Unidentified photographer
Ambrotype, 1856
After Frederick Douglass escaped from slavery, he invented the concept ofAfrican American public individuality, investing it with a fierce public dignity evident in this image. Self-educated, Douglass became a powerful orator and writer advocating racial pride and social change through direct, even violent political action. The women’s rights leader Elizabeth Cady Stanton referred to his bearing this way: “he stood there like an African prince, conscious of his dignity and power, grand in his physical proportions, majestic in his wrath.” His example provided a foundation for the emergence of the concept of cool itself from African American culture in the 1940s.