I understood what he meant and shared his sentiment, just not the way he articulated it.

 At the age of twenty, Frederick Bailey, having his master’s surname, arrived in New Bedford after his route to self-emancipation, soon to be joined by his wife, changed his name after being inspired by a poet, and Frederick Douglass entered the world and began his life as a spokesman for Black people before, during, and after the Civil War.

He may have moved after a few years to other places, but Frederick Douglass became a free man and bloomed in New Bedford.

While other cities, even Dublin, Ireland, have statues of him and buildings named in his honor implying a deep connection with Douglass after he had become himself before moving to those places, short or long term, and many places named things after him as the token Black person later to be replaced by Martin Luther King whose name was just as practical and useful in the white mind as a panacea and a crumb to offset segregation and other racial abuses,

I worked for a New York Minute at the Frederick Douglass High School in Oklahoma City, the main high school built during segregation when the Blacks were red-lined to the Eastside of the city. The name was there, but by the time I arrived there this millennium, with little effort to even educate the students fully on his full import, his being an angry old Black man who spoke for Black people was the extent of knowledge of or connection to Douglass. His name was a crumb thrown to convince the Black residents that segregation was good and proof of that was the name of the school being that of a famous Black person.

Sadly in my time, while in his autobiography he condemns the practice of letting the enslaved have days like Christmas to celebrate without going to the field with part of the celebrations being athletic events, dancing, and, of course, more drinking than usual and this was okay within the plantation owners as it was a pressure valve release. Douglass lamented that while enjoying and encouraging the games and partying that were connected to man’s more primitive pursuits, educating the slaves was forbidden in order to keep these people in that primitive state. There was no problem training a slave to perform athletically so that in competitions they would make money for the master while it was illegal to educate them for self-improvement.

 At this school, while the principal doctored the books to give the impression students were learning because the district appreciated the false stats that appeared to validate their leadership so there was no oversight, he could not do the same in the field of athletics as there was a state organization. As was Douglass’s complaint, athletes received A-one training in the field of athletics to win championships, but most of the players, had there been oversight in the school district, should not have played in many games as their true grades would have them on the “Ineligible” list until they brought their grades up, but their grades were already artificially high because of the principal’s machinations.

This gave the impression to the public and colleges that these kids were academically successful when a later court case filed by some poorly educated students had that principal lose his job and professional certification for educational malfeasance.

The school named after a man who condemned this practice was producing minimally educated athletes.

The Great White hope with a deep seated doubt that Black people can learn when challenged, ran the school like a plantation with no work, using the students as the source of false statistics that made him and the school look successful while the students were going out into the world educated only for failure.

While this city and others had their tributes real or just gauze, there had been nothing in New Bedford other than a picture occasionally hung somewhere, a plague a tourist might happen upon, or his presence in the city being mentioned in passing, but nothing in the city that would celebrate his being here and re-birthing here.

To rectify this, the New Bedford Historical Society, doing everything that was needed, including community involvement, recently dedicated Abolition Park in the section of the city where the original Quakers who began the Abolition Movement had lived, the neighborhood Douglass first arrived at and resided in, and in which a bronze statue of a twenty year-old Douglass, his age at arriving in the city,  was unveiled.

I brought a small figurine of Frederick Douglass that has been with me from my experience at Douglass High School and gave it to the president of the Historical Society because doing so closed a Douglass Circle I have written about in the past. I knew I would be asked about my having it and from whence it came, so, in order to avoid using words like “bought”, “purchased” and “owned”, decided to glibly say when asked that we met at the Oklahoma History Museum just before I left that state.

The other words would have  been totally  inappropriate in relation to the Great Abolitionist.

The ribbon cutting and statue unveiling was why the mayor ended up in front of the huge crowd of racially mixed people, the obvious majority being Black people getting their history back. I wore my rainbow shirt from my Pride Parade days in OKC to represent those Gay people of color I knew, and those I didn’t. Like other white people present, as a Gay man or a straight one, I was a guest at someone else’s party and needed to stay in my lane and be wary of any unconscious words or actions that might come out because of unconscious privilege.

I may need to remind some that this is the mayor who, knowing the building I lived in was being sold six months before the tenants received their thirty day notice, the first and only indication the building had been sold around them, so that the low income and section-8 tenants had to move elsewhere for the building to be remodeled into luxury high-end apartment as part of the gentrification that is replacing actual citizens with empty apartments waiting for the influx of more moneyed people moving to the city when the commuter rail starts running.

Actual existing people were less important to the city than the potential, but not guaranteed, ones yet to come..

The gentrification was quiet until that point but media investigation as a result of the response from tenants to make this crime public and that the city had no central office to help those being displaced due to gentrification forcing them to organize a meeting of various assistant agencies in the building’s parking lot themselves brought it out of the shadows.

The mayor gave the media a wisp of a comment during all of that more impractical than humane, refused to recognize a tenant from that building during the question and answer period at the press conference where the mayor revealed the city’s rather late plan to address what had been going on after considerable damage had already been done to the citizens who rent and have low incomes.

His is an elitist mindset, and low income people need to just go away if the city they kept alive even during its worse days was to become a glass-palaced, top rated city and the mayor can add another feather into his cap. So this elitist stood before the crowd and made it known that, regardless what claims others maintained concerning Douglass, New Bedford was where Frederick Bailey, the enslaved, became Frederick Douglass, the, well, Frederick Douglass, as he should have as the mayor.

A well known historical event in the city’s history, a city with a high population of comfortably situated Blacks who owned businesses and homes, or held jobs equal to those of the White citizens as this was a Quaker town back in the Pre-Civil War era, is Rodney French ringing the Liberty Hall bell to warn citizens that some slave bounty hunters had arrived from the South so that people could protect themselves from being kidnapped and spending the rest of what should have been their free lives in slavery.

Massachusetts had passed a law in 1843 granting equality to all residents of the city, so such an act was legal.

Some self-emancipated people went right to the docks gaining employment on whale ships and could spend months and years out at sea until their escape was no longer relevant, or could jump ship in any port that looked more promising than what waited at home. When the Fugitive Slave Law was passed, the number of Black men going whaling spiked and remained high until after the Civil War.

Owning people and bounty hunters are negatives when it comes to New Bedford.

When a white supremacist group came to town and did their usual demanding that citizens take their city back, they were totally ignorant that that would mean the handful of still existing Quakers would have to go up against the majority population that was anything but Anglo-Saxon throughout its history. If people took back the city, the Whites would not fare well.

After explaining his problem with the other places having statues et al, the mayor made his declaration that the park and the statue show the world that,

“New Bedford owns Frederick Douglas.”

Yep we went out there and brought him back to being owned again.

He could have said Douglass is one of us, that he belongs here, or that he is now home. He chose, instead, to go full bounty hunter and re-own him.

The crowd might have remained silent but it rippled like a breeze had passed over water.

The word choice was not missed.

An isolated, poor word choice, perhaps, but the Freudian Slip added to other mayoral actions and attitudes as a further indication of his upper class attitude and actions and his true attitude toward the great majority of the citizens of the city he leads.

If it had been up to this mayor, if a poor, unemployed, self-emancipated person arrived in town, like refugees and immigrants do now, it would have been better in his mind if Douglass had just moved on and left any possible residence available for someone who might move into town from Beacon Hill.

I taught at Douglass High School and fought the principal hoping to educate my students. An attempt was made to drive me away by those who wanted the safe and self-serving status quo and were exposed for this by harmed students. 

Regardless of whoever I might truly be, I was unhoused by a city leader who prefers money and fame over people, and here, in front of me, came the mayor letting me know that there was one more connection with Douglass that I had not seen before.

Frederick Douglass too, perhaps for his color or initial status, is not fully accepted and only a Freudian slip made that known.

My building, the one we all got thrown out of, is only three blocks from the new park and statue. Had he moved to that area and had my building existed in his day, the mayor would have just seen Douglass as someone who needed to be moved back to his “place” because there was money to be made with him gone.

And why would this be acceptable?

What rights did he have since the mayor went and got the city its property back.

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