The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Looking for Frederick Douglass in Savannah
SCAD exhibits open up fresh interpretations of political figure’s impact.
SAVANNAH — Frederick Douglass passed through this elegant Southern city only once, for the briefest of visits — a half-hour whistle-stop on his rail journey to a speaking engagement in Jacksonville, Florida.
It was April 1889, just the second foray into the deep South for the great orator, five decades after his escape from Maryland as a fugitive slave. Douglass was now a major political figure, with an elegant hilltop home in Washington, D.C. Across the South, Jim Crow laws and racial terror were demolishing the gains of Reconstruction.
In Savannah, Douglass greeted the cheering crowd and reviewed a company of black troops at the railway depot, and then he was gone.
“Within a stone’s throw of one of the largest cotton-trading centers,” writes the historian David
W. Blight, “and in a city with thousands of black freedmen struggling to survive and live meaningful lives amid hostile white supremacy festering around each of its beautiful squares, the locals had only glimpsed their mysterious hero.”
Today, however, Savannah is a pilgrimage site for Douglass researchers. The reason is a remarkable archive of letters, manuscripts, and other documents, by Douglass and by members of his family, in the possession of Walter O. Evans, a retired surgeon here and a major collector of African American art and letters.
The trove sheds light on the later parts of Douglass’ life, and on his family, which he rarely mentioned in his speeches and writings. It has prompted a fresh wave of Douglass studies — not least Blight’s book, “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom,” which won a 2019 Pulitzer Prize, and which is dedicated in part to the collector and his wife.
This fall, the city has become a destination for cultural tourists on the Douglass trail. The museum of the Savannah College of Art and Design is hosting three concurrent and contemporary exhibitions that open up fresh interpretations of his impact. They show how primary sources can feed not only new scholarship, but also the imagination of artists and curators concerned with issues of the present day.
One is a five-screen film and photography project, “Frederick Douglass: Lessons of the Hour,” by the British filmmaker Isaac Julien, on view through Dec. 15 — a new edit of the work that showed earlier this year at the New York gallery Metro Pictures starring the Royal Shakespeare Company actor Ray Fearon in episodes based on Douglass’ speeches, travels, and home life.
The centerpiece exhibition, “Frederick Douglass: Embers of Freedom,” on view through Jan. 5, is a Douglass-themed dialogue between the archive and visual art. It features 48 modern and contemporary works — from Charles
White and James van der Zee to commissions by emerging artists — together with highlights from the Evans collection, presented in vitrines and on digital browsers.
Running concurrently is “The Golden March,” a series of screenprinted fabric installations on Douglass’ life, by the French artist Raphaël Barontini.
It is possible to fill a show with photographs of Douglass, who cannily managed his image and is considered the most-photographed person in 19th-century America. He was also a theorist who connected the possibilities of photography with political representation and social progress for all people.
“Men of all conditions may see themselves as others see them,” he commented about the spread of the medium. Elsewhere, he wrote: “Poets, prophets, and reformers are all picture-makers — and this ability is the secret of their power and achievements. They see what ought to be by the reflection of what is, and endeavor to remove the contradiction.”
The exhibitions here take liberties with Douglass, gently. Barontini screen prints him into collage like tapestries; Fearon, remarkably well-cast, lends him emotions and affect in Julien’s film. “Portrait Frederick Douglass lapels,” by the British painter Lubaina Himid, is an anti-portrait: a colorful composition of rectangles, each of which contains a shape inspired by the lapels of the fancy suits that Douglass’ wife, Anna, sewed for his lengthy travels.
The new research on Douglass stems from something close to accident. Evans, then a surgeon in Detroit, purchased from a dealer in the mid-1980s two large lots of Douglass materials. Two decades later, retired in his hometown of Savannah, Evans showed the discovery to Blight, who was in town for a talk.
It included manuscripts in Douglass’ hand of some of his later essays and speeches, but also correspondence with his children. There are years’ worth of letters from one son, Lewis Henry Douglass, to his fiancée (and later wife) Helen Amelia Loguen, including early ones from places where Lewis’ unit was stationed in the Civil War. Another son, Charles Remond Douglass, was a kind of family historian, attesting in particular to the role the whole family played in Douglass’ endeavors.
The trove is an antidote to hero-worship, Bernier explained. “It enables us to tell stories that aren’t just the mythic, epic, solitary Douglass. You see that the struggle of the family was struggle for social justice that was collaborative and collective.”
Evans said that the collection was “dormant” for many years, until he let scholars rummage in it. He knew the material was precious, but never sifted through it in detail, consumed by what he called the addiction to finding the next treasure. “I had barely looked at it until David Blight came around,” he said.
The SCAD exhibition “Frederick Douglass: Embers of Freedom” is the last time Evans intends to show materials from this archive in his lifetime, because of their fragility. (They are being digitized.) Humberto Moro, one of the museum’s curators, said they offered an opportunity to connect archives and contemporary art.
“We’re inviting people to lose their fear of historical documents, and opening them up with new work,” Moro said.
Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company is planning a film adaptation of Blight’s biography, suggesting more attention to Douglass ahead. “The Douglass moment is kind of an unending moment in the fight for justice,” Bernier said, noting that even late in life, in a reactionary time, Douglass never despaired. “In this dark hour, I think he has a lot to tell us about how to continue that fight.”