Frederick Douglass

I had written this months ago; only posting it now. Sorry.

The president is ruining my blog.

Really. I'd been working diligently on my post about Frederick Douglass for a while--researching it to make sure there would be no fake news on it--and he goes out and proclaims him living. 

He should have boned up on Black history before slapping his name on the lease at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  But he's not entirely to blame.

Growing up in a decidedly white neighborhood in Queens--one the other side of the tracks from where DJT was born--the name Frederick Douglass didn't enter my life as a child or teenager.  In the last three decades, sleepy Richmond Hill transformed itself into a more diverse neighborhood but back then, I knew about black people, slavery, and discrimination academically--through white history books. The singular discourse I can recollect from a TEACHER was a mere sentence: "You know, the only job black people could get until very recently was as maintenance workers." It impressed me greatly but bounced off my classmates. I still don't think we understand what that means. And, she uttered the phrase in the late 1970's. In New York City.

Until high school, many of my neighborhood friends had never spoken to an African American; 
as far as they were concerned, were taking away their jobs, neighborhoods, their very way of life and replacing it with one of riots, drugs, poverty and violence. 

My outlook was framed differently since I often visited my with father's sister, who lived and worked as a nurse in hospitals throughout upper Manhattan and the South Bronx. My earliest recollection of a purely African American experience was going with her to a dance recital somewhere in Harlem where she and I were the only non-African Americans there. I noticed it; I was intrigued. 

Back to Frederick Douglass. 

Frederick Douglass Circle sits at the gate of Harlem: The Northwestern tip of Central Park. West 110th Street and Central Park West, turns into the boulevard bearing his name and travels north to where it ends around West 155th Street and the Harlem River Drive. 

The circle sits in the baking sun; unshielded by the swanky apartment buildings lining the semi circle, but it doesn't matter. A life-size statue of Fred himself faces Harlem, his back turned to the rest of Manhattan. 

When I started this project, I felt Frederick Douglass would be the central figure on which to focus my search for a phrase applicable to DEMOCRACY SPOKEN HERE. Over the years it's become a well known face that he, an escaped slave from Maryland, was a best-selling writer, orator, and abolisher; that he campaigned for equality not only for African Americans' rights but for women's rights and suffrage. He was friends with Abraham Lincoln, etc., etc., etc. But what I find most fascinating were his writings and speeches about PHOTOGRAPHY!

He writes: Our age gets very little credit for poetry of music or indeed art in any of its branches. It is commonly and often scornfully denominated the age of money, merchandise and politics, a metallic, utilitarian, dollar-worshipping age--nothing in the waterfall but mill power, nothing in the landscape but cotton, corn and cattle; dead alike to the poetic charms both of nature and of art.

Ehem.

Not camera shy, he was the most photographed black man of the 19th century. He believed, and rightly so, that the camera was the greatest democratic testaments: a camera could easily record the face of a king as it could a young black servant; a photo booth could exist at a country crossroad gas station or on the fabulous boulevards of Paris. One side of the world could behold the other--and, without the blink of an eye, cast an opinion of the true state of the human condition from which he came, free of demeaning depictions or sensational writings