Frederick Douglass

Hayden contains multitudes: He has the intellect of a professor, the heart of a civil rights activist, and the soul of a mystic. His poem “Frederick Douglass” also deals in multitudes. At the most obvious level, the poem, commissioned by a national magazine, commemorates the memory of a major 19th-century historical figure who led the national fight for emancipation and then for Black civil rights. Hayden’s own experiences as a Black man, however, tell a different story.

Hayden’s America, 50 years later, still reflected little of Frederick Douglass’s vision. Hayden was a product of an impoverished inner-city Detroit neighborhood that testified to the lack of economic opportunities for Black families and exposed how radically hypocritical the rhetoric of his nation’s own Constitution was. How can Hayden lionize a man whose courageous life and uncompromising, incendiary rhetoric were every day in America’s cities exposed at best as naïve, at worst ironic? Hayden does so through his belief system.

Using the generously grand historic-cosmic perspective afforded him by his Baha’i faith, Hayden celebrates Douglass not for what he accomplished but rather for what he set in motion. The power of Douglass registers for Hayden’s generation not for any piece of legislation he shepherded, not for any of his copious writings, and not even for his celebrity (he was by all accounts the most famous, certainly the most photographed Black man in 19th-century America).