Throughline - Everyone should have a voice

Episode Date: March 10, 2026

The story of Frederick Douglass’s fight for universal suffrage from the Civil War to the rise of Jim Crow.To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline.To manage podcast ad preferences, review the links below:See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR and the following message come from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, investing in creative thinkers and problem solvers who help people, communities, and the planet flourish. More information is available at Hewlett.org. This is America in Pursuit, a limited run series from ThruLine and NPR. I'm Randab del Fattah. Each week, we bring you stories about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the U.S. that began 250 years ago. And of course, at the heart of these stories

are the people that made history happen, people who had a bold vision for the America they wanted to see despite the obstacles. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her claims have been born of earnest struggle. If there is no struggle, there is no progress.

Frederick Douglass is one of the greatest minds in American history. Born into slavery in the early 1800s, Douglas lived through the Civil War, emancipation, black men getting the right to vote and the beginning of the terrors and humiliations of Jim Crow. And through all of that, he kept coming back to one thing, a sacred right he believed was at the heart of American democracy, voting. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will. Today on the show, Ramtin and I bring you the story of one man's dedication to changing how American democracy worked for everyone,

by fighting for the right for all people to have a say. That story right after a quick break. This message comes from Wise, the app for international people using money around the globe. You can send, spend, and receive in up to 40 currencies with only a few simple taps. Be smart, get Wise. Download the Wise app today or visit wise.com. Tees and Cs apply. Support for NPR and the following message come from the William and Florian.

Hewlett Foundation, investing in creative thinkers and problem solvers who help people, communities, and the planet flourish. More information is available at Hewlett.org. Will you repeat the mistakes of your fathers who sinned ignorantly? Will the country be peaceful, united, and happy, or troubled, divided, and miserable? Frederick Douglass dreamed of a country that lived up to the ideals of its founding fathers, where all people could vote. You. universal suffrage. And he did everything in his power to make that dream a reality.

In the face of suffering, he hoped. In the face of setbacks, he hoped. In the face of violence, he hoped. And in the face of suppression, Frederick Douglass hoped. From the very moment he gets on a platform as a speaker as early as 1841, and then endlessly across the north as the itinerate abolitionist orator

in the 1840s into the 1850. Douglas was a firm, fierce believer in what the 19th century loved to call the natural rights tradition. And what we generally mean by that is that a tradition of inalienable rights, rights that are either from God or from nature. This is David Blight.

He's a history professor at Yale University. an author of the biography, Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom. Douglas once referred to the first principles of Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, you know, the four first principles. Liberty, equality, popular sovereignty,

meaning governments exist by the consent of the government. And the last was the right of revolution. Exactly what he meant by equality. you know, has always been open to a debate. But Douglas loved those principles, loved those creeds. He loved the Declaration of Independence in that sense. He didn't like the way it was practiced, but he loved the creeds.

What have I or those I represent to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and natural justice embodied in that Declaration of Independence extended to us? I say it with a sad sense. of the disparity between us. He said, natural rights are like the air you breathe. They belong to no one group, no one person, no one country. They belong to everybody.

And the right to vote to Douglas in something called a republic, if it could ever live up to those creeds, was the most sacred right of all. He saw it not just as a kind of human right to participate in one's political system, But he saw it as a power by which people could protect themselves. Douglas really believed that, and he said it a thousand times over, that the right to vote for African Americans in particular,

especially once they were liberated by the Civil War, was their greatest self-protection. After the Civil War was over, nearly four million formerly enslaved Black Americans were free. Right away, The radical Republicans, their leadership anyway, let's remember it was the original Republicans. The Republicans of Abraham Lincoln came out for black suffrage.

The Radical Republicans. If you've been listening to this whole series, we've brought up the radical Republicans a number of times. They were resolute abolitionists leading up to and during the Civil War. And now they're pushing for the black vote. Now, that had multiple moments. motives, one of the motives, and it should not be diminished, is that they believe this was a right. The second motive was, if you want to spread the Republican Party into the South, you have a whole

new constituency to do it with here with black voters. So the right to vote becomes the heartbeat of radical Republican reconstruction plans as soon as the war is over. Douglas is himself a radical Republican at this point. He's just not an elected official. He has nothing to do with designing these plans. He is, as always, the spokesman. He is the order. He is the writer.

He is the outsider trying to beat his way inside to that Republican Party. But Douglas starts preaching for the right to vote immediately. In fact, he's doing it during the war. We may be asked, why we want it? I will tell you why we want it. We want it because it is our right, first of all. This speech called what the black man wants is a speech he took on the road, and it's a fascinating oration because it is mostly about the right to vote. It's also about wanting and demanding dignity, wanting and demanding safety, etc.

I hold that women, as well as men, have the right to vote, and my heart and voice go with that movement to extend suffrage to women. But that question rests upon another basis than which our right rests. He especially used the idea of the service and sacrifice of black soldiers. If we are, you know, human enough to serve in uniform, if we are human enough to go to, die in war for the country, then we are human enough to have the right to vote. You know, if we are capable of this, then we are capable of that. By depriving us of suffrage, you affirm our incapacity to form an intelligent judgment respecting public men and public measures. You declare before the world that we are

unfit to exercise the elective franchise and, by this means, lead us to undervalue ourselves. There is no argument, he says, against this right to vote. You can say that black people who were enslaved are not as well educated, but they know how to tell a field. They know how power gets used because it's been used on them for generations. They know how political will is based on how you can bend it out in society. They know something about economic power because they were slaves living under this system. And so he says over and over and over, don't tell us we're not educated as a means of not letting us vote. Help us get educated and we'll show you how to vote.

He so often used this argument that the right to vote was the ultimate, sacred form of protection in a republic. If I were in a monarchical government or an autocratic or aristocratic government where the few, bore rule and the many were subject, there would be no special stigma resting upon me because I did not exercise the elective franchise. But here were universal suffrage is the rule, where that is the fundamental idea of the government. To rule us out is to make us an exception, to brand us with the stigma of inferiority, and to invite to our heads the missiles of those about us. Therefore, I want the franchise for the black man. In the aftermath of the Civil War, a time that would come to be known as the Reconstruction era.

The country was reinventing itself. It was a moment of great hope and promise for black Americans in particular. The country was embracing progressive reforms. Black politicians were being elected to southern state governments and even to Congress for the first time. laws against racial discrimination were being implemented. The future looked bright. Probably the most openly hopeful brief period of Douglas's life was from about 1867 to 1870 or so.

During that brief moment, that window, he writes a speech that he took on the road for a while, called the composite nation. We stand between the populous shores of two great oceans. Our land is capable of supporting one-fifth of all the globe. All moral, social, and geographical causes conspired to bring to us the peoples of all other overpopulated countries. Europe and Africa are already here, and the Indian was here before either. This is an amazing speech where Douglas says, the United States now has a chance

to do what no other people have ever done to create a republic with people from all corners of the world of all colors, all religions and ethnicities can come together and all live under the same constitution, now a new constitution, and the rule of law. He says, no one's ever done this.

No one's ever accomplished. in a republic. We have that chance. We have chance to create, he says, the composite nation. And here I hold that a liberal and brotherly welcome to all who are likely to come to the United States is the only wise policy which this nation can adopt. It's so hopeful. You read it, God, it sounds like, you know, it sounds like a multiculturalism manifesto.

But it's rooted in, this is so important to understand about him. and other abolitionists too. It's rooted in the belief now that not only had they won the war, but they had recreated a different America. They had reinvented the republic. That it's the second republic now. However, like all revolutions,

this one will have a counter-revolution. In the 1868 presidential, the general election, the first time black men voted in large numbers. At the time, some black men were voting, but not consistently. And it definitely wasn't a guaranteed or protected right. Black men in the South, former slaves, the freedmen themselves, lined up in droves at voting polls to vote. They voted for the conqueror of the Confederacy, Ulysses Grant, and he became president. Now, the Democrats at that time ran a viciously, I mean, very openly racist, racist,

white supremacist's campaign against Grant. That campaign, it must be said, was probably the single most racist and white supremacist campaign ever conducted in American history. They just appealed to white man's society, white man's government, and protecting the country from, you know, the inward vote. And in the wake of the 68th election, even during that election, this counter-revolution by the white south was wrecked upon black Americans. It was wrecked upon the freed people. The emergence of the Ku Klux Klan and many other imitators, many other kinds of terrorist groups,

vigilante groups across the South, who will wage a informal, largely vigilante terror war against Republican politics, black politics and the black right to vote using terror, using violence, using intimidation, and using virulent, you know, white supremacy.

All the good scholarship about the clan and all of its imitators shows that the principal aim of clan violence and others was to stop black politics, to wipe out black suffer. In the midst of all this violence to suppress the black vote, the federal government makes a move to step in. The 15th Amendment, which grants black men the right to vote, was ratified in 1870.

The revolution wrought in our condition by the 15th Amendment of the Constitution of the United States is almost startling, even to me. I view it with something like amazement. It is truly vast and wonderful, and when we think through what labors, tears, and precious blood it has come, we may well contemplate it with a solemn joy. Henceforth, we live in a new world. Breathe a new atmosphere. Have a new earth beneath and a new sky above. But despite the 15th and the work done to bring equality to the polls, the push to suppress the black vote with violence and intimidation became even stronger during the Jim Crow era that started in the late 1870s. The Jim Crow era would last almost 100 years

and would be defined by the violent, systematic oppression of black Americans across the South. This was Frederick Douglass's worst. nightmare, the country was reverting back to its old ways, and that essential right, the right to vote, was under attack. Though we have had war, reconstruction, and abolition as a nation, we still linger in the shadow and blight of an extinct institution. Though the colored man is no longer subject to be bought and sold, he is still surrounded by an adverse sentiment which fetters all his movements. In his downward course he meets with no resistance, but his course upward is resented and resisted at every step of his progress. At times it causes a real despair

for him and for others in the former abolitionist movement. Do you ask me how, after all that has been done, this state of things has been made possible? I will tell you. Our reconstruction measures were radically defective. So, yeah, as he grows older, this defeat of reconstruction becomes, in some ways, the most difficult thing in his life to assess, to incorporate into his vision of America. But the thing that sustained him, right or wrong, naive or not, was this faith in natural rights. By law, by the Constitution of the United States, slavery has no existence in our country. The legal form has been abolished.

By the law and the Constitution, the Negro is a man and a citizen and has all the rights and liberties guaranteed to any other variety of the human family residing in the United States. Frederick Douglass clung to the vote as the ultimate symbol of freedom and equal rights in American democracy. He traveled around the country speaking to this belief and asserting that it is the right to vote and the power behind it

that has made black Americans targets of violence. Basically, he is saying, if we didn't have this right to vote, they probably wouldn't be killing us. It's our politics and our quest for power. both economic and political, that they really want to kill.

Frederick Douglass never gave up on the transformational power of the vote and continue to fight for universal suffrage until the very end of his life. And that's it for this week's episode of America in Pursuit. If you want to hear more on Frederick Douglass, check out the full-length through-line episode, The Most Sacred Right. And be sure to join us next week to hear a rarely known story about the American Confederates who made the decision to leave the country rather than rejoin the Union. Slavery in Brazil was really stable.

And at that point, the Brazilian Empire was supporting Europeans and white Americans to come to Brazil. While Frederick Douglass and the radical Republicans didn't think the changes after the Civil War went far enough. Others felt that the U.S. was no longer their home. So they sought to make a new one in Brazil. The story of the Confederados. That's next week. Don't miss it.

This episode was produced by Kiana Morgadam and edited by Christina Kim with help from the throughline production team. Music by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric. Special thanks to Julie Kane, Irene Noguchi, Beth Donovan, Casey Minor, and Lindsay McKenna. We're your hosts, Randabdel Fattah, and Ramtin Arablui.

Thank you for listening. Support for NPR and the following message come from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Investing in creative thinkers and problem solvers who help people, communities, and the planet flourish. More information is available at Hewlett.org.