David Blight wins Christopher Award for “Frederick Douglass”

New Haven-based author David W. Blight will receive a Christopher Award for Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (Simon & Schuster). It is one of 11 books to be honored on May 23rd at the 70th annual Christopher Awards in New York. The Christophers will also recognize creators of 9 feature films and TV/Cable programs.

The biography of Frederick Douglass traces the life of the escaped slave who became the greatest orator of his day and one of the leading abolitionists and writers of the era. Blight has drawn on new information held in a private collection that few other historians have consulted, as well as recently discovered issues of Douglass’s newspapers. An astonishing man of words, Douglass was also a thinker steeped in Biblical story and theology.

Blight, whose book also just won a Pulitzer Prize, is Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. He is the author or editor of a dozen books, including American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era; and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory; and annotated editions of Douglass’s first two autobiographies. He has worked on Douglass much of his professional life, and been awarded the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.

The Christopher Awards were created in 1949 to celebrate authors, illustrators, writers, producers and directors whose work “affirms the highest values of the human spirit.” A nonprofit organization founded in 1945 by Maryknoll Father James Keller, it is rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition of service to God and humanity. The ancient Chinese proverb—“It’s better to light one candle than to curse the darkness”— guides its publishing, radio, and awards programs. Visit www.christophers.org for more information.