Courtesy of Algernon Miller
An eight-foot-tall sculpture of Frederick Douglass, by the sculptor Gabriel Koren, is included in the $15.5 million project honoring Douglass.
Posted on 01/23/2007 6:46:55 PM PST by neverdem
At the northwest corner of Central Park, construction is under way on Frederick Douglass Circle, a $15.5 million project honoring the escaped slave who became a world-renowned orator and abolitionist.
Beneath an eight-foot-tall sculpture of Douglass, the plans call for a huge quilt in granite, an array of squares, a symbol in each, supposedly part of a secret code sewn into family quilts and used along the Underground Railroad to aid slaves. Two plaques would explain this.
The only problem: According to many prominent historians, the secret code — the subject of a popular book that has been featured on no less a cultural touchstone than “The Oprah Winfrey Show” — never existed. And now the city is reconsidering the inclusion of the plaques, so as not to “publicize spurious history,” Kate D. Levin, the city’s commissioner of cultural affairs, said yesterday.
The plaques may go, but they have spawned an energetic debate about folklore versus fact, and who decides what becomes the lasting historical record.
The memorial’s link between Douglass, who escaped slavery from Baltimore at age 20, and the coded designs has puzzled historians. But what particularly raised the historians’ ire were the two plaques, one naming the code’s symbols and the other explaining that they were used “to indicate the location of safe houses, escape routes and to convey other information vital to a slave’s escape and survival.”
It’s “a myth, bordering on a hoax,” said David Blight, a Yale University historian who has written a book about Douglass and edited his autobiography. “To permanently associate Douglass’s life with this story instead of great, real stories is unfortunate at best.”
The quilt theory was first published in the 1999 book “Hidden in Plain View,” by Jacqueline Tobin, a journalist and college English instructor from Denver, and Raymond...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
This might be something interesting for the crafters' ping list.
I always thought the "code" in quilts was a true story, that safe houses of the Underground Railroad would hang one over the balcony as a secret welcome to runaway slaves. Guess it was a myth all along.
Is this a typo?
Spell check just won't spot a spelling error that is a correctly spelled wrong word. Sigh.
Twin obviously = Twain.
I would put Douglass in the top twenty Americans of all time.
"While the project, which involves rebuilding roadways, will cost more than $15 million in city, state and federal money, the 15,000-square-foot plaza and sculpture were commissioned for $750,000. It’s unclear how much it would cost to redesign it now. The memorial, at 110th Street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard, is expected to be completed in fall 2008."
I think there's a lot of wishing and grabbing for tangibles that just might not be there regarding the underground railway...the usual "make it simple so we can use it to tell edifying stories" type of thing that happens to history we want to enshrine and pass down to our children. A bit of finding symbols that we can wrap the story around.
It's nearly as interesting about what it says about how people want to view history as how history really works.
And just where does a Harvard historian get off dissing obvious history experts, "Jacqueline Tobin, a journalist and college English instructor from Denver, and Raymond Dobard, a quilting and African textiles expert."?
It is he & his ilk that call Washington's cherry tree chopping a 'myth', too. < /sarc
Right up there with John Brown?
"It's nearly as interesting about what it says about how people want to view history as how history really works."
Very true!
If there was a message in the quilts, it was probably more just a reminder of the possibility of escape, of hope.
People who needed to be reminded to take supplies, take evasive action and head north - they wouldn't get too far.
There was one light-skinned woman who disguised herself as a white man with a toothache (face bandaged to hide her beardlessness, arm in a sling so she wouldn't have to sign her name - she was illiterate) travelling on a ship with her manservant (her dark-skinned husband) - they made it north.
Yeah, I wouldn't particularly disagree on that. Just commenting on the picture of the statue, not the man.
"I am a Republican, a black, dyed in the wool Republican, and I never intend to belong to any other party than the party of freedom and progress."
http://www.bartleby.com/73/1599.html
"I am a Republican, a black, dyed in the wool Republican, and I never intend to belong to any other party than the party of freedom and progress."
ATTRIBUTION: Attributed to FREDERICK DOUGLASS. Unverified.
Sounds like the quilting code. LOL! Thanks for the link!
Maybe it was J.C. Watts. :-)
Nice sculpture. It's so rare to see a new formal, non-abstract sculpture being made these days. Mostly piles of geometric junk labelled with some preposterous "title".
No, what your grandfather passes down is what people wanted to remember, shaded by their world view. Sometimes it holds things pretty good, but a lot of the time, when you go back and check the record books, it's been colored with nostalgia...or avoidance...Think of all those, "when I was a kid your age, I had to...." "Teenagers in my day didn't..." and so on.
My grandma grew up hearing how her uncle was killed defending a woman's virtue at a bar...we go back and checked the record, and he had been knifed by three husbands who were tired of him messing with their wives...
It ain't necessarily so. It might be, it might not. It's the documents that get left behind that tells stuff best...the account books, the diaries, the records at the general store, the court cases, all the bits and papers that anchor stuff to trust.
Oral history can and often does corroborate...but sometimes, it gets mythologized...
I haven't studied this particular set of stories myself, and I have no problem with it being one way or the other. But when you see what gets passed around and ends up on snopes, you know that sometimes things aren't exactly what they are talked about being.
I make no judgement to its right or wrong without doing some real study.
"My grandma grew up hearing how her uncle was killed defending a woman's virtue at a bar...we go back and checked the record, and he had been knifed by three husbands who were tired of him messing with their wives..."
Talk about rewriting history...
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