Maria dietrich frederick douglass

A 21st Century woman obsessed with productive and passionate anti-racism, I feared for years after buying Love Across the Color Lines to begin this history of the 28-year friendship/romance linking the German/Jewish woman, Ottilie Assing, with African American slavery emancipator Frederick Douglass.

It might show me as a similar fool.

Author Maria Diedrich, a German professor of American studies, tells us why many have never heard of Ottilie: most of her papers were burned at her death at her request. However, despite their lifelong quarrel, Ottilie's sister Ludmilla had saved a bundle of 90 letters, bequeathed to a German library along with the papers of their erudite uncle Varnhagen.

A history of the relationship between white German female journalist and Black American leader.

Title: Love Across Color Lines: Ottilie Assing and Frederick Douglass.

The tragic story of a German journalist and a black American abolitionist comes to life in an intriguing portrait that describes their loving relationship.

Though Assing's earnest desire to disabuse Douglass of all religious sympathy is very clearly noted by Blight and William McFeely, Maria Dietrich and Leigh.

Born into slavery in on Maryland's eastern shore, Douglass grew up without knowing the identities of either his mother or father.

The papers survived WW II hidden in a Polish monastery and nearby library. Dietrich, toward the end of her book, quotes sections of these sisterly letters which leave no doubt that Ottilie claimed a romance with Douglass. P