Facing Frederick by Tonya Bolden

Author:Tonya Bolden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams
Published: 2017-03-22T04:00:00+00:00

The Fall of Richmond, Va. on the Night of April 2d. 1865 (lithograph, 1865). With the imminent arrival of Union troops in defenseless Richmond, the Confederate capital, officials decided to evacuate the city, and some soldiers torched warehouses and other buildings.

A c. 1865 carte de visite. In early 1864 Frederick switched from beard to walrus mustache.

CHAPTER 7

A New World

Slavery is not abolished until the black man has the ballot.”

That’s what Frederick had declared four weeks after Appomattox, on May 10, 1865, in New York City’s Church of the Puritans. The occasion was the thirty-second annual meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society, where William Lloyd Garrison called for the Society’s dissolution. With the abolition of slavery a foregone conclusion, the Society’s work was done, he contended.

Frederick had no illusions that in peacetime blacks would suddenly cease to be a despised people. Unless the black man had the vote, Southern states could enact laws to essentially usher in slavery by another name, make freedom “a delusion, a mockery.”

Frederick wasn’t just worried about the fate of blacks in the South. The North was still steeped in racism, he reminded folks. A case in point: in Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, blacks still couldn’t testify in a court of law against whites. “Where shall the black man look for . . . support, my friends, if the American Anti-Slavery Society fails him?” With Wendell Phillips as president, the Society fought on for black political and civil rights.

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