Thread by @ThePublicSquare

TONIGHT at 5 PM PDT, Pulitzer Prize winner David W. Blight will interview fellow historian @william_sturkey, winner of Zócalo’s 10th annual Book Prize for “Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White.”

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Here’s a look back at the last time Blight visited Zócalo.

In an event titled “What Does the Life of Frederick Douglass Tell Us About America?”, Blight discussed his biography of #FrederickDouglass with author/comedian Baratunde Thurston.

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@Baratunde pointed out that the tension between patriotism and not-patriotism is a theme repeated through leadership across generations. “Love America or damn America … How do you understand [Douglass’s] holding of that space?” he asked @davidwblight.

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"[Frederick Douglass] loved the creeds,” Blight responded. “He loved the four first principles of the Declaration of Independence and he knew what they were.”

“But, hypocrisy became ... his favorite subject, the way America has built itself on creeds and violates them.”

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Blight spoke more about Frederick Douglass in an interview with Zócalo.

He shared that the theme of rebirth, which was the central metaphor in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, also appears over and over again in Douglass’s speeches about the Civil War.

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“This is a war that is destroying the first American Republic, and a second new one must be invented, reinvented, and redefined, and it has to be redefined around the freedom of the slaves and the beginnings of their equality in law.”—Blight explained Douglass’s argument.

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And, as Douglass predicted, the Civil War was only the beginning of that redefinition.

William Sturkey’s “Hattiesburg” shows how Black communities organized against Jim Crow.

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Tonight at 5 PM PDT, Sturkey and Blight will discuss the community Hattiesburg built, how it helped birth and bolster the Civil Rights movement—and why those successes may ultimately have destroyed it.

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