Previously unseen speeches, letters, autobiographies, and photographs of Frederick Douglass and his sons, Lewis Henry, Frederick Jr. and Charles Remond Douglass, from the Walter O. Evans collection

While the many public lives of Frederick Douglass - as the representative 'fugitive slave', autobiographer, orator, abolitionist, reformer, philosopher and statesman - are lionised worldwide, If I Survive sheds light on the private life of Douglass the family man. For the first time, this book provides readers with a collective biography mapping the activism, authorship and artistry of Douglass and his sons, Lewis Henry, Frederick Jr. and Charles Remond Douglass. In one volume, the history of the Douglass family appears alongside full colour facsimile reproductions of their over 80 previously unpublished speeches, letters, autobiographies and photographs held in the Walter O. Evans Collection. All of life can be found within these pages: romance, hope, despair, love, life, death, war, protest, politics, art, and friendship. Working together and against a changing backdrop of US slavery, Civil War and Reconstruction, the Douglass family fought for a new 'dawn of freedom'.

Marking the 200th anniversary of Frederick Douglass' birth, this first collective history and comprehensive collection of the Douglass family writings and portraits sheds new light not only on Douglass as a freedom-fighter and family man but on the lives and works of Lewis Henry, Frederick Jr., and Charles Remond. As civil rights protesters, essayists, autobiographers, and orators in their own right, they each played a vital role in the 'struggles for the cause of liberty' of their father. As published here, each of their original writings and portraits is accompanied by an explanatory essay and in-depth scholarly annotatations as well as a detailed bibliography.

Recognising that the Frederick Douglass that is needed in a twenty-first century Black Lives Matter era is no infallible icon but a mortal individual, If I Survive situates the lives and works of Douglass and his family within the social, political, historical and cultural contexts in which they lived and worked. Each unafraid to die for the cause, they dedicated their lives to the "emancipation of the slave" and to social justice by every means necessary.

The Foreword is written by Robert S. Levine and the Afterword is authored by Kim F. Hall.

Professor Celeste-Marie Bernier is Chair of United States and Atlantic Studies at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK. She is the author of over 50 books and essays and curator of over 10 US and UK exhibitions. Her forthcoming books include Douglass Family Lives: The Anna Murray and Frederick Douglass Family Biography and Collected Works: Volumes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, and The Anna Murray and Frederick Douglass Family Selected Writings: A Reader, and Douglass Family Lives: The Biography. She is the recipient of a UK Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship Award for her current project, Sacrifice is Survival: Black Families Fighting for Freedom in the USA and Canada (1732-1936). Andrew Taylor is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of Henry James and the Father Question (2002), Thinking America: New England Intellectuals and the Varieties of American Experience (2010), co-author of Thomas Pynchon (2013) and co-editor of If I Survive: Frederick Douglass and Family in the Walter O. Evans Collection (EUP, 2018). He co-edits the book series Interventions in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture.

Categories

• African American & Black
• American - African American & Black
• Black Studies (Global)

Related Editions

• Hardcover (September 1st, 2018): $168.75

Product Details

ISBN: 9781474429283
ISBN-10: 1474429289
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Publication Date: September 1st, 2018
Pages: 880
Language: English