TV REVIEW : Electrifying Douglass’ Last Great Speech

Something happens in the chemistry of American politics during crises: Great orators rise to the occasion and deliver a statement crystallizing the issues. What Patrick Henry did during the Revolutionary crisis and Abraham Lincoln did during the Civil War crisis, Frederick Douglass did during the Southern lynching crisis of the 1890s.

His speech, titled “The Lesson of the Hour” and delivered 100 years ago (to the month) at Washington’s Metropolitan A.M.E. church, addressed nothing less than the prospect of the total breakdown in U.S. civil order.

It was a subject fitting of Douglass’ stature as the country’s most powerful orator and the vocal conscience of abolition, and it also fits actor Fred Morsell, whose re-creation of Douglass’ speech, “Presenting Mr. Frederick Douglass,” airs tonight on “Bill Moyers’ Journal” (9 p.m. on KCET-TV Channel 28; 8:30 p.m. on KPBS-TV Channel 15; 8 p.m. on KVCR-TV Channel 24).

Underlying the speech is a profound bitterness, for after seeing his cause win the Civil War, Douglass had to respond to a growing orgy of lynching and illegal persecution of blacks by white Southerners following the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the former Confederacy. “The cause lost in war,” he noted of the vengeful lynchers, “is won in peace.”

Unlike most of the works in the overdone solo historical performance genre (Hal Holbrook’s Mark Twain, for instance, or James Whitmore’s Will Rogers), Morsell presents his Douglass at the very podium where the author-activist galvanized his likely receptive audience. Morsell’s is receptive too, and can be seen transfixed in a way they probably wouldn’t be in a theatrical environment.

Of course, a podium, a speaker and a church congregation comprises its own theater, which Douglass understood very well. Since Douglass died (the following year, in 1895) before his oratory could be recorded, Morsell is freed to interpret the elegant prose; but like Shakespeare’s language, Douglass’ precise, imagistic writing tells the actor what to emphasize, where to pause and where to erupt with passion.

Thus, in a moment, Morsell’s Douglass sums up the soul of the speech: “The mob is its law . . . the mob is its jury . . . the mob is its judge . . . and the mob is its executioner.”

Like Henry and Lincoln, Douglass expanded the particular event into the catalyst for an idea. Douglass’ was to remind all that the rise in mob justice ensured the collapse of the American democratic project. And that the solution was to adhere to the Constitution, not for blacks to escape their destiny and flee to Africa.

In one breath, Douglass--and Morsell today--dismantles both white racists and black separatists.