This might be Frederick Douglass’ 200th year.
We don’t know for certain because at the time and place of his birth, black people were not allowed the dignity of a birth date. It was an event noted for its economic benefit to the “master,” but not for its personal significance to the “slave.” It was remembered because one man increased his wealth, not because another man began his life.
But we think it was about 200 years ago, and in Douglass’ adopted home of Rochester, New York, the city government has declared a year of jubilee and celebration.
That is as it should be.
No person in Rochester history – and few people in American history – have so seminally advanced the cause of liberty and equality. Frederick Douglass was a voice, mind, soul and heart raised up by God to raise up the rights of a people and the consciousness of a nation. If the Civil War was a great step in the keeping of the promise of the Declaration, Frederick Douglass was as essential to that step as was Abraham Lincoln, Harriet Beecher Stowe or Ulysses S. Grant.
And unique among those people, Frederick Douglass shared the history, experience and skin tone of that one-tenth of Americans who were then bound in slavery.
During the most intense period of his rhetorical fight – when he sounded most clearly the battle cry of freedom – from 1847 to 1863 – he published a series of newspapers from the Talman Building at 25 West Main Street in Rochester. That place in that town was America’s most genuine hub of abolitionist thought.
Rochester’s ties to this great man and his work are deep and undeniable.
Which makes it all the more unfortunate that for 75 years Rochester has chosen to disrespect the memory of Frederick Douglass by hiding in obscurity the nation’s most significant memorial to his life.
I’m talking about the heroic larger-than-life statue that once graced Rochester’s busiest intersection, but has – since 1941 – languished in the hidden hollow of an out-of-the-way county park. Seen by virtually no one, Douglass is a giant in exile.
Rochester came to have a Frederick Douglass statue because of the efforts of John W. Thompson, a black man who was a waiter at the Powers Building at Four Corners in downtown Rochester. The city was completing the wonderful Lincoln and Civil War monument in Washington Square Park and Thompson noted that the statues of Union fighters were all white, though by 1865 some 10 percent of Union combatants were black. John W. Thompson wanted to erect a statue that would honor black soldiers and sailors of the Civil War.
That began a discussion that evolved into the decision to commission a statue honoring Frederick Douglass.
That statue was dedicated on June 8, 1899, by Teddy Roosevelt, who was then the governor of New York.
Douglass’ son Charles was the model for the statue’s body, and sculptor Sidney W. Edwards depicted Douglass as he appeared while delivering a milestone speech in Cincinnati – Douglass’ first public remarks after the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment. That amendment, which Douglass said made him at last an American, was the crown of his life’s work.
The statue was so important that W.E.B. DuBois commissioned a smaller replica for display at the 1900 Paris worlds’ fair.
It had initially been thought to put the Douglass statue in Lunsford Circle, which was then a small park in Corn Hill, where many of the city’s blacks lived at the time. But putting the statue – the first in America honoring a black man – in a park was judged too out of the way, and not sufficiently prominent.
So they put it at the busiest intersection in town.
In 1899, that was St. Paul and Central avenues, directly in front of the New York Central train station.
“It is fitting,” Mayor George Warner said at the dedication, “that it should stand near a great portal of our city, where the thousands who enter it may see that she is willing to acknowledge to the world that her most illustrious citizen was not a white man.”
He was right then, and he ought to be right now.
But by 1941, the train station had moved, the traffic patterns had shifted, and Douglass stood alone.
Though he had stood alone for a time. It’s worth noting that 1941 – the year the only prominent American statue of a black man was moved out of sight and out of mind – was the year that the Civil Rights movement began with the threat of a “March on Washington” and a demand for black access to jobs in the burgeoning defense industry. The year black Americans started getting “uppity” is the year Frederick Douglass got hidden.
Maybe that’s a coincidence.
But history teaches us that when black people have been slighted in American society, it has not usually been an accident.
So it’s probably not an accident that this historic statue of this historic man is some several yards off the road, down a hill, with his back to the street, shielded by trees from the notice of cars passing on South Avenue. The Highland Park Bowl is the toilet bowl down which Frederick Douglass has been flushed.
And the notion that his statue is there because it is near his former home on South Avenue is hard to accept, as it’s not actually very close to where he lived, and there’s a swamp in between, and the actual spot of his home is the site of a city school named for an Irishman.
Frederick Douglass is where he is because they wanted to hide him.
And 2018 is the perfect year to change that.
The county had thought to move the statue up to South Avenue – and a mysteriously absent state grant was supposed to pay for that – but that solution is an unacceptable half measure. Frederick Douglass belongs downtown.
If in 1899 they wanted him on broad public display, he deserves the same today.
Beyond just the prominence of Frederick Douglass as an historical figure and Rochester icon, the appropriate display of his statue could be inspiring to the city’s black children, who face some of the direst circumstances in the nation. There is pride and power in history and heritage, but it needs to be out front and visible.
So where should he go?
An obvious location might be at Graves and West Main, on the southwest landing of the Main Street Bridge, next to the still-standing building where Douglass had his newspaper office. Another might be at Four Corners itself, in front of the Powers Building where John W. Thompson conceived the idea of honoring black men in statuary.
Or maybe Frederick Douglass should join his friend and partner Abraham Lincoln at Washington Square Park. Perhaps the Italian cannon – which has no real tie to Rochester or American history – could be moved elsewhere and Frederick Douglass could stand where it sits, standing in front of and paving the way for Lincoln and liberation – as, in fact, his writing and speaking did.
Douglass deserves the prominence. We deserve the inspiration. That historic statue deserves to be on display.
When President James Garfield walked out of the Capitol to take the oath of office, he chose to walk arm in arm with Frederick Douglass. Garfield chose Douglass to deliver him to his duties.
We should make the same choice.
We should ask this great man and this great statue to return to the heart and consciousness of Rochester, to remind of us our heritage and our duties – what we owe the past, and what we owe the future.
When he was born, they hid away that proof of humanity by refusing to note the date. Now that he has passed, we must not hide his monument, and repeat that ignominy.
You don’t build monuments to hide them; you build monuments to display them.
It’s time for Frederick Douglass to come back downtown.