Maya Angelou always makes me cry. She also makes me laugh, of course, and sing and think and feel. But the one certainty is that her every performance — be it at lecture hall, poetry reading, dinner table or presidential inaugural — will at some point make me cry.

She did it again last week, with readings from her work and others’ at a Frederick Douglass birthday celebration.

There’s no point in trying to recreate for you the words that evoked my tears this time. It cannot be done. An Angelou performance is such a blend of words, delivery, acting and feeling — so much involved with her whole being — that to try to tell someone else about it is like trying to summarize love.

Besides, I don’t want to talk about Angelou. I want to talk about Douglass — about his hard life, his determination, his success and, most of all, his dreams.

It’s a talk my wife and I often have. We’ll be driving along an inner-city street and happen past a group of rowdy teenagers, or a blond-wigged prostitute, or some derelict talking to himself, and one of us will say: "What would Frederick Douglass say if he saw that?"

Last week’s program, at Ford’s Theater, had me thinking those thoughts again. Douglass, born into slavery, made his mark as gifted orator and committed abolitionist. He lived long enough to see the end of slavery. But he knew, his own uncommon success notwithstanding, that abolition alone would not ensure justice.

"Though slavery was abolished," he sadly declared after the Civil War, "the wrongs perpetrated against my people were not ended." That unfinished business became his new mission, and by the time of his death, 98 years ago this week, he had reason to be hopeful — not just for himself but for his people.

What would Frederick Douglass say … now? Wouldn’t he be overjoyed to see college attendance rates for blacks approaching those of whites? Wouldn’t he smile in satisfaction to see the growth of the black middle class, in affluence and influence? Wouldn’t he delight in knowing that the top military man in America is Colin Powell, a black man, or that another black man, the late Reginald Lewis, could put together an international conglomerate capable of doing $1.5 billion in annual sales? Might he not marvel at the idea that the 15th Amendment, which guaranteed blacks the right to vote, had by now produced an estimated 8,000 black elected officials across America? Or that three of his people now sit in the Cabinet of the president of the United States?

Don’t you think he might find delightful irony in recalling the words of his old slave master, that "learning would spoil the best nigger in the world"? He might be moved to say: Thanks for the advice; my people have learned, and now they are no longer fit to be niggers.

But of course, we’d have to tell him the bad news too. I think he might, on hearing that black people were disproportionately involved in criminal activity, swallow hard and try to understand. Didn’t he say, over a century ago, that "where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where one class is made to feel that society is organized in a conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe"?

What would Frederick Douglass say if you seated him in the parlor of the Executive Mansion in Virginia — Virginia! — and bade him sit while you fetched the governor, and then you walked in with Doug Wilder?

And suppose you sat there and told him of the progress, individual and societal, we’ve made in extending opportunity to the descendants of slaves. Suppose you told this man, who had to risk severe punishment for daring to learn to read, that education is now not just free but mandatory; that books are plentiful and can be borrowed at no cost from public libraries; that educators, civil rights leaders, the government and private industry are co-conspirators in a scheme to get our children to learn.

Suppose you ticked off the academic and political accomplishments of the grandchildren of slaves, even while informing him that there were still in America those who were indifferent, even hostile, to the advancement of his people.

Could he suppress his delight?

And then suppose you put him in the governor’s limousine and drove him through the slums of Richmond, or Washington or Los Angeles and let him see what my wife and I have seen too many times: the aimless drifters, the homeless in their cardboard shelters, the bullet-riddled walls, the vandalized schools, the pitifully undereducated children, the drug dealers and their prey.

What would Frederick Douglass say?

I think he would say nothing at all. I think that, with no need for an assist from the brilliant Maya Angelou, Frederick Douglass would simply cry.