Here, too, Douglass’s cautions echo down through today’s agitations for racial justice: Some protesters demonstrating in response to George Floyd’s murder asked their supporters to stop sharing their photos on social media. It was best, he argued, to leave some edges blurred. He bristled at other authors of slave narratives who included a surplus of details surrounding their escape from bondage. He also knew that countering the narrative of delusional white supremacy was a double-edged sword too much information aimed at exposing its brutalities could bring new and unintended forms of harm. According to the Douglass scholar John Stauffer, in addition to 168 photographic portraits, the great man’s face graces “the walls of fifty neighborhoods seventeen schools or universities seven libraries or historical societies seven community centers five public housing projects five government buildings five churches three stores three playgrounds and parks two prisons two underpasses one fire station one newspaper building one publishing house and one subway station.” This vast roll call of Douglass mural sites and building names neatly distills the aspirations and deferred promises that continue to define so much of black experience two centuries after his birth. His image has remained a steady presence in our time as well, and not just on film. After Douglass found a wider audience in 1842 as the well-spoken protégé of William Lloyd Garrison’s Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, he went on to become-alongside his many other celebrated accomplishments-the most photographed American of the nineteenth century.

Indeed, it’s no exaggeration to say that Douglass’s legacy-and indeed his very image-continues to haunt the urgent quest for real and enduring racial justice in twenty-first–century America. The former slave, orator, political organizer, and self-taught man of letters in many ways speaks to the present moment of civic and racial fracture almost as powerfully as when he scourged the conscience of white America in the mid-nineteenth century. As our country grapples with a deadly pandemic, responds to still more outbreaks of police brutality, and bears astonished witness to street after street filled with fed-up citizens calling for change, I find myself thinking of Frederick Douglass.

Wall of Respect by Jabari Asim