“American Prejudice and Southern Religion”
Speech | Hingham, Massachusetts | November 4, 1841
In one of the earliest speeches of his career, Douglass recounted stories from Methodist churches––both in the slaveholding South and racist North––that revealed universal prejudice against Black people. Drawing from his own experiences while in slavery, he explored the relationship between Christianity and the slaveholders’ brutality and hypocrisy.
Another young lady fell into a trance––when she awoke, she declared she had been to Heaven; her friends were all anxious to know what and whom she had seen there; so she told the whole story. But there was one good old lady whose curiosity went beyond that of all the others––and she inquired of the girl that had the vision, if she saw any black folks in Heaven? After some hesitation, the reply was “Oh! I didn’t go into the kitchen!”
Thus you see, my hearers, this prejudice goes even into the church of God. And there are those who carry it so far that it is disagreeable to them even to think of going to Heaven, if colored people are going there too! And whence comes it? The grand cause is slavery; but there are others less prominent; one of which is the way in which children in this part of the country are instructed to regard the blacks.––”Yes!” exclaimed an old gentleman, interrupting him––“When they behave wrong, they are told ‘Black man come catch you!’”. . .
But all this prejudice sinks into insignificance in my mind, when compared with the enormous iniquity of the system which is its cause––the system that sold my four sisters and my brother in bondage––and which calls on its priests to defend it even from their Bibles! The slaveholding ministers preach up the divine right of slaveholders to property in their fellow men. The Southern preachers say to the poor slave “Oh! if you wish to be happy in time, happy in eternity, you must be obedient to your masters’ their interest is yours; God made one portion of men to do the working, and another to do the thinking; how good God is! Now you have no trouble or anxiety; but ah! you can’t imagine how perplexing it is to your masters and mistresses to have so much thinking to do in your behalf! You cannot appreciate your blessings; you know not how happy a thing it is for you that you were born of that portion of the human family which has the working instead of the thinking to do! Oh! how grateful and obedient you ought to be to your masters! How beautiful are the arrangements of Providence! Look at your hard, horny hands––see how nicely they are adapted to the labor you have to perform! Look at our delicate fingers, so exactly fitted for our station, and see home manifest it is that God designed us to be the thinkers, and you to be the workers—Oh! the wisdom of God!”––I used to attend a methodist church, in which my master was a class leader; he would talk most sanctimoniously about the dear Redeemer, who was sent “to preach deliverance to the captives, and set at liberty them that are bruised”––he could pray at morning, pray at noon, and pray at night; yet he could lash up my poor cousin by his two thumbs, and inflict stripes and blows upon his bare back, till the blood streamed to the ground! all the time quoting scripture for his authority, and appealing to that passage of the Holy Bible which says “He that knoweth his master’s will and doeth it not, shall be beaten with many stripes!” Such was the amount of this good Methodist’s piety!
Frederick Douglass, “AMERICAN PREJUDICE AND SOUTHERN RELIGION,” Speech, November 4, 1841, in The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, Volume 1: 1841-1846, by Frederick Douglass and John W. Blassingame (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 11-13.
