This Photo of a 7-Year-Old Girl Transformed the Abolition Movement

It’s a side point, but “Green Book” is not about a white “savior." It’s true that the white guy helps the black guy, who is his employer, on a couple of occasions. But mainly, it’s the black guy who “saves” the white guy, not by being a magic Negro type figure but simply by representing a complex human who is black to a guy who has never gotten to know such a person. If the jazz musician in the movie were white it would not likely occur to anyone that the chauffeur represents a “savior.” The musician in the movie was imperfect but did not need saving. He is doing fine at the start and finish of the movie.

While I love that this article brings important scholarly work on historical technologies, media, and race to the public eye, I felt like I was back in the 19th century with the numerous references to the scholar Jessie Morgan-Owens as "Ms." It's useful to point out *once* that this professional photographer and author is female, especially because she has an ambiguously gendered name. But a casual glance at other NYTimes articles citing male academics sometimes call them "professor" and generally use their last names; Mr. didn't appear once. Dr. Morgan-Owens has a PhD from NYU and is a dean -those titles were also available.

I’m puzzled by Maurice Berger’s claim that the daguerreotype of Mary Mildred Williams (née Botts) “was recently rediscovered by ... Jessie Morgan-Owens.” In her book “Raising Freedom‘s Child: Black Children and Vision’s of the Future after Slavery” (New York University Press, 2008), Mary Niall Mitchell writes that circulation of Botts’ image “marks the beginning of efforts to use photography...in the service of...the abolitionist cause.” She also describes the child’s father’s escape from slavery in Virginia to Boston, Senator Charles Sumner’s subsequent involvement in the purchase of the fugitive’s wife and children, and Sumner’s association of Mary Botts with the heroine of the novel “Ida May.” Mitchell then places a pair of daguerreotypes of Botts in the context of antebellum American art depicting white female slaves, Victorian images of little girls, and the literary trope of the tragic mulatto. This is followed by discussion of abolitionist calculations about the use of light-skinned female slave children to rouse anti-slavery sentiment. I have not read Jessie Morgan-Owens dissertation or her new book. I regret that its innovations are unclear to me from Berger’s review and fear that Mary Niall Mitchell’s precedent has been overlooked. Judith Wilson-Pates (retired art historian) San Francisco

I wish that I could post pictures of my husband’s family that gathered in Eastern North Carolina to bury its matriarch a week ago. Most of them look white...and several are “Passing!” My Louisiana Creole Family is much the same though none are “Passing.” This Country’s systematic racism inflicts wounds on the souls of POC that will never, ever heal.

Going on two hundred years later and we're still shocked that she's Black, and still shocked as to how to react...

Interesting article. It reminded me of the book "Black Like Me", first published in 1961, is a nonfiction book by white journalist John Howard Griffin recounting his journey in the Deep South of the United States, at a time when African-Americans lived under racial segregation. Griffin was a native of Mansfield, Texas, who had his skin temporarily darkened to pass as a black man. He traveled for six weeks throughout the racially segregated states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, and Georgia to explore life from the other side of the color line. Getting back of Mary Mildred Williams. It would be fascinating to have analyzed DNA samples from Mary's body to verify her parentage.

This work is an excellent example of the incalculable value of scholarship in the humanities. Next time someone makes fun of a Ph.D. in photography, tell this story.

Skin color? It’s all about the legacy of slavery and an extremely racist culture that was created to maintain it. One might think it all disappeared with various bits of legislature, a war and a century plus a few score, but apparently not so simple. Truth and Reconciliation? Whatever that is, it seems we still need something like it. What’s breathtaking is that we don’t have any language that allows us to describe ‘bi-racial’ people in any meaningful way. ‘She looks white but she’s a negro, well my goodness!’ The ‘one-drop’ rule rules but why? Because we can’t even acknowledge that it exists.

Human history is a continual story of compromise, both personal and social. This photo—despite its complex backstory—was integral to important shifts in policy and thinking. Imagine how we will be judged one day, despite the good intentions of many.

We’re never going to get over skin color, are we? So unfair, so depressing.

Thanks for sharing this info. I hope other readers will look for this book as I will.