Henry Highland Garnet vs. Fredrick Douglass

NO. 1

Henry Highland Garnet didn’t develop the best ideas to counteract slavery and resistance. His ideas were mixed with violence that critics like Fredric Douglass opposed for fear that it would ignite rebellions across the states that African Americans could not win or face bloody white backlashes. But black leaders like Douglass didn’t understand that the demand for equal rights by appeasing the dominant elitist through morality would not work. A great black activist during this time, Martin DeLaney, explains that appeasing the dominant society through morality and common decency will not work because you cannot force your morals, no matter how right they are on a people, group, or individual who are unwilling to listen or hear. In other words, it isn’t morality that holds the reins, it is power, and that is true no matter what century we’re discussing.

NO. 2

First, we should get to know who Henry Highland Garnet was ‘‘born a slave on December 23, 1815, in New Market, Kent County, Maryland, and escaped with his family in 1824, was the grandson of a captured Mandingo chief. Garnet’s early education was in a segregated school on Mulberry Street in Manhattan. In 1835, he attended the Canaan Academy, a New Hampshire School destroyed by a racist mob. Like other abolitionists during the 1840s, Garnet critically assessed the various emigration programs. That process, however, was an evolutionary one.’’

One of his best quotes is, ‘‘Neither God nor angels nor just men command you to suffer for a moment. Therefore, it is your solemn and imperative duty to use every moral, intellectual, and physical means that promises success…. (In Woodon 1925, 1969), one of his most radical statements in regard to slavery. The earliest extant speech by a black man advocating violence in America, entitled ‘An Address to the Slaves of the United States, was delivered before the National Convention of Colored Citizens at Buffalo, New York, in 1862. Despite the significance of the speech and the speaker, Henry Highland Garnet is virtually unknown to American history students’’. Garnet truly believed that the only way for slaves to gain their freedom from slave owners was to take it by force, by any means necessary, and Fredrick Douglass fiercely opposed such views, as he wanted to have all slaves be freed through non-violence and appealing to people’s sense of morality. The two went back and forth. Douglass then wrote that educated men who followed Garnet’s ‘backwatered and destructive’ stance had no stomach for continuing the struggle against prejudice and ignorance in this country. Thus it was they sought more congenial places, so they could live peaceful lives.

NO. 3

Nevertheless, Garnet inspired his people when it seemed like all was lost, a talent of his, as his voice was awe-inspiring, and people who were tired of being crushed under the weight of oppression who didn’t think non-violence was going to work flocked to him during his weekly sermons. ‘‘There was something about his personality that few leaders possessed—the commanding presence which inspires courage and the will to fight through difficulties. In his personality reflected the fire to the genius of African chieftains who had defied the slave catchers and later rankled Southern bondage.’’