This article was originally published on Jacob Mchangama’s Substack on September 24, 2026
This is the fourth installment of my series on Frederick Douglass’ free speech philosophy, drawn from the Frederick Douglass Free Speech Corpus. The first examined his defense of wartime dissent; the second, press freedom and defamation; the third, the mobs that enforced slavery’s code of silence.
The first three installments followed Douglass’ fight for freedom and equality through words, even as that struggle culminated in war. This installment examines a more difficult issue. Douglass spent two decades insisting that free speech would defeat slavery and secure freedom. Then emancipation came, constitutional amendments passed and for a short while it looked as if Douglass’ vision of ‘a reform absolutely complete’ had triumphed. But soon Reconstruction was being dismantled. Free speech had helped win the argument, but the “sacred right” was once again overawed. What does a man do with his first principles when the victory they helped secure proved fleeting rather than permanent?
The question is relevant even today. A growing share of Americans have become skeptical of the value of free speech. In our 2025 Future of Free Speech Index, the United States recorded the third-largest decline in support for free expression of the 33 countries surveyed. Among Americans aged 18 to 34, only 47% said speech offensive to minority groups should be permitted, against 70% of those over 55. Douglass belonged to the most despised minority in the country, was slandered, mobbed and nearly killed for speaking, and watched the constitutional settlement he had fought for be dismantled in his lifetime. His answer is worth knowing.
“A Reform Absolutely Complete”
On February 6th, 1863, Frederick Douglass celebrated the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation as perhaps “the greatest event of our nation’s history, if not the greatest event of the century”. With Lincoln’s momentous proclamation, Douglass declared: “At last the out-spread wings of the American Eagle afford shelter and protection to men of all colors”.
The Emancipation Proclamation, the defeat of the Confederacy and the adoption of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments prohibiting slavery and promising equal protection and the right to vote for the recently emancipated Black population seemed to fulfill Douglass’ life’s mission as an abolitionist and human rights defender. Yet over the following decades, Douglass’ joy at emancipation was mixed with bitter disappointment at the stark contrast between the fine principles enshrined in these documents and their practical nullification through oppressive laws, racist terror and mob action in the South.
Douglass had often insisted that the practical protection of freedom of speech throughout the Union would defeat slavery. Free speech was the foundation of individual freedom and democratic self-government, the great moral renovator of society, the precondition for the triumph of truth and reason over error and falsehood and the antidote to fanaticism and orthodoxy.
But would Douglass’ faith in freedom of speech survive the bloody and bitter disappointment of a failed Reconstruction in the South where former rebels “who deliberate with daggers and vote with revolvers” were emboldened by a prejudiced public opinion and given a pass by the federal government?
In “Reconstruction”, published by The Atlantic Monthly in 1866, Douglass offered his blueprint for a new America repudiating President Andrew Johnson’s conciliatory attitude to White Southerners and indifference to the Black freedmen. Douglass’ prescription for a “government consistent with itself” was to “render the rights of the States compatible with the sacred rights of human nature.”
This would not be achieved by vesting “despotic power” in the federal government, but by enfranchising “every loyal citizen”. The right to vote, Douglass expected, would “form a wall of fire” for the protection of all citizens, Black or White. The resounding Republican victory in the midterm elections of 1866 gave him hope that this bold vision for a republic which no longer would “den[y] to any of its citizens equal rights and equal means to maintain them” could be realized:
“In every considerable public meeting . . . the subject has been discussed, and the people have emphatically pronounced in favor of a radical policy. . . . they have everywhere broken into demonstrations of the wildest enthusiasm when a brave word has been spoken in favor of equal rights and impartial suffrage. Radicalism, so far from being odious, is now the popular passport to power.”
In other words, open discussion and free elections would open the South “to the light of law and liberty”. For a while, this policy won support in the Republican-controlled Congress and charted a hopeful course for Black Americans in the South who were being reshackled by Black Codes and terror.
In 1870, Douglass gave a short speech at the final meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society in New York, where it triumphantly disbanded, its mission accomplished. Douglass hailed the occasion as marking “a reform absolutely complete”. He noted how different everyday life had become for the combative abolitionist long accustomed to being greeted by mobs, epithets and rotten eggs. But now: “The old elements of malice and hate and contempt that I once saw written in the faces of men, seem mostly to have disappeared.”
Douglass, normally an unstoppable fountain of speech, declared himself at a loss for words to “express my sense of the great triumph of justice and liberty” achieved by the rapid succession of emancipation, equal protection and the right to vote ensured by the 13th–15th Amendments.
“Reconstruction a Failure”
Alas, the spirit of radical zeal gradually lost its grip on Congress, and what had seemed like a reform absolutely complete by 1870 looked more and more like a dilapidated halfway house as Reconstruction unravelled.
As early as 1871, Douglass sounded the alarm about “Liberty of Speech South”, or what I called the “Segregationist’s Veto” in Douglass versus the Mobocrats. He painted a hagiographic image of Northern commitment to free expression. Nothing had so aroused the North’s “hatred” against slavery in the South as “the absolute denial of freedom of speech”. Yet ex-slaveholders and rebels were once again denying this freedom to Northerners and others who—he claimed—were murdered in their thousands for daring to express their commitment to equality or declare themselves Republicans. Douglass’ conclusion struck a very different tone than the triumphalist speech in New York the previous year:
“Until a man can express his opinion upon all possible subjects as freely and as safely at the South as he does at the North, freedom is the merest farce, and reconstruction a failure.”
In May 1878, Douglass delivered a Memorial Day address in New York’s Union Square. His assessment of Reconstruction had grown even darker than his early warning seven years earlier. Freedom of speech and the ballot had “fallen before the shot-guns of the South”. Yet he insisted that “we need bate no jot of heart or hope”. Even as he acknowledged the destruction of the protections on which his earlier optimism rested, he continued to profess his belief in their resurrection.
But restoring life to the protections that had been dangled before Southern Blacks, only to be cruelly snatched away, required confronting something constitutional amendments had failed to eradicate. In “The Color Line” in 1881, Douglass described the prevalent anti-Black racial prejudice as a moral disorder that “fortifies itself by refusing all contradiction”. Slavery had given its beneficiaries “a thousand reasons for painting the black man as fit only for slavery”. The former Slavocracy’s wealth and influence had enlisted the press, pulpit and politicians in spreading that picture. Emancipation had abolished human ownership while leaving much of its ideological justification intact. Yet Douglass rejected the claim that racial prejudice was an immutable feature of human nature. His essay itself was an attempt to expose its origins and reason his readers out of it.
That diagnosis gave him ample reason to distrust public opinion. His longstanding warning about suppressing discussion nevertheless still held. Back in 1852, he had explained how censorship directed against one group could endanger the liberties of others:
“If they can prohibit the discussion of the rights of black men, they may also, bye and bye, prohibit the discussion of the rights of white men. Liberty for all, or chains for all.”
“The Gates of Reason Are Still Open”
Strikingly, his later defense of free expression rested on extolling the immense benefits of this freedom, even as he decried the way it was exercised by the power and wealth of Southern segregationists and their Northern apologists. In an April 1883 address, Douglass condemned a press that “usually tries him in advance of the courts”, preparing the way for juries to convict Black defendants. Yet the persistence of public discussion remained a ground for hope:
“There is no modern Joshua who can command this resplendent orb of popular discussion to stand still.”
The country was “governed by ideas as well as by laws”. Despite the violence and exclusion, he insisted: “The gates of reason are still open to us; and, while we may speak and vote, we need not despair.”
Addressing the National Colored Convention in Louisville that September, Douglass developed the argument further. Conventions airing grievances, “whether real or fancied”, were “the safety-valves of the Republic, a wise and safe substitute for violence, dynamite, and all sorts of revolutionary action”.
Even unfounded grievances could be exposed through public scrutiny. Employed as such, free speech was the antithesis of violence: a means of transforming anger and dissatisfaction into public argument, collective action and the pursuit of peaceful change through the ballot rather than the gun.
By 1888, the distance between constitutional promises and practical freedom had become intolerable. At an emancipation anniversary in Washington, Douglass described Black Americans in the South as “in law free, in fact a slave”. Citizenship brought obligations without adequate protection; voting rights coexisted with disfranchisement. An occasion normally devoted to celebration demanded an alarm: “There are times when neither hope nor fear should be allowed to control our speech.”
His appeal joined public exposure to concrete reform. He denounced Southern exploitative payment practices as a “villainous swindle” and urged the Black press to expose it, legislators to prohibit it and Black voters to withhold support from politicians who refused. Speech was part of the remedy needed to expose and reform a system built on the pillars of injustice and fraud.
The following year, in “The Nation’s Problem”, Douglass confronted the wave of opinion, laws and violence that made a mockery out of the freedoms and protections that Blacks had been promised after the War. His response supplies perhaps the clearest answer to whether the shattered promises had also shattered his faith in first principles:
“I do not regard discussion as an evil in itself. I regard it not as an enemy, but as a friend. It has served us well at other times in our history, and I hope it may serve us well at this time.”
However, he took no pleasure in the intense discussion of “The Negro problem.” That the question dominated public discourse at all was “a bitter disappointment” to him. He had believed Reconstruction would settle Black Americans’ membership in the political community for good and consign demands for legally enforced color lines to the dustbin of history. Now that settlement was being reopened. Yet his answer was not to shy away from the controversy or let his detractors speak unopposed: “Our business is to answer back wisely, modestly, and yet grandly.”
That commitment also extended to criticism within the Black community, where he defended the importance of identifying mistakes and harmful errors as essential for the progress and improvement needed to make equality a practical reality.
“The Light of Truth”
Nor did this commitment blind Douglass to the relationship between racist speech and physical violence. In “Lynch Law in the South” in 1892, discussed in a previous installment, he assigned responsibility beyond the men who carried out the killings. The mobs acted on a public sentiment cultivated “by wealth and respectability, by the press and the pulpit”. Northern prejudice helped sustain the same violence. His proposed response was to enlist these influential institutions in condemning lynching and changing the public sentiment that licensed it.
By “Lessons of the Hour” in 1894, his assessment of the national retreat was devastating: “The cause lost in the war, is the cause regained in peace, and the cause gained in war, is the cause lost in peace.” His faith in the nation’s conduct had been shaken, and he highlighted the culpability of “newspapers and magazines” for “increasing hate and dark suspicion” that fed the mob violence against Blacks and the spread of lynch law to the North. But his remedies continued to combine public argument with the enforcement of constitutional rights. He demanded honest elections, protection from exploitation and an end to the evasion of equal citizenship. And he again summoned the institutions capable of shaping public opinion:
“Let the great Northern press and pulpit proclaim the gospel of truth and justice against war now being made upon the negro.”
Two years earlier, Douglass—already in his seventies—had found hope in a younger generation taking up the struggle that this “Prophet of Freedom” had inspired but would not live to see completed. The fearless civil rights and women’s rights advocate Ida B. Wells demonstrated what independent reporting could accomplish. Wells believed that “The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them”. In the pursuit of truth, she travelled the South exposing fabricated rape allegations, including cases involving consensual interracial relationships, and killings for supposed offenses as trivial as being “sassy” towards whites. Her investigative reporting and commentary were considered a scandalous affront to the “honor” of White women and subjected her to extreme danger. In May of 1892, a White mob—incited by local newspapers to torture and burn “the black wretch”—destroyed her Tennessee newspaper, The Memphis Free Speech, and Wells went into exile. Yet her investigation of lynching reached readers through her pamphlet Southern Horrors, which recounted dozens of stories of lynchings throughout the South and documented the racist logic behind this practice.
In an October 1892 letter to Wells endorsing Southern Horrors, Douglass wrote enthusiastically about the pamphlet’s content and impact:
“There has been no word equal to it in convincing power. I have spoken, but my word is feeble in comparison. You give us what you know and testify from actual knowledge. You have dealt with the facts with cool, painstaking fidelity and left those naked and uncontradicted facts to speak for themselves.”
Douglass acknowledged that repeated atrocities had hardened American moral sensibility. The evidence might encounter indifference as well as hostility. Yet even at a time of despair and hopelessness, silence was not an option: “we must still think, speak and work”.
“Liberty for All, or Chains for All”
Future generations of Americans did indeed continue to think, speak and work.
From the late 1950s, the civil rights movement won a series of landmark First Amendment cases that expanded protection for speech, press, assembly and association. Those victories gave protesters, organizers and journalists greater freedom to challenge segregation. In 1965, the legal scholar Harry Kalven Jr. captured the contrast with the repression of the Cold War years: “We may come to see the Negro as winning back for us the freedoms the Communists seemed to have lost for us.”
Yet these freedoms still had to be defended. On April 3, 1968, less than twenty-four hours before his assassination, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “Mountaintop” speech in Memphis. A federal judge had issued an injunction preventing another march in support of the city’s striking sanitation workers. In language that echoed Douglass, King called upon America to honor its own professed ideals:
“If I lived in China or even Russia, or any totalitarian country, maybe I could understand . . . the denial of certain basic First Amendment privileges. . . . But somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly . . . the freedom of speech . . . the freedom of press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right.”
The following year, the Supreme Court demonstrated how far those protections extended. In Brandenburg v. Ohio, it overturned the conviction of Clarence Brandenburg, a local Ku Klux Klan leader. The Court held that advocacy of violence was protected unless directed to inciting imminent lawless action and likely to produce it. Brandenburg’s legal team included Eleanor Holmes Norton, a young Black lawyer. Among the justices who voted unanimously to overturn his conviction was Thurgood Marshall, a civil-rights icon and the first Black member of the Supreme Court.
While the immediate beneficiary of that outcome was a hardened racist, it enshrined a principle Douglass had advocated more than a century earlier: “Liberty for all, or chains for all.” The freedoms that enabled Black Americans to challenge white supremacy also protected a Klansman’s right to express his repugnant beliefs. Douglass understood free speech and equality as mutually reinforcing. His response to the betrayal of emancipation’s promises was to insist on the freedom to expose injustice, organize and answer back. Those who now treat free speech and racial equality as mutually exclusive should reckon with that history.
Jacob Mchangama is the founder and CEO of The Future of Free Speech and a research professor at Vanderbilt University. He is also the author of Free Speech: A History From Socrates to Social Media and The Future of Free Speech: Reversing the Global Decline of Democracy’s Most Essential Freedom (with Jeff Kosseff).