“Minneapolis’ Phillips neighborhood is named for Wendell Phillips, a fervent abolitionist. He was once asked why he couldn’t turn down the heat in his rhetoric: why are do you always have to be so firey? Phillips’ reply: ‘Yes, I’m on fire–because I have mountains of ice to melt!'”
The invocation of Phillips by composer and writer Frank Hudson has been doing numbers on Bluesky. It’s only one of a thread of posts about Minneapolis neighborhoods named after abolitionists.
As he writes in a recent blog post about having to set music aside to fight the forces of fascism and terror on the streets of his hometown, Hudson came to the Phillips quote the way so many have: it was a favorite of the late MN senator Paul Wellstone. He closed a March 2000 speech at an educators conference about the foundational importance to democracy of education with it:
That reminds me of a quote that has motivated me throughout my life. It is my favorite quote. It is from Wendell Phillips, an abolitionist from the 1840’s. At that time both political parties were very weary of the slavery issue and they weren’t sure how to confront it. But not Wendell, he just said slavery was a moral outrage, that it was unconscionable, and he wouldn’t equivocate. He wasn’t afraid to speak out.
After he gave a particularly fiery speech about abolition, a friend came up to him and said, “Wendell, why are you so on fire?”
And Wendell turned to his friend and said, “Brother May, I’m on fire because I have mountains of ice before me to melt.”
We have mountains of ice before us to melt. Thank you for your energy, your time, your love for children and your passion to do what is right. It has been an honor to be here.
And it was cited in memorials to Wellstone after his death in a plane crash in 2002.
I could not find Wellstone’s version of the exchange, though. But I did find Wendell Phillips repeating it in 1879—at the funeral of his longtime friend and fellow abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison:
He [Garrison] said to a friend who remonstrated with him on the heat and severity of his language, ‘Brother, I have need to be all on fire, for I have mountains of ice about me to melt.’
Garrison co-founded and edited The Liberator, and founded—with Phillips and others—the New England Anti-Slavery Society, which advocated for full, immediate, and uncompensated emancipation of enslaved people in the US. It was Garrison’s call for full Black liberty and equality, grounded in the “self-evident” truths of the Declaration of Independence, that was considered unhelpfully extreme in the 1830s, when other early abolitionists were calling for gradual emancipation and the expulsion of Black people—both freed and enslaved—from the US.
The earliest mention of the story is from 1840, in a eulogy for the Rev. Charles Follen, who’d taken up the ministry after being fired from Harvard for his abolitionist views. Follen died in a fire on the steamship Lexington, and churches in Boston refused to host the Anti-Slavery Society’s memorial service for him:
He [Follen] knew that Mr. Garrison was incited to greater vehemence and severity by the coldness, and heartless indifference of almost all around him; and that nothing would so soon attemper his zeal, as to find himself supported, instead of opposed, by the wisest and best men in the community. He had heard and he felt the force of Mr. Garrison’s reply to an early friend, who was remonstrating with him on his violence of language. “Why,” said that friend, “you write as if you were all on fire.” “I have need to be all on fire,” was his solemn reply, “for I have mountains of ice about me to melt.”
That eulogy was delivered by Samuel Joseph May.
Brother May revealed himself as Garrison’s early friend in his 1869 memoir, Some Recollections of Our Antislavery Conflict. It was not just the coldness and indifference of those around him that set Garrison afire, but it was also that. May was one of several friends who asked Garrison about turning down the rhetorical heat a bit:
“But,” said I, “some of the epithets, though not perhaps too severe, are not precisely applicable to the sin you denounce, and so may seem abusive.”
“Ah !” he rejoined, “until the term ‘slaveholder’ sends as deep a feeling of horror to the hearts of those who hear it applied to any one as the terms ‘robber,’ ‘pirate,’ ‘murderer’ do, we must use and multiply epithets when condemning the sin of him who is guilty of the ‘sum of all villanies.'”
“O” cried I, “my friend, do try to moderate your indignation, and keep more cool; why, you are all on fire.”
He stopped, laid his hand upon my shoulder with a kind but emphatic pressure, that I have felt ever since, and said slowly, with deep emotion, “Brother May, I have need to be all on fire, for I have mountains of ice about me to melt.” From that hour to this I have never said a word to Mr. Garrison in complaint of his style. I am more than half satisfied now that he was right then, and we who objected were mistaken. [paragraph breaks added]
Don’t call it genocide. Don’t call it fascism. Don’t call them nazis. Don’t call it an occupation. Don’t call it kidnapping. Don’t call it disappearing. Don’t call it white supremacism. Don’t call it terrorism. Don’t call it murder.
We have need to be all on fire, for there are mountains of ice about us to melt. We are here now with multiple people murdered by agents of the state, as evergrowing crowds fill the streets to take the places of the fallen and protect their neighbors in hiding. But the goal is the same as it has been for everyone who has caught the fire and passed it along to new generations who recognize its self-evident truth: equal liberty and equal justice for all. I really hope the fire this time does not take 30 years to do its thing.
