An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

commit the same sin that the nation has been committing against his own
color.” 62 She continued by explaining the harm of US government’s
assaults against Native people, arguing that “we are now in the same danger
of extermination of the Indians as we are of the perpetual enslavement of
the Black man.” She ended her speech by arguing that they should not
commit war against any people, for which she received great applause.
I appreciate Tappan criticizing Douglass’s comments. Even a man such
as Douglass needed a reminder not to engage in discourses of Native
erasure. Black men, even today, need to be criticized for Native erasure.
Unfortunately, I hear Black men use the same rhetoric as Douglass today,
asserting that Native people have disappeared and Black people don’t want
to “end up like the Indians.” It is a discourse that is old and tired, and we
need to retire it ASAP. Unfortunately, even for the “prophet of freedom,” it
was easy to use Indigenous suffering as a prop for Black liberation.
However, Douglass, just two years earlier, shared a different message,
suggesting a more unbiased view about the racial equality of other people
of color.
In 1867, Douglass gave a lecture at the Parker Fraternity Course in
Boston, Massachusetts, on the topic of Chinese immigration, which he
supported. While that was the main topic, in the lecture, titled “Composite
Nation,” he also conjoined the situations of Black and Indigenous people in
the US. Douglass attempted to imagine a place where all people could live,
though not without contradictions. Imagining this open democracy, he also
made the case that land was open for all, noting that the continued
exclusion of Black and Indigenous people was ensuring this vision could
not be realized.
Douglass noted that problem that kept the races unequal was not
grounded in the principles of US democracy. It was because of the “peculiar
composition of our people; the relations existing between them and the
compromising spirit which controlled the ruling power of the country.” 63
He took the advocates of US democracy to task, arguing that the problem
was that “we have for a long time hesitated to adopt and carry out the only
principle which can solve that difficulty and give peace, strength and
security to the Republic, and that is the principle of absolute equality.” 64
Douglass continued prophesying about the immigration to Indigenous
land that would surely continue. Acknowledging that Europeans and
Africans were already here, Douglass remarked, “And the Indian was here