Frederick Douglass

Robert Hayden’s commemorative poem “Frederick Douglass” (1947) originally appeared in The Atlantic magazine. The poem is a panegyric, which is a specialized form offering high praise for someone deemed exemplary. Hayden uses the form to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Frederick Douglass’s death, during what would become historically the first stirrings in the nearly three-decades-long struggle for civil rights for African Americans. In celebrating the memory of the courageous 19th-century Black abolitionist and fiery orator, whose incendiary rhetoric decrying the immorality of slavery helped fuel the growing Northern movement against slavery in the years leading up to the Civil War, Hayden’s poem actually resists being a commemorative poem. Such poems are traditionally past tense. The poem dismisses the value of such commemorations as hopelessly myopic and self-congratulatory. Indeed, the point of the poem is that nearly a century later Douglass’s work is barely begun.

Hayden argues that Douglass’s fullest legacy as a passionate freedom fighter will be realized not in poems or in statues in his honor but only when freedom is part of the very fiber of every American—of humanity itself. In this vision of humanity’s freedom, Hayden fuses two elements critical to his vision: the urgent call for Black civil rights against white America’s institutionalized racism in the post-war era and the generous vision of the Baha’i faith that Hayden himself embraced in the mid-1940s.