Summoning Frederick Douglass By FRANCIS X. CLINES

[applegrove]

The New York Times
The City Life
Summoning Frederick Douglass

By FRANCIS X. CLINES
Published: November 3, 2006

For all his exultation in fleeing slavery to New York on the Underground Railroad, Frederick Douglass recalled how formidable the city soon seemed. “The loneliness overcame me,” he wrote of his first perch upon liberty in 1838, before he blazed into history as the articulator of African-Americans’ determination to shuck slavery. “There I was in the midst of thousands, and yet a perfect stranger,” Douglass recorded of his early glimpse of New Yorkers. “I dared not to unfold to any of them my sad condition.”

That such a powerful individual could be so daunted by the city, like so many ordinary newcomers, makes it all the sweeter that Douglass will be properly welcomed next summer at Harlem’s gateway. His statue likeness, noble and powerful as the man, will peer forth at the skyline. The setting includes a 60-foot-long, laser-lit fountain, flowing with the waters of freedom, and an array of the quilted code symbols that were one of the ingenious secrets of the slaves’ escape north.

Strategic quilts, harmlessly hung out to air along the routes toward liberty, offered instructions and maps to knowledgeable slaves on the run. Their innocent symbols — wagon wheel, crossed wrenches, bear’s paw, log cabin, child’s shoofly — were guides and cautions, just as patterns of knots marked mileage. These symbols are being rendered in multi-hued granite squares by Algernon Miller, a New York artist, as part of his Douglass tribute, under construction in a European-styled traffic circle and park bordering the northwest corner of Central Park. Mr. Miller’s boyhood was spent at play on the circle’s surrounding streets; an earlier work celebrated the Seneca Village community of African-American landholders displaced in the making of Central Park. “Things just came together,” he said of the muse he found in the quilted subtext of the Underground Railroad.

In contrast, the eight-foot statue catching Douglass in the classical pose of his daguerreotypes was done by Gabriel Koren, a Hungarian-born sculptor so fascinated as a child by far-off African-American human rights leaders that she came to specialize in them. “They are so interesting, so magnetic.” Her Malcolm X glares forth handsomely in Harlem, and her Marcus Garvey reigns lately in her city studio. “I fought against doing Douglass 20 or 30 feet high, totally removed from ordinary people,” said Ms. Koren, seeing to a proper welcome for the singular fugitive who landed here on his way into history

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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/03/opinion/03fri4.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

[texpatriot2004]

1. Isn't Frederick Douglass day soon? nm

[applegrove]

2. I don't know. I'm Canadian. Is it part of Black History Month? That is soon.