American History through American Lives

V. Activities

1. Teaching with Events. Douglass and Truth were so adept at responding extemporaneously and turning their surroundings and the events of the day into lessons for their audiences.  Douglass turned the events of his life into literature.  Students need to understand that history is a combination of personal experience, group experience, and how those experiences are represented.  Enter current events.  Students can find a news article that intrigues them, or you can curate a list to choose from to avoid hunting time.  Instead of reporting the 5 W’s to the class, or generating a list of comprehension questions for another student to answer, students can write a persuasive one-pager in which they use the article to advocate for change and teach their position.  They would need to use at least one of the techniques mentioned above to do it:  mobilizing their own witness, demanding attention, using an inclusive story to as a positive example, explaining where values and laws are inconsistent, or taking the vocabulary of an issue and shifting its meaning.  The choice allows students to self-differentiate, and the options could result in anything from a personal essay to a shock piece to wordplay on the more sophisticated end of the spectrum.

2. Biblical Metaphor for Current Events and a Reader’s Influences. Not every student has Bible trivia under his or her belt, so this activity might take some examples from Douglass and Truth.  You can carefully choose pairings of current events and Bible stories that students then do the writing work to connect.  The Exodus story is the most frequent analogy Douglass draws, and both Douglass and Truth held Christianity as an ideal that slaveholding and racist America wasn’t living up to.  Exposure to Biblical stories is a literary project because of ubiquitous allusions in English letters.  This also shows students that reading is at its best when memory for what you’ve read before resonates.  By referencing the Israelites in Egypt, Douglass has set himself up to argue from the position of other Christian doctrine, touching ideological webs.

3. Mattering Maps.¹²⁶ Crowley, though only mentioning them in passing, woke me to Lawrence Grossberg’s mattering maps.  Douglass and Truth are our models for engaging with the world in all the interesting ways you’ll discuss with students using the questions, but by literalizing Grossberg’s explanation of what and how things matter to us, students can see connections within themselves that impact their agency.  I’ve included an example from my life to go with each prompt.  I envision this as discussion preparation for creating a group mattering map for Douglass or Truth after the class has already spent some time with them.

Mattering Map Exercise

We are going to try to map where and how we invest in the world.  This is about how intensely you self-identify with something which makes something significant to you...which is basically how you make your identity matter.¹²⁷ We are constantly trying to organize pieces of ourselves and finding ourselves at home with what we care about.¹²⁸

1. Start by drawing a circle and writing something inside that you are a huge fan of.  You’re a fan if it matters to you.¹²⁹ (Example:  I love R&B.)
2. With a line, connect to another circle and label it “Sensibility”.  Inside the circle write what holds the context of what you’re a fan of together.  This can be ways you engage with it or how it operates.¹³⁰ (Example:  R&B is smooth and sexy and combines elements of pop, funk, soul, hip hop, and electronic music.  It is a black cultural expression.  The singer is typically in his or her feelings about some aspect of love, and sad love songs to me are the most beautiful.)
3. Again from the fan circle, draw a line to another circle and label it “Ideology”.  Inside this circle write how the thing you’re a fan of helps define your true picture of the world, what is natural and commonsensical to you.¹³¹ (Example:  I think the highs of love always contain a deep sadness.  I think this has to do with vulnerability and the release that can accompany acceptance.)
4. Connect all three of the circles so far to another circle labeled “Mood”.  Mood is not emotions; it’s more a feeling of life.  Different parts of our lives feel different to us, and things like meaning and pleasure we take from something change as our mood changes.  Mood is important because it determines how invigorated we feel about something.  Mood makes meaning less important than our willingness to engage.  Write in this circle what kind of mood the thing you’re a fan of puts you in and why.¹³² (Example:  R&B is relaxing to me because it contains struggle and drama which feel real, but it’s packaged in such a way that it’s hopeful in spite of lived experience.)
5. Draw an arrow from the mood circle to another circle labelled “Investment”.  Investment is how, how much, and where we put energy that we have as we struggle to care, survive, and locate passion to start our own projects.  Write in this circle what your investment in this fandom looks like.¹³³ (Example:  I obsessively look for new music and put together playlists for my friends on Spotify.  These lists function as motivation to keep up and are saturated with alternative R&B.  When I write music, it is my own brand of R&B.  The challenge is to write a song that is as smooth as possible.)
6. Draw an arrow from your investment circle to a circle labelled “Authenticity”.  When we invest in something, we give it extra weight.  Because it has more weight in our minds, we further invest, and it matters even more.  Something is authentic to you when you see this excess of difference between what matters to you versus something else.  Write in this circle you think what you’re a fan of is authentic and what makes it different.¹³⁴ (Example:  I really do think that tenderness is how I measure R&B.  Even if the tenderness is performative or sometimes hyper-sexualized, the beat needs to groove and the delivery needs to be felt.  R&B is authentic because of its soul, its emotional intensity, its not-holding-back and leave-it-all-out-there quality especially in the vocals.)
7. Draw a big arrow below the map so far to a circle called “Empowerment”.  Because one thing matters to us, other investments become possible. You can have more energy, feel more control of your life, or feel like you’re still alive.  You continue to struggle to make a difference and feel optimistic.  Write in this circle how being a fan of this thing empowers you to expand your investment portfolio.¹³⁵ (Example:  When I allowed myself to embrace the catchier, poppy pieces of mainstream R&B, getting over an adolescent distaste for popular music, I was able to evolve and find what I really like.  Genre of music became less of a concern when I allowed myself to listen.)

Now that you know how this works, you can think about how it applies to stakeholders (fanbases) for different issues, people, and cultural productions in the world.  Before we have a discussion, think about what we know Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth were fans of.  We’ll create a mattering map together for one of them.

4. Constitutional Interpretation. Recently, I was watching a John Oliver episode about how U.S. History education is bungled frequently in our country.  He said succinctly what I was imagining for this exercise--that it’s possible for the Constitution to be revolutionary and racist at the same time.  Students could get some good practice with counterargument by reading the Constitution as if they were Frederick Douglass interpreting this founding document as anti-slavery.  Some counterargument sentence stems could be provided, and students would need to acknowledge the parts of the Constitution that are pro-slavery on the way to making Douglass’s argument for him.  You can tie back to the rhetorical inquiry questions by referring to values, beliefs, movement of difference, and by encouraging students to hook into the circulating discourses in the document to make their point.  This activity is practicing being a rhetor instead of a rhetorician.  It could be done in groups with collaborative roles assigned to to attend to different rhetorical concerns.  Special focus should be given to the Preamble and the amendments prior to the abolishment of slavery, even though the incarceration crisis in our country does require a close look at the wording of Amendment XIII.

5. Evolution of Thought: Across the Autobiographies and the White Poor.  When I’ve taught Douglass’s 1845 Narrative, even though it’s short, I don’t necessarily teach every chapter.  Schedules often shift, so a nice approach for considering Douglass over time is to use episodes and compare across his first two autobiographies, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and My Bondage, My Freedom (1855).  The third, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881), is less highly regarded and less useful for pedagogical purposes.  It’s up to you to decide which telling and re-telling you want to juxtapose, but this chart sets you up to consider general shifts across several categories¹³⁶:

This exercise draws attention to subtle language shifts, and how they impact author purpose.  Again, this is a way to extend, challenge, and complicate the habits of mind cultivated with the rhetorical inquiry questions. 

The first two autobiographies have very different motives, but Douglass was always open-minded and curious.  Take for instance how he pivoted his opinion about the white poor during his first trip to Ireland.  At first, he felt “accosted” when people would say the Irish lived like slaves, saying that “slavery was not what took away any one right or property in man:  it took man himself”.¹³⁷ But Douglass was there during the beginnings of the potato famine, so he ended up drawing some comparisons--that the rich “would as willingly sell on the auction block an Irishman, if it were popular to do so, as an African”.¹³⁸ Then nearly ten years later in My Bondage, My Freedom he shows a deeper understanding of class, “...the poor white of the South are wage-slaves whose enmity toward blacks is encouraged by the slave-holders in order to keep both groups politically impotent”.¹³⁹ These statements show growth and a developing nuance for diagnosing society.  So often my students read in monotone: what is on the page is the document, and that’s the way it is.  Zooming out to a life puts growth mindset on display.  Giving students these three quick statements, even asking them to attempt to order the movement of ideas, and then asking them to craft a belief statement at the root of this evolution could work nicely.  A journal beforehand asking them to think about the circumstances around which they have changed their mind in the past might make this transition exercise more effective.  Rhetoric is about trading ideas which is how we advance the collective brain.

6. Comparing Douglass and Truth. There are many overlaps between our hero and shero.  If you are working through this unit in a detailed way, here is where I encourage you to buy the Blight and Painter biographies.  I’ll explain Douglass and Truth’s interactions with Lincoln to show how the comparisons work, but their views on black community uplift, black colonies, and women’s suffrage are also up for grabs.

When Truth met Lincoln in October 1864, she described it in the Narrative of Sojourner Truth as heart-warming and playful.  She compared Lincoln to Daniel, still surviving the Lion’s Den (the Civil War).  She called him “the best president ever” and gave him one of her photographs.  He signed her autograph book and showed her beautiful Bible that black people from Baltimore had given him, and she noted the irony that just recently black people weren’t allowed to read.  She says glowingly that she was treated with “kindness and cordiality” by the “great and good man Abraham Lincoln”.  She admitted she had never heard of Lincoln before he entered the highest office in the land, and he said he had heard of her many times.  Other reports of the meeting aren’t as effusive.  Lucy Colman, who accompanied Truth to the White House said they had to wait for three and a half hours.  Lincoln was “tense and sour.  He called Truth ‘Aunty’ as he would his washerwoman.”  Colman thought Lincoln was annoyed to be loved as the Great Emancipator.¹⁴⁰

Douglass first met Lincoln late in 1863.  He also called Lincoln a “great man” and he relished telling the story to crowds of “a black man at the White House,” how he “felt big there” in the inner sanctum of power.  He turned this encounter in a kind of comedy routine where he elbows his way past white patronage seekers, the office is cluttered, and Lincoln stands to tower over him.  Lincoln also says to Douglass, “I know you”.  They sat and talked about policy, and Douglass thought Lincoln honest and forthright even though it was tough to take when Lincoln told him poor treatment of black troops was necessary for them to serve at all.  Douglass described Lincoln as having a “transparent countenance” and called the encounter a “flying visit”.  As Douglass was leaving, Lincoln signed Douglass’s pass to go South to recruit black soldiers.¹⁴¹ The second time Douglass met with Lincoln, August 19, 1864, he was invited.  He had been critical of Lincoln in speeches, and Lincoln asked his advice about how to spread the news of emancipation and get slaves in the South to rebel.  Douglass said he was “treated...as a man” by Lincoln and found him to have “a deeper moral conviction against slavery” this time, but there are reports that Lincoln swapping Sambo stories later that day.¹⁴²

Just like will be discussed later with photographs, what’s interesting here is the difference between the ideal and the real.  When given these brief episodes, students have an opportunity to question if Douglass and Truth’s versions are accurate or not and why or why not.  Douglass typically didn’t hold back his criticism; Lincoln sought him out at his harshest.  But it would perhaps be in Douglass and Truth’s best interest to make the president look good.  He was the best there was to offer, even though his Reconstruction plan included paying slave owners for their slaves and establishing a black colony outside of America.¹⁴³ Also, if Lincoln patronized them, that story would not square with the respectable image they both crafted.¹⁴⁴ I would use side by side stories like these to get students to write compare/contrast paragraphs, using frames if necessary, to practice the language moves required.

After Truth died, her dedicated friend Frances Titus commissioned Frank C. Courter to paint Truth’s meeting with Lincoln.¹⁴⁵ This piece of art could be interrogated.  How is it different from the actual encounter?  Why have people used it so often as if it was painted from life?  How is it derivative of Truth’s photographs?  Getting students to flood an image with questions can reveal its mysteries. Sometimes to develop detail awareness, I break a photograph into quadrants.  When the photograph is reassembled, students see it differently.

7. Using Douglass and Truth. As mentioned early on, Truth’s touchstone moments are imagined by white women who effectively turned her into a brand, a symbol so persistent that even though in scholarly circles it’s known that “Ar’n’t I a woman?” was never said by Truth, academics insist on using it especially in the context of feminism.¹⁴⁶ A question to ask students is:  why, even after learning the truth about something, do people cling to the made up version?  This will point students back to how ideology is difficult to penetrate.

We have two versions of the Akron Ohio Women’s Rights Convention speech by Sojourner Truth.  The first was written by Marius Robinson, a friend of Truth’s, who served as the secretary of the convention, and one written 12 years later by Frances Dana Gage who was in charge of the convention but wrote the article in response to Stowe’s “Libyan Sibyl” article.¹⁴⁷ It was popular to write about black people in the news at that time, and both women would have been paid for their work.  Chapter 18 of Painter’s biography contains Gage’s version, and Chapter 14 contains Robinson’s.  Students should think about which version carries more weight and why.  I would turn this into a Family Feud style list of important differences, and after reading both accounts aloud in class, students would prepare for the game.  Here is list of 10 from the reading:¹⁴⁸

Akron Family Feud

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s article also provides turns of phrase that Truth was known by as well as proof that white people can’t hear themselves sometimes.  Stowe is responsible for the convention that whatever Truth said, was enough.  Her title for Truth, the “Libyan Sibyl” (ancient oracle from Libya) came from a sculpture by William Wetmore Story who apparently sculpted it after hearing stories of Truth from Stowe.¹⁴⁹ This is a great opportunity to compare the Libyan Sibyl from the Sistine Chapel ceiling to Story’s version using semiotics which I will describe in the next section.  Michelangelo’s Sibyls “represent humanity’s loss of knowledge in the pagan world”.¹⁵⁰ Story’s problematic explanations of his work on pages 158-159 could give students some historical insight to how racist language and images proliferated in the 1800s. 

Douglass has been used since his time to cosign many different views because he did sustain some complicated positions that could be easily taken out of context.  Blight’s biography will likely be given piecemeal to students, but his opinion piece in the New York Times called “How the Right Co-Opts Frederick Douglass” would show students a longer but still short example of his writing. To practice looking for textual support for argument, read all or part of Douglass’s “Self-Made Man” or “What are the Colored People Doing for Themselves” speech with students, and provide them with a list of conservative and liberal ideals.  Let them craft one-sentence arguments for both sides by folding quotes from a speech into their own sentences.

8. Douglass and Truth in Images. As touched on in the unit’s Introduction, Douglass and Truth “practiced photography”¹⁵¹ I haven’t read them yet, but Douglass toured speeches about his photographic theories which were very optimistic about the medium; study, criticism, self-improvement, and social change can happen because we see ourselves differently with distance and in the way that other people see us.¹⁵² He went as far as to say “picture making and picture appreciating” is what separates us from the animals and saw photography as a democratizing art--a “universal tool of self-representation”.¹⁵³ Henry Louis Gates, Jr. called Douglass, “Representative Man because he was Rhetorical Man”.¹⁵⁴ Putting visual culture studies alongside literary studies expands the concept of argument and creates a “site for new identities”.¹⁵⁵

Because Truth was an oral, not a written, communicator, her “embodied presence” in photographs takes on extra significance and gives her independence from how other people represented her.¹⁵⁶ Both she and Douglass saw their images as a way to direct advancement and to battle racist, anthropological specimen images in circulation.¹⁵⁷ America was more photograph-obsessed (cartomania) than other countries, and pictures were sold as inspiration to the masses and during the Civil War, as anti-Confederate propaganda.¹⁵⁸

I want to introduce semiotics, the study of signs, as a way for students to unpack these self-representations that Douglass and Truth took so much care to design.  A sign is some form of understandable communication that is made up of the signifier, what conveys the meaning or the medium that communicates, and the signified, the meaning or concept the signifier refers to.¹⁵⁹ I recommend making a chart with blanks next to pictures of both Douglass and Truth (easily searchable online).  You can provide either the signifier or the signified drawing attention to the use of props, or not, clothing, posture, gaze, background, and captions.

The Black Lives Matter movement has its own set of signs that students can display and unpack. Even the fact that protests of Summer 2020 are happening during the Covid-19 pandemic with people wearing masks gives the images extra meaning.  In Richmond, the transformation of Confederate monuments, the highly trafficked grounds, and uses of the projection technology bring home how images can be persuasive.  I even saw one picture of Frederick Douglass’s face shining brightly on Robert E. Lee’s tagged-up pedestal.  His images continue to speak.