Dr. Evans, also
a leading collector of African-American art, acquired the bulk of the Douglass collection in the 1980s from a dealer. He described his historic house in Savannah as so crammed with an estimated 100,000 rare books and manuscripts that even his wife never entered some rooms.
On one visit, after Dr. Blight recalled once meeting Jacob Lawrence, Dr. Evans took him to a closet where the artist’s print series
“The Legend of John Brown” was stacked against a wall. On another, Dr. Blight mentioned a previous book project relating to James Baldwin.
“Walter said, ‘Oh, Jimmy? Go back in the TV room on the right. I have about 100 Baldwin letters,” he said.
The Beinecke
acquired the Baldwin letters in 2013. The Douglass acquisition, Dr. Blight said, was the result of “a long courtship” (with no shortage of suitors, Dr. Evans noted).
The Beinecke, citing library policy, would not disclose any financial terms of the Douglass acquisition. But the library did note that it was also receiving roughly 200 drawings by the pioneering 20th-century African-American political cartoonist
Oliver Wendell Harrington from Dr. Evans by donation.
Dr. Barton, the curator, said the scrapbooks — made during the 19th-century heyday of scrapbooking — are particularly rich and rare, giving a glimpse not just of Douglass’s public and private life, but of the way it was curated by his family. “Their self-consciousness about their role in history is fascinating,” she said.
In one, letters from prominent figures like Sen. Charles Sumner, the African-American abolitionist Martin Delaney and the poet John Greenleaf Whittier are pasted in. There are also handwritten personal narratives by two of his sons, including one called “Some Incidents of the Home Life of Frederick Douglass.” They offer insights not just into Douglass, Dr. Blight said, but also into his 44-year marriage to
Anna Murray, a free Black woman who helped him escape from slavery in 1838.
Archivists at Yale’s Beinecke Library unpack a copy of Frederick Douglass’s Paper, part of the Evans collection.Credit...Tubyez Cropper/Beinecke Library
Thousands of newspaper clippings record his public career, which included serving as consul general to Haiti and as superintendent of Washington, D.C. But the scrapbooks don’t just record his triumphs. They also record the public interest in the more complicated parts of his life as patriarch to a large and sometimes difficult extended clan — in its day, “the Black first family of Washington,” as Dr. Blight put it.
One scrapbook is dedicated mostly to the public controversy over his second marriage to Helen Pitts, a white woman 20 years his junior. Other clippings document his sometimes intense rivalries with other Black leaders like
John Mercer Langston.
In 1888, Douglass opposed Langston’s bid to become the first Black congressman from Virginia, on the grounds that he was insufficiently loyal to the Republican Party. Instead, he supported Langston’s white opponent, a former Confederate, prompting one editorialist to charge Douglass with “a vain sacrifice of race to the fetish of party and personal pique.”
“Man, the D.C. press got all over that,” Dr. Blight said. “And if one of his sons gets into bankruptcy trouble, that’s in there too.”
Douglass, who died in 1895, was the most photographed American of the 19th century, but his voice was never recorded. Still, it’s his soaring oratory that most vividly endures.
a reading of both the Declaration of Independence and of Douglass’s famous Fourth of July oration of 1852. (This year, it will be online.) Douglass begins with a searing critique of American hypocrisy before offering his white audience a vision of an America that might yet live up to its ideals.
“He rips the throats out of his audience, before lifting them up at the end,” Dr. Blight said. “He says ‘It’s not quite too late. Your nation is still young, still malleable. It’s still possible to save yourselves.’”
