February is Black History Month, which happens to coincide this year with the 200th anniversary of the birth of Frederick Douglass, the most distinguished and influential African-American public figure in the first century of our country. A reformer and writer who thought deeply about the place of African-Americans in the broader American experience, he demands attention today as much as he did in the ominous years leading up to the Civil War and the period of unresolved racial conflict in its aftermath. As he admonished students of American history, “we have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present...

Source: Wall Street Journal February 22, 2018 14:48 UTC