with Guest Host Rochelle Riley, executive director of Arts, Culture and Entertainment for the City of Detroit

Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave, went on to become an outspoken and widely respected orator, writer and supporter of not just the abolition of slavery, but equal rights for all people.

Never has a biography been more relevant.  In this upcoming conversation, biographer David Blight will talk about the need to harness the nation’s tremendous moral outrage over racial injustice into votes and political action.

He recently wrote in The Atlantic that  the 1850s provide poignant lessons.

“That decade was the only time in our history when the nation dissolved, militarized, and ultimately went to war over competing visions of the future. It offers a stark warning about what can happen when political and legal institutions lose their hold on public trust and collapse.”

Blight is the Sterling Professor of American History at Yale University and director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Aboltion at Yale.