By DCist contributor John Muller
As United States Marshal of the District, Frederick Douglass took to
walking from his home in Cedar Hill in Anacostia to his office in
City Hall, just around the corner from where his seven-foot bronze likeness was
first unveiled in the fall of 2008.
In another step towards the statue’s
legislated move
from the lobby of One Judiciary Square at 441 Fourth Street NW to
Emancipation Hall in the U.S. Capitol, political and community leaders
and Douglassonians will
convene next Monday evening, February 4 at 6:30 p.m., for a public pep rally in recognition of the Lion of Anacostia.
Before the statue made its public appearance, in 2008 the city
submitted proposals to the U.S. Mint advocating Douglass and fellow
Maryland native Benjamin Banneker grace the city’s thematic quarter.
Exposing its own historical illiteracy, though, the city’s application
needed some
quick fact checking
by high school teachers to amend that Douglass did not move to the
nation’s capital to help abolish slavery. (A Douglass quarter is
planned for 2017.)
“At the close of the war he moved to Washington and became deeply
interested in the practical work of reconstruction,” wrote George
Washington Williams, one of the nineteenth century’s foremost black
historians, in 1883.
It is understandable that an often one-dimensional telling of Douglass as a runaway slave turned abolitionist is what
holds the public’s consciousness.
But Douglass lived nearly thirty years after the Civil War; twenty-five
of which were spent partially or entirely in Washington.
During these years Douglass launched the last of his newspaper
ventures, was appointed to the city’s Legislative Council, served on the
Board of Trustees of Howard University, raised money for the city’s
colored schools, advocated “District Suffrage,” buried his wife, his
namesake, far too many grandchildren and scores of his old line allies;
radical abolitionists, journalists,
suffragists, educators, ministers, runaway slaves, diplomats and Presidents.
When Douglass settled in Washington in 1872, post-emancipation
Washington was envisioned by radical Republican Congressmen and Senators
as becoming a fully politically, and socially, integrated “
Example for all the Land,”
as Northwestern University Professor Kate Masur details in her
award-winning 2010 book. Rights of enfranchisement and public
accommodation for black folk were codified. With the arrival of the
country’s
first generation
of black Civil Rights leaders, towering figures of their day, into the
halls of Congress, Washington was the place to be for those on the make.
One of the most prominent men of “
New Washington” was Frederick Douglass.
Robert Smalls, a former slave, war hero and Congressman, recalled
when meeting Douglass that as a child in Charleston, South Carolina
Douglass’s 1845 autobiography was passed around among the slaves
illegally.
This younger generation of black political leaders and social
reformers, looking for guidance, turned to the elder Douglass who in
turn shared his experiences, influence, money and blood, sweat and tears
to improve the lot of not just the city’s black elite but also the
orphans who ran the streets of late 19th century Washington.
For marrying Helen Pitts, the daughter of a white abolitionist, in
1884 against the wishes of both their families, Douglass upturned
Washington society. His marriage was met with mixed emotions in the
daily papers and divided the black press.
The Washington Grit, edited by black nationalist John Edward Bruce,
let loose, “Barnum could make a mint of money out of this couple if they
would consent to go on exhibition. We do not believe that it adds
anything to the character or good sense of either of the two races to
intermarry with each other, and when it is done it will generally be
found that moral depravity is at the bottom of them.”
Representing black Washington’s more conservative temperament, the
Washington Bee, known for its standard tag line “Honey for Friends,
Stings for Enemies,” did not object to the interracial union. On
February 2, 1884, the Bee’s tag line championed the protection of civil
liberties, its editorial on Douglass and Helen Pitts saying as much. “If
[Douglass] felt disposed to marry a white lady, it does not prove that
he is opposed to the colored ladies of our city,” the Bee said, offering
a rebuttal to black women who could not help feeling slighted. “Mr.
Douglass will be different from other men who have white wives. He will
not try to hide his identity with his race, but he will still be
Frederick Douglass, the defender of civil and political liberty.”
In the parlors of Cedar Hill and on the back lawn literary readings
hosting neighbors, students from Howard University, Washington poets and
old friends from Rochester, New York were held with regularity.
Known to carry a pistol in her purse since witnessing the lynching of
a close friend in Memphis in the late 1880s, Ida B. Wells was a
frequent guest at the Douglass home in Anacostia. Unlike many black
women of her time, and Douglass’s own children, Wells befriended
Frederick as much as Helen. In Wells’s autobiography, compiled by her
daughter, she writes, “The friendship and hospitality I enjoyed at the
hands of these two great souls is among my treasured memories.”
The sweeping styles of Frederick Douglass, one of the 19th century’s
most prominent Victorian men of letters, are various. From taking in a
baseball game to horse playing with his grandchildren to stringing a
song from his memories of the Wye House plantation in Maryland’s Talbot
County, the time Douglass spent in Washington was a regeneration of the
former adolescent slave who walked the streets of Baltimore in the 1830s
picking up torn Bible pages scattered in the gutter. A fugitive slave
for nearly a decade, hunted by United States Marshals in the immediate
aftermath of John Brown’s failed raid on Harpers Ferry in the fall of
1859, Douglass was no longer an outlaw when he and his family settled in
post-emancipation Washington.
The full portraiture of Douglass, the most photographed man of the
19th century according to new research, is not complete without a full
exposure, recognition, and discussion of his time in our city.
Throughout February (designated Black History Month because Dr.
Carter G. Woodson sought a week in February to honor the birth months of
Douglass and Abraham Lincoln), there are a handful of Douglass-related
events at the D.C. Public Library and local bookstores and museums. On
Saturday,
February 2 and February 23,
I am leading a tour ($30) of Frederick Douglass’s Anacostia, while
seven days a week free public tours of the Douglass home are offered at
the
Frederick Douglass National Historic Site in Historic Anacostia.
John Muller is the author of Frederick Douglass in Washington, D.C.: The Lion of Anacostia.
A
Confederate battle flag hung inside the old North Carolina State
Capitol last week to mark the sesquicentennial of the Civil War is being
taken down after civil rights leaders raised concerns.
