Frederick Douglass’s Demand for Citizenship Is Still Radical

By Jia Lynn Yang

Jia Lynn Yang is a Times senior writer. She previously served as the national editor.

June 8, 2026

In the Edward P. Jones historical novel, “The Known World,” there is a harrowing scene in which a freed slave named Augustus Townsend encounters a group of patrolmen one night on the dark country roads of antebellum Virginia. They are on the lookout for runaway slaves. When Townsend hands over his papers, proving he is a freedman, one of the officers takes the pages, examines them, then puts them in his mouth. As Townsend watches, the officer slowly chews on them until swallowing them whole. The formerly enslaved man is taken, sold as property again soon after. He was a freedman, but not a citizen.

It was the bitterest of truths in 19th century America that the yoke could come off, but this alone would not deliver a person to freedom. Emancipation was a precursor to something grander, but to what? Frederick Douglass, whose prophetic voice made him one of the most famous American public speakers to have ever lived, invoked “a mightier work”: the achievement of full national belonging. For him this meant, first and foremost, the right to vote, but also to work freely, to receive an education, to be respected as an equal participant in the crafting of the American social fabric. What he imagined was a new conception of citizenship itself.

What does it mean to be a citizen of the United States? The nation’s founding documents are remarkably reticent. The word “citizen” appears only once in the Declaration of Independence, in passing, and not once in the Bill of Rights. Decades after the country’s founding, during a civil war in which the entire project was nearly lost, no one quite knew the answer. In 1862, the attorney general, Edward Bates, wrote with an exasperation still audible across the centuries: “I have often been pained by the fruitless search in our law books and the records of our courts for a clear and satisfactory definition of the phrase citizen of the United States. I find no such definition, no authoritative establishment of the meaning of the phrase.”

It took the bloodiest conflict in the country’s history to establish a definition. The Civil War, in which nearly 700,000 Americans died, was fought over the institution of slavery and whether it should survive. But in grappling with the lives of enslaved people, and what would happen to them after Emancipation, the country was also forced to read again more closely the opening words of Declaration of Independence: When Thomas Jefferson wrote about “unalienable rights,” did he mean that God had given natural rights to all, or only to some?

Perhaps no one in the 19th century invested more meaning in those words than Frederick Douglass. For him, the country’s founding texts sat alongside the Bible as holy writ. While others debated whether freedmen should be allowed to vote — or even be allowed to stay in the country — Douglass pointed to the Declaration as evidence enough for what to do. In a speech to white abolitionists on July 5, 1852, the canonical “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?,” Douglass argued that the Declaration was “the ringbolt to the chain of your nation’s destiny.” He emphasized, “The principles contained in that instrument are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost.”

Citizenship meant the protection of these principles: equal rights, regardless of race, enforced in full by the federal government. This idea, enshrined in the Constitution in the 14th Amendment in 1868, today feels intuitive. The entire logic of civil rights rests upon it. Previously, though, state and local authorities could establish their own freely discriminatory rules, erasing any possibility of an egalitarian democracy. By providing the country with a belated definition of citizenship, the authors of the 14th Amendment invented a new national purpose for government itself, but one derived from the opening lines of the Declaration.

After the ratification of the 14th Amendment — and of the 15th, establishing Black men’s right to vote — the country glimpsed the interracial democracy prophesied by Douglass.

Under the protection of the federal government, freedmen cast ballots and ran for office. Between 1865 and 1876, at least 1,500 held political office. Hundreds of thousands of Black children and adults finally began receiving an education. But when the South essentially revolted again, the country’s leaders retreated.

The 14th Amendment had clarified the promise of the Declaration, but the full realization of the country’s founding words is always being postponed. American women, citizens in theory, fought for decades more to win the right to vote. (Douglass was forever proud to be among the few men who signed the “Declaration of Sentiments” at Seneca Falls.) Many groups were banned until not long ago from naturalizing as American citizens: most Asians, solely because of their race, until 1952; gay men and lesbians, deemed by U.S. law as suffering medically from “sexual deviation,” until 1990. In the mid-20th century, the civil rights movement revived Douglass’s campaign for citizenship for all, before losing ground again.

In our own time, citizenship has become an even more precious commodity, denied to millions in our midst every day. Rather than an expansive vision of democratic equality, with room for ever more people to enjoy “unalienable rights,” the word citizenship has become a legal term, a cudgel to enforce the power of some over others.

The abolitionists’ democratic dreams were larger than ending slavery, grander even than winning the right to vote. In 1869, at the height of Reconstruction, Douglass began touring the country with one of his most far-seeing speeches, known as “Our Composite Nationality.” In it he insisted on citizenship for Chinese immigrants, who were some of the most maligned people in American society. Douglass believed that a truly great country would include people of all races, living in “perfect civil equality,” bound together in the same national project.

This is the covenant of citizenship. Each person’s life is tied to all the others.

It was Douglass who warned his country most powerfully that freedom without equality, without protection, was no freedom at all. And it was certainly not citizenship. It’s a set of promises without real weight, as light as a piece of paper that can vanish in the middle of the night.