Wednesday, February 6, 2013

Where's Frederick Douglass?

There is a kind of silly but also funny YouTube video of an actor pretending to be Frederick Douglass critiquing the Spielberg/Kushner Lincoln movie. I am already on record as a fan of the film, but as this video notes it does seem downright absurd that in a film documenting the legislative acts that led to the end of slavery in America, there is hardly a Black face to be seen. Frederick Douglass, as we know, was one of America's greatest and most eloquent abolitionists, as well as a runaway slave, who helped to shape Lincoln's thinking about slavery as the true cause of the Civil War and the end of slavery as the War's most important purpose. The fellow dressed up as Douglass, as clownish as he is, sharply satirizes Douglass's complete absence from the film. As I said in a post back in early January, it would have been both enlightening and appropriate to insert a flashback, showing Lincoln's most important meeting with Douglass and how much Lincoln respected Douglass and was influenced by him. That previous post is here: http://democraticengagement.blogspot.com/2013/01/lincoln-and-civic-engagement.html. And the YouTube is here: http://youtu.be/Gjd3atGnd5o.

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