Description

Charles White worked with Robert Blackburn, an African American master lithographer, to create this depiction of the abolitionist and civil rights leader Frederick Douglass (1817–1895). White felt that the images of black Americans that proliferated throughout art history were, in his words, "a plague of distortions," and he sought to create his own representations that heroicized such figures. Here, Douglass—an escaped slave—meets the viewer's gaze confidently and directly, spotlit by a white border.