Hoodoo and the Making of Frederick Douglass
The abolitionist pioneer had a little-known magickal side to his life story
Although a reader would not know it from most works of American history, the nation’s driving voice of abolitionism, Frederick Douglass (c.1818–1895), placed the Black system of magick and spell work called hoodoo at the center of the defining moment of his life — and his coming of age as an abolitionist icon.
Douglass did not use the word hoodoo. But the episode, which the speaker and author recounted in all three of his memoirs across nearly fifty years — Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845); My Bondage and My Freedom (1855); and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1893) — is marked by telltale occult references, for generations unnoticed by (and of little concern to) mainstream historians until I first documented its significance in my 2009 Occult America.
By way of history, hoodoo is among the most significant American movements in occultism.
“The way we tell it,” wrote novelist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston in her 1935 Mules and Men, “hoodoo started way back there before everything …Nobody can say where it begins or ends.”
Due to phonetic and cultural intersections, hoodoo is sometimes confused with Vodou. Vodou is an…
