution was damn near in living memory for some folks in England. So any story of how terrible Americans were as a people was bound to sell real well there. That made Frederick Douglass an overnight celebrity in the UK.

I get it, not to brag, but we have multiple British listeners on this podcast. I like that. I listen a lot of which tracks because we're solid proof of how terrible Americans are. Yeah. So his fame and you're pretty quickly led to a European speaking tour. Now, that was partly because anti slavery groups in Ireland and Great Britain were sending a steady stream of invites, but it was also a safety issue.

My publisher is autobiography, the escape slave who was by the laws of the country that he lived in, still Thomas Ald's property was calling a lot of attention to himself, and there had been rumors that Ald might try to reclaim him. So he headed to England on an extended tour and lest we fall into the trap of forgetting just how much more racist America was in the early 1800s. I want to offer a quote from Douglas where he was writing about it like his first few days in Ireland. Quote, I breathe and low.

The chattel becomes a man. I gaze around and vain for who will question my equal humanity, claim me as his slave or offer me an insult. I employ a cab. I am seated beside white people. I reach the hotel. I enter the same door. I am shown the same parlor. I dine at the same table and no one is offended. I find myself regarded and treated at every turn with the kindness and deference paid to white people. Now ultimately, Douglas would spend two years touring around England and lecturing to packed halls during this time, his friends and a white lady who was almost certainly

fucking during that period raised the money to buy his freedom. So in 1847, he returned to America unofficially free man. He goes back and he pays it all in pennies. Fuck yeah. And I'm going to need a receipt. God damn it. Definitely needed a receipt. So now once he was back in the States, he started his own abolitionist newspaper called The North Star. In the intervening time, he and Garrison had had a bit of an ideological falling out as Garrison was a little more wedded to the concept of nonviolence than Douglas. And let's be super clear about this one.

One of the main reasons we don't hear as much about Frederick Douglass in history class as we do say Martin Luther King Jr. is because Frederick Douglass very clearly advocated for breaking some fucking skulls, if that's what it was going to take to earn black freedom. Now, of course, breaking some skulls is exactly what it was going to take to earn black freedom. On April 12th of 1861, Confederate troops fire on for a sumpter and the American Civil War is underway. By that time Douglas is 44 years old and he's the most famous African American in the country and probably in the world. He's been a tireless and vocal advocate for the abolition of slavery and for women's

rights for decades by then. And as the war ramps up, he transitions quite nicely from reformer to war propagandist. He starts dutifully publishing articles about how ethesis real. He publishes articles about how Confederate troops are drinking from the skulls of their vanquished enemies and shit. Well, maybe you just guess that every other piece of writing in history ever, including the thriving reenactment scene, would act like the South were just good old boys out for a jog for the rest of history. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. Balance in it out a bit.

Now, it's worth emphasizing here that the Civil War, at least at first, it didn't have to be a war to end slavery. It's not like they said, we're going to end slavery. And then everybody went to war, right? There was a very real fear among abolitionists that ultimately Lincoln would make peace by agreeing to allow the institution of slavery to continue as long as the South agreed to rejoin the union. Okay, but what kind of fucking deal would that be? Like, I fine. I'll take you back and you don't have to stop fucking our gardener, but I get to order not shows. No, not shows. No, not fine. You're right. Stupid. I don't get not shows.

Yeah, but Tom, but we all know that guy. We all have. And we do. Right. And while people have debated hit the sincerity of the claims for over a century now, Lincoln said publicly that he would do exactly that. It took the work of people like Frederick Douglass to ensure that that was off the table. And his effort to that effect included face-to-face meetings with the president about it. It's just like, uh, Mr. Lincoln, I'm going to need you not to slide me across the table like a piece of paper with a dollar. No, I just sit in the chair. Thank you. So, so once the Civil War was over and slavery was abolished, Douglas would turn his efforts in oratory to the fight for black suffrage and civil rights. He also took on a

series of government jobs as the US Marshall for DC, the recorder of deeds for DC and minister resident in console general to Haiti. He would serve under five different presidents and break so many color barriers that it would be damn near impossible to list all of them. He died in 1895 at the age of 77 or possibly 76 from a massive heart attack. And if you want to know how active he stayed in his later life, the most recent speech he'd given before his death was that evening. Not damn. Wow.

And if you had to summarize what you learned in one sentence, what would it be? No matter how bad you think American history is going in, it's always gonna be worse. Yeah Are you ready for the quiz? Oh, yeah. All right Noah Tough one if Frederick Douglass could see us now He'd Hey crack a few more fucking skulls. Yeah That's that's that's it. That's what you do. I think that's what you do. Got it. One shot. All right. No, if Regicor alive today, he wouldn't have gone on tour. Obviously, he would have started a podcast. What would the title of that podcast? Oh, no. a escape. Be the Bailey.

Pod Slave America. Oh, my God. Wait, wait, don't sell me. Wait, wait, don't sell me. Is the greatest thing you've ever done. That's, that's fucking amazing. Yeah. I'm going to have to obviously go with D. Wait, wait, don't sell me. Uh, you are correct. And you get to answer the message when I get it next week. All right. Noah, thanks to my upstate New York education, who did I think

Frederick Douglass was for most of my life? Oh, Jesus Christ. Hey, that guy has always pretended to have a heart attack on that sitcom. Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ. Oh, no. Jesus Christ.

A boulevard in Upper Manhattan. What? See the peanut butter guy? In Heyman. Or D without context, the guy who wrote hit Shikers guy to the guy. All right, well, Eli, I know you pretty well. I'm going to go with D, the guy who wrote hit Shikers guy to the guy. That is correct.

You know, as good as some of these were and not as good as some of these were, I think we're just going to have to say heath is the winner because he skipped this and he will not have to weather any of the bad emails that we get. There you go. Yeah, so he's going to be the winner and I guarantee that heath is going to choose Tom. I just guarantee you. Yeah, I feel like it's what's in the essay schedule. That's why hold on.

Let me talk to him. Yeah, it's it's. Emmett. Generally, is heath with us right now? All right. It's it's time it's time to finally is he's with us right now All right well for Eli Tom and Noah I'm Cecil. Thank you for hanging out with today We'll back next week and by then Tom will be an expert on something else between now and then you can listen to all of our other stuff I have to do is say citation pod calm and you can check out all the links there

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I sent you in for $8 worth of groceries but gave you a ten dollar bill. Yeah, no, I changed it for two fives and I only needed the one. Right, right. So the five is... I'm spending on the groceries. Got it. All right, well then, here's the other five. Oh, oh, right. Yeah, no, I guess I did the math wrong. Damn right. You did. I am smart. Yeah, you sure are.