Celebrate this Fourth (or Fifth) of July by Putting Frederick Douglass in Your Syllabus

Alec Ewald The best way to celebrate this Fourth of July is to open your draft syllabus and put Frederick Douglass in it. Particularly if it’s a draft con law syllabus, but Douglass goes with anything. (I’m a political scientist, and wouldn’t presume to tell actual law professors what to do – but actually, I kind of would. I think this will be valuable in your classrooms too, and at least one purpose-built casebook features Douglass.) Plan to read, with your students, two things: his 1852 speech “What to the Slave is The Fourth of July,” and his 1860 speech “The Constitution of the United States: Is It Pro-Slavery or Anti-Slavery?” I did these first as optional, dropped in alongside required readings. But over a couple years, the discussions were too good, and too many students said later in course evals that these were among the most memorable and valuable things they’d read. So now it’s a day. You should try it. Let me make the case, and since it’s summer, I’ll do it in the most…