Frederick Douglass

Hayden contains multitudes: He has the intellect of a professor, the heart of a civil rights activist, and the soul of a mystic. His poem “Frederick Douglass” also deals in multitudes. At the most obvious level, the poem, commissioned by a national magazine, commemorates the memory of a major 19th-century historical figure who led the national fight for emancipation and then for Black civil rights. Hayden’s own experiences as a Black man, however, tell a different story.

Hayden’s America, 50 years later, still reflected little of Frederick Douglass’s vision. Hayden was a product of an impoverished inner-city Detroit neighborhood that testified to the lack of economic opportunities for Black families and exposed how radically hypocritical the rhetoric of his nation’s own Constitution was. How can Hayden lionize a man whose courageous life and uncompromising, incendiary rhetoric were every day in America’s cities exposed at best as naïve, at worst ironic? Hayden does so through his belief system.

Using the generously grand historic-cosmic perspective afforded him by his Baha’i faith, Hayden celebrates Douglass not for what he accomplished but rather for what he set in motion. The power of Douglass registers for Hayden’s generation not for any piece of legislation he shepherded, not for any of his copious writings, and not even for his celebrity (he was by all accounts the most famous, certainly the most photographed Black man in 19th-century America).

For Hayden the mystic, Douglass was a visionary able to see the world not in the bleak present tense but in the radiant possibility of the future tense: “this former slave, this Negro / beaten to his knees. Exiled, visioning a world / where none is lonely” (Lines 7-9). Hayden uses the first six lines not to critique his own imperfect and in-process era but rather to project, as Douglass did, a vision ahead, to catapult beyond the heavy pull of present circumstances by using a series of uplifting visions of a future America, each starting with the resilient, hopeful word “when.” When everyone in America has secured freedom, genuine freedom, “when it belongs at last to all” (Line 3), when freedom is as basic to the human condition as breathing, then the poet assures the reader need no longer fret over the empty bloviations of hapless, useless (white) politicians who work so diligently, and have since Reconstruction, to pay lip service to the cause of African American freedom while working to guarantee such freedom remains abstract.

Because Hayden doesn’t detail how this vision is actually going to happen, the poem moves in the closing octet to reassure Hayden’s readers that when America is free, Douglass will not need statues in his honor or even poems like this one because the ideals he envisioned would by then be embodied by every American. Free Americans, says Hayden, “the lives / fleshing his dream to of the beautiful, needful thing” (Lines 13-14), will be Douglass’s greatest memorial.

Like both Douglass’s and Hayden’s generation of Black civil rights activists (and the generation of post-millennial Black Americans, for that matter), the thorny question is how to be patient, how to let history work itself into this higher, greater humanity. An African American reading Hayden’s poem in the mid-20th century and contemplating the brutal inequalities in racist white America nearly a century after the Emancipation Proclamation would be hard-pressed to find satisfaction, much less hope, in Hayden’s inspirational call to wait for history to change.

Never publicly embracing an identity as a “Black poet,” Hayden offers here a vision much bigger than any racial identity, bigger than any of the tragically countless examples of bigotry and discrimination in every generation of the American experiment, bigger than Robert Hayden the poet, and bigger than Frederick Douglass the abolitionist. Freedom is not a condition, not a political right, not a social principle, not a virtue. Freedom, for Hayden the Baha’i, is as much “love” as it is “logic” (Line 10). Freedom is the purification of the individual heart of hate and the individual mind of anger, a liberation into the mind and heart of the spirit that will bring into reality Douglass’s vision. Hayden counsels that it shall happen.