Mar 20 at 10:30 AM - Sale 2697 -

Sale 2697 - Lot 158

Estimate: $ 4,000 - $ 6,000
FREDERICK DOUGLASS. Self-Made Men: Address before the Students of the Indian Industrial School, Carlisle, Pa. [wrapper title]. 39 pages. Octavo, 8 x 5¾ inches, original printed wrappers, light soiling; minimal wear to contents, minor foxing to final leaf. Carlisle, PA: Indian Print, [1893]
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Douglass gave this 6 April 1893 address at the Carlisle Indian Industrial Boarding School. A short introduction conveys the emotions of Douglass before giving his address: "What he had seen and heard had filled him with admiration and with the hope that the Indian will yet do his full share towards the civilization of our composite nation. . . . He had himself been known as a negro, but for then and there, he wished to be known as an Indian."

Douglass places the American philosophy of bootstrap ambition in context: "Give the negro fair play and let him alone. If he lives, well. If he dies, equally well. If he cannot stand up, let him fall down. . . . It is not fair play to start the negro out in life, from nothing and with nothing, while others start with the advantage of a thousand years behind them. . . . Fair play demands that to the barbarism from which the negro started shall be added two hundred years heavy with human bondage. Should the American people put a school house in every valley of the South . . . for a hundred years to come, they would not then have given fair play to the negro" (pages 15-16).

Douglass also admiringly quotes "Paul Dunbar, the colored poet" (page 13)--a new 20-year-old voice on the literary scene young enough to be the grandson of Douglass. He discusses Benjamin Banneker and Toussaint L'Ouverture at length (pages 27-31).

This publication is undated, but the occasion is discussed at length in the Carlisle Sentinel of 7 April 1893 and the 8 April 1893 Harrisburg Patriot-News. Not in Afro-Americana or Blockson. 4 in OCLC and none traced at auction.

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