During Black History Month, in February 2017, President Trump stated that “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more.” Douglass was born in 1818 and died in 1895.

Author Rebecca Solnit remarked recently that if she could require the president to read one book, she would recommend “Frederick Douglass’ autobiography.” However, the prolific former slave wrote three autobiographies, not one. Which should Trump read?

总统将受益于阅读每个Douglass’ autobiographies as well as Yale historian David W. Blight’s exquisitely researched and incisively argued “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom.” This book is a richly detailed intellectual biography, full of new sources and interpretations that add clarity, meaning and verve to Douglass’ personal story.

Blight is best known as the award-winning historian of race and historical memory in post-Civil War America. He’s devoted much of his career to chronicling Douglass’ importance to understanding slavery, race and the neo-slavery and racial segregation of Jim Crow America.

Blight also is the foremost interpreter of Douglass’ autobiographies (the first two of which he edited and annotated) and speeches. His new book is unquestionably the best account of Douglass’ complex and epic life. Blight’s writing is consistently engaging and, despite his biography’s heft, lean and measured.

His book differs from previous Douglass biographies by unraveling the last three decades of Douglass’ life, identifying insights gleaned from a close reading of his third autobiography, “Life and Times of Frederick Douglass” (1881; revised edition, 1892). Researchers have inexplicably understudied that essential text; it lacked a scholarly edition until 2012. Blight also corrects errors of fact and interpretation by other scholars, most notably historian William McFeely, whose “Frederick Douglass” helped shape the Douglass field since 1991.

Douglass began life as a slave in Talbot County, Maryland. He escaped in 1838 and eventually attained international acclaim as the nation’s foremost African American radical abolitionist. Before the Civil War, Douglass demanded that the federal government intervene to prevent slavery’s extension into the federal territories. Douglass described these details in his well-received first two autobiographies — “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave” (1845) and “My Bondage and My Freedom” (1855). Once hostilities erupted in 1861, he besieged President Abraham Lincoln to suppress the Confederate insurgency, end slavery, mobilize African American regiments and protect the freed people from racial violence by whites.

Blight contends that Douglass was “an American radical patriot … who became a lyrical prophet of freedom, natural rights, and human equality.” “Few Americans,” Blight explains, “have ever analyzed race with more poignancy and nuance than this mostly self-taught genius with words.”

Just as another giant of American history, W.E.B. Du Bois, identified race as the defining problem of the 20th century, Douglass considered slavery America’s original sin — a festering wound that refused to heal.

Douglass condemned white Southerners’ postwar sharecropping projects for denying the freed people property ownership, money and savings. He explained, “The man who in slavery days said to the Negro, ‘You shall be a slave or die,’ now added, ‘You shall work for me at the wages I propose or starve.’ ”

Douglass believed that post-Civil War allegations by whites that blacks raped white women provided a convenient subterfuge for the abuse and disfranchisement of the freedmen. He said that “slavery had always been a ‘system of legalized outrage’ upon black women by white men, and ‘no white man was ever shot, burned, or hanged for availing himself of all the power that slavery gave him.’ ”

Not only was Douglass an impassioned and powerful voice condemning slavery and racial violence, but his autobiographies transformed him into a major literary figure.

“His literary genius ranks with that of many of America’s greatest writers,” Blight asserts. He considers Douglass “the prose poet of America’s and perhaps of a universal body politic.” The great black radical “searched for the human soul,” often employed biblical stories to punctuate his arguments, and “envisioned through slavery and freedom in all their meanings.” Douglass’ writings “inspired adoration and rivalry, love and loathing.”

Blight also correctly interprets Douglass as a complex, often conflicted man who captured “the best and the worst in the American spirit.” On a personal level, Douglass exhibited vanity, arrogance and hypersensitivity, especially regarding his status as his generation’s most recognizable black leader. Just as Du Bois described Reconstruction as a “splendid failure,” Blight characterizes Douglass as “thoroughly and beautifully human.”

Beyond this, Blight regards Douglass as a radical thinker, a classic 19th century political liberal, and a pragmatist. “At different times he hated and loved his country; he was a ferocious critic of the United States and all of its hypocrisies.”

Douglass admonished black people to become self-reliant. Again and again he promoted himself as a Victorian-era “self-made man,” an assessment some Republicans today manipulate for partisan gain. Blight notes astutely that they applaud Douglass’ individualism but not his “enduring radicalism.”

Although he opposed mob violence by white people, Douglass nevertheless justified “revolutionary violence” to defend the rights of freed people. During Presidential Reconstruction, he implored President Andrew Johnson to intervene in what Douglass denounced as “a moral war against the negro” by white Southerners.

In the late 1870s and 1880s, when serving as a government bureaucrat, Douglass opposed both the “Exodus” of black Southerners to Kansas and their self-repatriation to Africa. Yet he enthusiastically supported American territorial expansion.

Many black and white critics condemned Douglass’ 1884 marriage to the abolitionist and suffragist Helen Pitts, a white woman who clerked for Douglass when he served as Washington, D.C.’s recorder of deeds. In their opinion he was a race traitor who flagrantly crossed the threshold of the color line. Douglass, however, followed his heart, not contemporary racial etiquette. According to Blight, in the age of segregation, “Douglass was Jim-Crowed more times than he could count.”

应该胜过读道格拉斯memoirs, he would learn much about the deleterious power of race in 19th century America and its pernicious legacy for today. As Blight concludes, Douglass’ determined life and words, his quest for “freedom in its infinite meanings remains humanity’s most universal aspiration.”

Blight’s book is a stunning achievement, executed with clarity and unpretentious elegance. It may not be the last Douglass biography, but it is one for the ages.

Frederick Douglass

Prophet of Freedom

By David W. Blight

(Simon & Schuster; 888 pages; $37.50)