Benjamin Quarles

The Breach between Douglass and Garrison

The anti-slavery movement in the United States was an instance of the familiar historical process in which substantially unlike interests and diverse personalities find themselves working for a common object. Posed against the Souths economic system, hostility to which they used as a unifying bond, was a varied assortment of groups in the West and in the East-landhungry expansionists, internal improvers, political opportunists and professional abolitionists. Even among this last aggregation there were clashing techniques which not infrequently resulted in sundered personal relationships. Such was the breach that developed between Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison. Mutual friends on both sides of the Atlantic were nonplussed by the sudden rift in the friendship of two men who had so much in common and who had shared experiences of a nature to establish permanently affectionate bonds. Their acquaintanceship had dated from August, 1841.1 Douglass, then unknown, was attending an antislavery convention at Nantucket when he was urged by a New Bedford friend to take the platform.2 The impression

Frederick Douglass and the Woman's Rights Movement

In certain districts in the South Carolina elections of 1870 colored women, under the encouragement of Negro election officials, exercised the privilege of voting. By this act the Negro became the first practical vindicator of womans right to the ballot. This development followed the logic of events; the beginnings of the struggle for womans rights in the United States was closely related to the antislavery movement. Negro leaders in their efforts to undermine legal and political institutions prejudical to their group made common cause with the handful of militant women who sought for their sex the status of complete equality in marriage, equal rights in property and wages, the right to make contracts, to sue and be sued, to testify in court and, above all, to vote. In their early efforts to convert a hostile and jeering public the feminists received much support from colored abolitionists. Of these Negroes, among whom were Charles Lenox Remond, James McCune Smith, William Wells Brown and Robert Purvis, none was more zealous than Frederick Douglass. As soon as he had established himself at Rochester in 1847 he identified himself with the budding movement. Right is of no sex, ran the opening phrase of Douglass North Star, the first issue of which appeared in December, 1847. In July of the following year the first organized gathering for equal rights-the famous Seneca Falls Convention -was held. Of the thirty-two men who ran the risk of being branded Aunt Nancy men, hermaphrodites and with similar epithets, Douglass alone was prominent in the de-

Fiftieth Anniversary of The Journal of Negro History

This is the fiftieth anniversary of The Journal of Negro History which originated in the creative and seminal mind of Carter Godwin Woodson. His preparation for this adventure was unique; he trained at the University of Chicago, Harvard, and the Sorbonne at a time when African and American Negro Studies were not offered in any American institution. Woodson secured the best available foundation in history and political science to which he added travel around the world where he learned to speak French and Spanish nearly as fluently as he spoke English. Since there were no authorities on the Negro in America, Woodson concentrated in history and political theory and never touched the Negro until he had completed his formal studies with a doctoral dissertation on the Disruption of Virginia which remains unpublished. Burgess, Dunning, and their numerous disciples were writing the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction from the point of view of the South which did not really lose the war except on the battlefields! Reconstruction historians and Southern politicians repudiated the Civil War Amendments to the U.S. Constitution while segregation and disfranchisement restored the essence of slavery which was to last for a 6entury! Woodson saw more clearly than anyone of record that unless the records of Negroes were found and published, the Negro would become increasingly, after the nadirregime, a negligible factor in the history and thought of the world! With this vision, Carter Godwin Woodson founded The Journal of Negro History in 1916 with the financial resources of a Washington, D.C. high school salary and great