I would submit that there were and are nations on earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than American slavery.

Which isn't to endorse slavery, obviously. As a matter of fact, I would agree that Frederick Douglas was a great man, with big balls, who had the rarest quality: Integrity. And I agree with him entirely, save for that last line above which I address only out of a nitpicky, OCD need to be utterly correct.

Buttplugs for everyone!

Frederick Douglas is a hero of mine, also. Thank you for your entry.

you're so deep. 

today i watched 'shattered innocence' on lifetime and then i looked up 'shauna grant' on imdb and wikipedia.

Excellent - I always share this speech with my students. They read his Narrative, but I also want to give them a sense of his radical political voice in another genre. I think if you look at Douglass's horrifying personal experiences, and multiply that by the sheer number of years slavery existed (CENTURIES in North America) and consider all of its manifestations, from the middle passage to the plantations, it is fruitless and disrespectful to question Douglass's claim for most shocking and bloody nation - made all the more so by the complacency with which most white Americans allowed it to flourish and continue.

I don't know if thats the sort of thing that needs glorified or not. True there was a lot of injustice enough to spread around, but isn't that what the Civil Rights movement was all about? Equal standing for all (Americans)?

@DrTiff - 

what's amazing to me is how unhorrifying Douglass' experience with slavery was compared with so many others. I mean most slave narrative we have of the period is from a slave who had certain "advantages" compared to other slaves. Oh my stomach turns even writing that. That anyone would question how truly appalling and unique American slavery was even in a world of violence is a testament to how willfully ignorant and insular America and its education system is.

@bluemarsupial - 

I'm not sure what you are trying to communicate with your comment. Frederick Douglass died well before the twentieth century civil rights movement. His courage in speaking out against slavery, of battling racism within the abolitionist movement, of working alongside first wave feminists (some of whom were openly hostile to him because he was black) for women's rights, his advocacy for American Indians' rights made his life extremely, extremely difficult. The site where his farm was burnt down by the KKK after the civil war is around the corner. As is the school that wouldn't allow his daughters to enroll because of the color of their skin. This man actively challenged America to be a better America, to extend it's rhetoric to all of it's citizens. This man gave us a more beautiful America. How? How could that possibly not need to be glorified?