As our country grapples with a deadly pandemic, responds to still more outbreaks of police brutality, and bears astonished witness to street after street filled with fed-up citizens calling for change, I find myself thinking of Frederick Douglass. The former slave, orator, political organizer, and self-taught man of letters in many ways speaks to the present moment of civic and racial fracture almost as powerfully as when he scourged the conscience of white America in the mid-nineteenth century.
Indeed, it’s no exaggeration to say that Douglass’s legacy—and indeed his very image—continues to haunt the urgent quest for real and enduring racial justice in twenty-first–century America. After Douglass found a wider audience in 1842 as the well-spoken protégé of William Lloyd Garrison’s Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, he went on to become—alongside his many other celebrated accomplishments—the most photographed American of the nineteenth century. His image has remained a steady presence in our time as well, and not just on film. According to the Douglass scholar John Stauffer, in addition to 168 photographic portraits, the great man’s face graces “the walls of fifty neighborhoods; seventeen schools or universities; seven libraries or historical societies; seven community centers; five public housing projects; five government buildings; five churches; three stores; three playgrounds and parks; two prisons; two underpasses; one fire station; one newspaper building; one publishing house; and one subway station.” This vast roll call of Douglass mural sites and building names neatly distills the aspirations and deferred promises that continue to define so much of black experience two centuries after his birth.
Douglass almost never smiled while posing. In presenting himself as sober, dignified, confident, he refuted prevailing stereotypes that cruelly caricatured African Americans as carelessly content with bondage, while also furnishing vivid and unassailable evidence of black equality. He hoped his white viewers would see him and his kinsmen as, well, kin. “Whether we read Shakespeare or look at Hogarth’s pictures, we commune alike with nature and have human beings for society,” Douglass wrote in a lecture called “Pictures and Progress.” “They are of the earth and speak to us in a known tongue. They are neither angels nor demons, but in their possibilities both. We see in them not only men and women, but ourselves.” Douglass anticipated the evocative power of recorded images a century before photos of police dogs attacking civilians helped tame the Klan in Birmingham, and even longer before cell phones captured police killings of Eric Garner, Walter Scott, George Floyd, and so many others.