My Father-in-law and Frederick Douglass

My father-in-law told jokes about my kind (the Irish) and how they were drunken oafs and so on.  When we named one of our daughters Maggie, he objected, saying it was a servant's name. In nearly all ways he had sound working class, progressive politics, and this Irish thing was just a minor hitch. It didn't bother me, because I was raised to believe that there were only two kinds of people, the Irish and those who wished they were Irish.

The early women's suffrage and black suffrage movements, it seems, had the same hitch, and that's probably where my father-in-law got it.  They argued that it made no sense to allow drunken, ignorant Irish oafs to vote while denying suffrage to dignified men of color or good women. Douglass did hold that suffrage for men of color was more crucial than votes for women, because when women protested for the vote, they were seldom lynched or burned alive. 

Frederick Douglass made after- dinner jokes about the Irish, and this country has not produced a greater man than Douglass. 

Douglass embodied both of the main bodies of black political thought. He was a pragmatist who understood that people of color were a minority who need majority support. He worked with Lincoln and Grant. He also militantly advocated violence when (and only when) it would work (the Civil War, in which one of his sons fought). Douglass was Malcolm  X and King combined. Yet, like us, he was imperfect.