This book attempts to answer a fundamental question: How did Douglass manage to persuade anyone about the evils of slavery, and even impress viewers with his personal qualities, when his speeches were commonly considered mere entertainment, in the same category as Barnum's circus acts? In answering this question, Terry Baxter provides a means of understanding the positive responses of Frederick Douglass's white audiences and African American celebrities' roles as both objects of consumption and vehicles for social change.

Anti-slavery speeches by Frederick Douglass are now considered worthy of study, but in his own time were seen as merely public entertainment. Yet Douglass still had an enormous impact on his audiences. Baxter looks at this paradox & at the role of African American celebrities as agents of social change.