Frederick Douglass
Peace pilgrimage takes up war in Gaza as a civil rights issue
By Yonat Shimron — February 13, 2024
(RNS) — Many Black Americans view the Palestinian cause in the context of the African American experience of oppression. This has on occasion strained relations with American Jews.
What the country can learn about the Jan. 6 attack from the Civil War
By Danya Ruttenberg — October 14, 2022
(RNS) — We can't 'move on' from the Capitol attack at the expense of key members of our polity.
PBS docs depict Frederick Douglass’ and Harriet Tubman’s paths of freedom, faith
By Adelle M. Banks — October 11, 2022
(RNS) — ‘Religion for both Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass was the foundation in many ways of who they are,’ said co-director Stanley Nelson.
The journey from the Jan. 6 insurrection to Martin Luther King Day
By Eboo Patel — January 4, 2022
(RNS) — The very people who have been subject to the worst of the United States have embodied its best.
Let’s celebrate this Fourth of July without the myth of white Christian innocence
By Robert P. Jones — July 2, 2021
(RNS) — Which will we honor — the Doctrine of Discovery or the Declaration of Independence?
Black history can’t be told without the Bible
By Nicole Martin — February 18, 2021
(RNS) — Black Christian heroes knew that the Bible had to be at the center of life as free men and women in the United States.
The Fourth of July: Time to celebrate or lament?
By Antipas L. Harris — July 2, 2020
(RNS) — How could the white colonists fight for freedom and remain numb to the possibility of liberty for the slaves? The question plagues us to this day.
‘What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?’
By Frederick Douglass — July 2, 2020
(RNS) — Frederick Douglass’ July 5 speech in 1852 is a still relevant indictment of America’s habit of championing freedom while failing to measure up to democratic ideals on race.
From New York to Alabama, blacks worshipped in own spaces before slavery’s end
By Adelle M. Banks — August 1, 2019
NEW YORK (RNS) — As the nation marks the 400th anniversary of the forced arrival of Africans in Virginia, a Harlem church joins others that have represented the enduring faith of slaves, free blacks and their descendants.
Why on July 4 we should remember the psalm ‘By the Rivers of Babylon’
By David W. Stowe — July 3, 2017
(The Conversation) It inspired Frederick Douglass and has long served as an uplifting historical analogy for a variety of oppressed and subjugated groups, including African-Americans.
N.Y. Freethought Trail traces nonbelievers who chartered a historic course
By Kimberly Winston — August 26, 2013
SENECA FALLS, N.Y. (RNS) Settlers transformed West-Central New York into a hotbed of radical social and religious ideas, including Mormonism and Spiritualism. A new Freethought Trail highlights the prominent atheists and agnostics who also called the region home.
5 religious facts you might not know about Frederick Douglass
By Adelle M. Banks — June 19, 2013
(RNS) Frederick Douglass, whose seven-foot bronze statue was unveiled at the U.S. Capitol Wednesday, is known as the father of the civil rights movement. But the 19th-century abolitionist and former slave was also a licensed preacher.
PBS series depicts American abolitionists as fired by faith
By Adelle M. Banks — January 4, 2013
(RNS) As the nation marks the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, PBS’ “American Experience” premieres “The Abolitionists,” a three-part series, on Tuesday (Jan. 8). Documentarian Rob Rapley, the writer and director of the series, talked with Religion News Service about the role religion played in the lives of the abolitionists featured in the series. By Adelle M. Banks.
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