A Thought about Baltimore

As the events in Ferguson and Baltimore--and now Charleston--have unfolded over the past two summers, one recollection keeps returning to me.  Ironically, it was in Baltimore that the great African-American writer and orator Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) finally encountered a measure of kindness from white people.  In the midst of all the vicious cruelties Douglass recounts in his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, he notes with gratitude that it was in Baltimore that he first learned to read and write.  Initially, his mistress there, Sophia Auld, taught him the rudiments of the alphabet and simple words, but her kind intentions were halted by her husband, who understood that the ability to read and write would empower a slave far more than any weapon.  Gradually, Mrs. Auld became as callous and cruel as other slave owners.  Douglass says of her, "Slavery proved as injurious to her as it did to me."   Her soul was destroyed in the process of being a slave owner. 

Providentially, Douglass was able to secure other sources of learning.  The local white children, many of whom were poor and deprived themselves, were happy to share with Douglass the limited knowledge which they had accrued.  In Baltimore, Douglass had been given more food to eat than when he subsisted on meager rations on the plantation.  He writes that bread was plentiful in the Auld household in the city, and Douglass gratefully shared bread with the white children who helped him learn to read. 

How sad that nearly 200 years ago there was at least a brief moment of kindness and cooperation between the two races, yet today strife has lingered.  If it happened once; surely it can happen again...and again.