After the War

Douglas is such a fascinating character, right?

Frederick Douglas, perhaps America's most famous abolitionist leader, a person who as a child escaped from slavery, who went on to become a global spokesperson for freedom.

When I sat down with President Barack Obama, he really wanted to talk about this larger-than-life man.

Douglas

is constantly battling... between a desperate belief that the better angels of our nature will win out.

He has seen this possibility of genuine equality.

But he has also seen the very worst.

He himself has experienced slavery.

He has watched slave catchers grab people and haul them away.

And he has witnessed equivocation and cowardice and betrayal.

I am struck by that same thing that he sees the best and he also is clear-eyed about slavery.

who we are and what we're capable of.

And this is why I think he belongs in that kind of pantheon of founding father.

Frederick Douglass is a founding father.

He really is.

He really is.

I said that not only because it's true, but because Douglass is one of those people who should have been crushed by history.

Instead, for a long time, he bent it to his will.

The movement to end slavery did not begin with Frederick Douglass.

That movement existed before the United States did.

A year before the Declaration of Independence, Philadelphia Quakers founded the nation's first anti-slavery society.

And from the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade, enslaved people organized revolutions and plotted escapes.

And the abolition movement churned out fiery figures that are now well known.

Harriet Tubman in Sojourner Truth, William Lloyd Garrison and David Walker, the radical John Brown.

But certainly Frederick Douglass was best known in his own time, both in the U.S. and abroad.

And so we begin our series with Douglass in the opening days of Reconstruction in 1865.

He's a man who thinks he's just completed his life's work, but he's about to discover that his work has just begun.

I'm Malcolm Gladwell, and this is Reconstruction, The Unfinished Promise.

One of our editors, Kai Wright, has been obsessed with Douglass for years, and particularly with the evolution of the man's politics.

Can you help people understand just how big a deal Frederick Douglass is at this stage in history? I mean, like today, he would have a billion Instagram followers, like the most streamed podcast in history, right?

Kai called up David Blight, who is the Frederick Douglass expert.

Blight wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Douglass.

He's such a fan that when he spoke with Kai, he was wearing a T-shirt with a portrait of Douglass on it.

I'm going to let the two of them tell the story of this influential activist's second chapter.

Douglas is such a fascinating character, right?

Frederick Douglas, perhaps America's most famous abolitionist leader, a person who as a child escaped from slavery, who went on to become a global spokesperson for freedom.

When I sat down with President Barack Obama, he really wanted to talk about this larger-than-life man.

Douglas

is constantly battling... between a desperate belief that the better angels of our nature will win out.

He has seen this possibility of genuine equality.

But he has also seen the very worst.

He himself has experienced slavery.

He has watched slave catchers grab people and haul them away.

And he has witnessed equivocation and cowardice and betrayal.

I am struck by that same thing that he sees the best and he also is clear-eyed about slavery.

who we are and what we're capable of.

And this is why I think he belongs in that kind of pantheon of founding father.

Frederick Douglass is a founding father.

He really is.

He really is.

I said that not only because it's true, but because Douglass is one of those people who should have been crushed by history.

Instead, for a long time, he bent it to his will.

The movement to end slavery did not begin with Frederick Douglass.

That movement existed before the United States did.

A year before the Declaration of Independence, Philadelphia Quakers founded the nation's first anti-slavery society.

And from the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade, enslaved people organized revolutions and plotted escapes.

And the abolition movement churned out fiery figures that are now well known.

Harriet Tubman in Sojourner Truth, William Lloyd Garrison and David Walker, the radical John Brown.

But certainly Frederick Douglass was best known in his own time, both in the U.S. and abroad.

And so we begin our series with Douglass in the opening days of Reconstruction in 1865.

He's a man who thinks he's just completed his life's work, but he's about to discover that his work has just begun.

I'm Malcolm Gladwell, and this is Reconstruction, The Unfinished Promise.

One of our editors, Kai Wright, has been obsessed with Douglass for years, and particularly with the evolution of the man's politics.

Can you help people understand just how big a deal Frederick Douglass is at this stage in history? I mean, like today, he would have a billion Instagram followers, like the most streamed podcast in history, right?

Kai called up David Blight, who is the Frederick Douglass expert.

Blight wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Douglass.

He's such a fan that when he spoke with Kai, he was wearing a T-shirt with a portrait of Douglass on it.

I'm going to let the two of them tell the story of this influential activist's second chapter.