To honor Black History Month, JSTOR Daily editors are picking their favorite stories and publishing on their website for all to read. The content is too tremendous not to share.
Today's feature, by Grant Shreve, speaks of a conflict between Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany and the source of that conflict, Harriet Beecher Stowe and her novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin.
The piece begins with a recent "fiery exchange" between Cornel West and Ta-Nehisi Coates and comparing that dialogue/debate to that of Delany and Douglass in the 1850s.
Frederick Douglass used his paper, Frederick Douglass' Paper, to promote Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin. Martin Delany, a soldier, physician, journalist and writer, was very critical of Douglass' "worshipful profile of Stowe."
Shreve reports that: "One of the most important exhanges in the paper during the period occurred when Douglass published an open letter from the journalist, physician, and committed black nationalist Martin Delany, who took Douglass to task for depending too much on white support for social progress and for heaping too much praise on Stowe for her representations of black life in America."
Click here to read more closely about this relationship between Douglass and Delany.
More fascinating Black History Month stories to come from JSTOR Daily.