Frederick Douglass, His Wife, and Mistress Make a Scene on The Good Lord Bird
Did Frederick Douglass have a mistress? Learn the truth in the back of the Showtime miniseries ‘The Good Lord Bird.’
The love triangle between Frederick Douglass, his mistress, and his spouse is among the more comedic parts of the Showtime miniseries The Good Lord Bird, by which Hamilton alum Daveed Diggs plays a “vain playboy” version of the famed abolitionist.
“It’s no longer that Douglass is living his best possible existence in an interracial throuple in 1850s America that makes this episode such a pleasure to look at, but the ways Anna and Ottilie vie for his affections with well-worn, but nonetheless effective ego-stroking,” The Undefeated’s Soraya Nadia McDonald wrote of Episode 3.
Bear in thoughts, alternatively, that the Showtime display does take creative liberties. “We had fun with the Frederick Douglass persona,” James McBride, who wrote the e book The Good Lord Bird and executive-produced the miniseries, informed The New York Times this month. “We don’t mean any disrespect to him and to the many thousands of historians who revere him and then the tens of millions of people that revere his reminiscence. But his life was once rife for cartoon.”
Naturally, viewers have questions on Douglass’ love lifestyles, and now we have answers.
Did Frederick Douglass have a mistress?
Seems so! As Slate stories, Douglass had a 24-year courting with German journalist Ottilie Assing, played on the display by Lex King. The show depicts a sexual relationship between Douglass and Assing, and biographer David Blight surmised that the two were “almost certainly fanatics.”
“As a German romantic, she was once always looking for the hero in history, the maker of recent countries, new concepts, and new occasions,” Blight wrote of Assing in his guide Frederick Douglass: The Prophet of Freedom.
According to William S. McFeely’s biography Frederick Douglass, Assing as soon as wrote to her sister, “If one stands in so intimate a dating with a man as I do with Douglass, one comes to know sides of the whole international, of men and girls, which might differently stay closed, particularly whether it is a man whom the entire world has noticed and whom so many girls have loved.”
Assing frequently lived with Frederick at his space in Rochester, N.Y., and had “utter contempt” for his first wife, Anna Murray-Douglass, who helped Frederick out of slavery and gave him his 5 youngsters. Blight studies that Assing hoped Douglass would divorce Murray-Douglass and she may marry him instead, in line with Slate.
Murray-Douglass died in 1882, and Assing died via suicide two years later, after Douglass married his second spouse.
Did Frederick marry a white lady?
Yes, Frederick’s 2d spouse used to be suffragist and abolitionist Helen Pitts, a white lady who used to be his secretary and the daughter of certainly one of his buddies. The couple married in 1884.
Pitts’ marriage to a former slave outraged her family — upper-class descendants of Mayflower passengers — however Douglass answered to criticisms of the union by way of saying he first married somebody the colour of his mother and then married any person the colour of his father, in keeping with The Frederick Douglass Encyclopedia.
After Douglass died of a middle attack in 1895, Pitts commemorated his legacy by asking Congress to ascertain the Frederick Douglass Memorial and Historical Association. Pitts also persisted her advocacy for women and Black other people till she died of middle illness in 1903.
“Love got here to me and I was no longer afraid to marry the person I loved because of his color,” Pitts once said, in keeping with a blog post from her alma mater, Mount Holyoke College.
The Good Lord Bird airs Sundays at Nine p.m. EST on Showtime.
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