He moved here with Anna and the kids in September of , having lived in the capital city of Washington for a little over six years. The cold weather I had shivered in for much of the first half of my trip is nearly forgotten.
The National Park Service now owns and runs the house, the grounds, and the visitor center and museum, collectively called The Frederick Douglass National Historic Site. I take a brief look at the outside of the house, then stop at the visitor center and sign up for the guided tour which will start shortly.
I take another brief look around while I wait, and note the displays and artifacts I want to examine more closely when I return to the visitor center museum. Then I join the tour group on the steps leading up the hill to the house. Let me express my gratitude and give credit at the outset to the very knowledgeable and helpful Nate Johnson who leads the tour.
As you may remember from the Boston and Honeoye accounts, their marriage was very controversial: many black people thought that Douglass was betraying Anna and his race by marrying a white woman, and many white people objected for obvious purely racist! While Douglass brushed it off by saying that when he married Anna, he married a woman the color of his mother, and when he married Helen, he married a woman the color of his father, he had more explaining to do when it came to his family.
Not because of the racial difference so much: though his children were sensitive on that issue on behalf of their mother, they knew his views on the color line and that it should be erased. Douglass family sitting room at Cedar Hill, Anacostia. There are many portraits of Frederick and Joseph together; evidently, they were proud of one another.
