Everyone should have a voice
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Support for NPR comes from NPR member stations and Eric and Wendy Schmidt through the Schmidt Family Foundation, working toward a healthy, resilient, secure world for all. On the web at theschmidt.org. This is America in Pursuit, a limited-run series from ThruLine and NPR. I'm Randa Abdel-Fattah. Each week, we bring you stories about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the U.S. that began 250 years ago. And of course, at the heart of these stories are the people that made history happen. People who had a bold vision for the America they wanted to see, despite the obstacles. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her claims have been born of earnest struggle.
If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Frederick Douglass is one of the greatest minds in American history. Born into slavery in the early 1800s, Douglass lived through the Civil War, emancipation, Black men getting the right to vote, and the beginning of the terrors and humiliations of Jim Crow. And through all of that, he kept coming back to one thing, a sacred right he believed was at the heart of American democracy, voting. This struggle was It may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will. Today on the show, Ramtin and I bring you the story of one man's dedication to changing how American democracy worked for everyone by fighting for the right for all people to have a say.
That story, right after a quick break. This message comes from Subaru. The all-new 2026 Subaru Outback features bold new styling plus standard symmetrical all-wheel drive and an available 260-horsepower turbocharged Subaru Boxer engine for confident performance wherever the trail may lead. Standard X-Mode with Hill Descent Control offers greater ability to optimize traction in almost any condition. Discover the all-new Outback at Subaru.com slash Outback.
Will you repeat the mistakes of your fathers who sinned ignorantly? Will the country be peaceful, united and happy? Or troubled, divided and miserable? Frederick Douglass dreamed of a country that lived up to the ideals of its founding fathers, where all people could vote. Universal suffrage. And he did everything in his power to make that dream a reality. In the face of suffering, he hoped. In the face of setbacks, he hoped. In the face of violence, he hoped. And in the face of suppression, Frederick Douglass hoped. From the very moment he gets on a platform as a speaker, as early as 1841, and then endlessly across the North as the itinerant abolitionist orator in the 1840s into the 1850s, Douglass was a firm, fierce believer in what the 19th century loved to call the natural rights tradition.
And what we generally mean by that is that a tradition of inalienable rights, rights that are either from God or from nature. This is David Blight. He's a history professor at Yale University and author of the biography Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom. Douglass once referred to the first principles of Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, you know, the four first principles, liberty, equality, Popular sovereignty, meaning governments exist by the consent of the governed. And the last was the right of revolution. Exactly what he meant by equality, you know, has always been open to debate. But Douglass loved those principles, loved those creeds. He loved the Declaration of Independence in that sense.
He didn't like the way it was practiced, but he loved the creeds. What have I or those I represent to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and natural justice embodied in that Declaration of Independence extended to us? I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. He said natural rights are like the air you breathe. They belong to no one group, no one person, no one country. They belong to everybody. And the right to vote to Douglass in something called a republic, if it could ever live up to those creeds, was the most sacred right of all.
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