PRESIDENT BARACK Obama may take a detour to University College Cork to honour a former African-American slave when he visits Ireland in May. Mr Obama has received appeals from both sides of the Atlantic to inaugurate a monument to the former slave Frederick Douglass, who was an abolitionist, writer and statesman.
Mr Obama dedicated a substantial part of his remarks to Douglass during his speech at the St Patrick’s Day White House reception. Both he and Taoiseach Enda Kenny drew a parallel between the suffering of slaves brought from Africa and the Irish who fled the Famine.
In 1845, Mr Obama noted that, as Douglass's book, Narrative of a Life of an American Slave, became a bestseller, he sustained "steady streams of threats to his life". Douglass began a lecture tour to the "British Isles" in Ireland, where he "found common ground with the people locked in their struggle against oppression". Douglass wrote that his months in Ireland were "some of the happiest moments of my life". He was transformed. "I live a new life," he said. Douglass met Daniel O'Connell at a rally in Dublin and the men became friends. O'Connell hated slavery and called Douglass "the black O'Connell of the United States".
Mr Obama said Douglass “modelled his own struggle for justice on O’Connell’s belief that change could be achieved peacefully through rule of law ... the two men shared a universal desire for freedom – one that cannot be contained by language or culture or even the span of an ocean.”
Mr Obama appeared to have been influenced by a letter he received this week from two Irish-American and two African-American congressmen: representatives Joseph Crowley, John Lewis, Donald Payne and Richard Neal. The letter asked Mr Obama to travel to Cork for the unveiling of the Frederick Douglass monument, which will be the first in Ireland to honour an African-American. During his stay in Ireland, the congressmen wrote, Douglass “was shocked and appalled by the living conditions of the Irish peasantry and later likened them to conditions endured by slaves on American plantations”.
English artist Andrew Edwards, whose family emigrated from Cork, has been commissioned to create the sculpture of Douglass at UCC. Don Mullan, a Dublin-based author and the originator of the monument idea, met Mr Kenny in Washington.