Frederick Douglass
As pressure mounts to fix the spelling of Fred Douglas Park, I’ve become aware of a counter-argument for why we just can’t know if the park is named for Frederick Douglass. Blake Farmer over at WPLN sums it up:
The predicament for the parks department today is people didn't call Frederick Douglass "Fred," and even if they did, his last name would be misspelled. So it's either an intentional error to rile African-Americans at the time, an honest mistake that has somehow never been corrected, or there's another Fred Douglas out there with heirs who need to speak up. Otherwise, Metro Parks is likely to change the name.
Let’s take these one at a time.
Yes, people did too call Frederick Douglass “Fred.” Specifically, white people in Tennessee looking to be assholes called him Fred. We talked about this a year ago when I noted the white papers in Tennessee having a big joke-fest about Nathan Bedford Forrest supposedly selling Frederick Douglass’s daughter, “Among the servants offered for sale by a Mr. Forrest of Memphis, Tenn., is a girl who is known to be the daughter of the notorious Fred Douglass, the ‘free-nigger’ Abolitionist.”
The misspelling of Douglass is something that still happens in Middle Tennessee today. That’s why you can live on Douglas Bend Road and go to Douglass Chapel United Methodist Church, when the same family that lived in the river bend built that church. Google, fount of all knowledge, as of the time I’m writing this, lists the church as Douglas Chapel.
If the park isn’t named after Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist, who is it named after? Everyone’s looked for a prominent black Nashvillian named Fred Douglas. There is none.
There were two white Douglas families prominent enough that a member might have gotten a park named after him. The Douglasses that came out of Douglas Bend were a large, wealthy family and some of the earliest settlers in the area. Many things in Sumner County bear their name, from the Douglass-Clark house to Sam Houston’s ex-wife.
Let me be very clear here: The Douglas family married into the Franklin family. Douglasses went to work for Isaac Franklin, the notorious slave trader.
Nashville, let’s look hard in the mirror. Do we believe that, if a park for black people was named for a descendant of a family involved in slave trading, that wouldn’t have been seen as a hilarious joke by most of white Nashville? You think you wouldn’t have seen digs in the papers about it? Of course we would have.
Also, this Douglas family now is well-known in local history circles for caring a lot about the preservation of the Douglas family legacy. They live here. They know their family. They care about historic preservation. If they had a Fred, they’ve have come forward by now, let alone if they had a Fred prominent enough to warrant a park.
The other prominent white Douglas family (which I heavily suspect is the same family, since it came out of Loudon County, Virginia, and the Sumner County Douglases came out of the neighboring county of Fauquier) was that of the many men named Byrd Douglas. The most important Douglas for this discussion was probably Judge Byrd Douglas, who was also Vanderbilt’s baseball coach for a while and an FBI agent before he decided to go into the legal profession. He was an elder at Downtown Presbyterian and served as the head of the Red Cross.
His wife was Mary Stahlman Douglas, a writer for the Nashville Banner for six decades. She started at the Banner in 1916 as a drama critic and reporter. She served as the book review editor from 1935-1972.
Obviously, this family was prominent enough to spawn a dude who would get a park named after him, but we’re supposed to believe that, if that is the case, the Banner made no mention of it?
Let’s just cut through the bullshit with Occam’s Razor: the simplest answer is probably correct.
The simplest answer is not that there’s some mysterious Fred Douglas prominent enough to warrant a park, but not prominent enough to remain remembered. The parks department, like all of Nashville at the time, was really racist. Black people couldn’t use most of Nashville’s public parks and the parks they were allowed in were notoriously neglected by the department. Thirty years after the opening of Fred Douglas park, the parks department shut all the city pools rather than integrate them.
That’s the baseline we’re dealing with. That’s the history we have to look square in the face. What’s more likely? Mysterious, impossible-to-find, but prominent-enough-to-warrant-a-park local Fred Douglas or the same racist people who didn’t want black people in their parks and who called adult black men “boy” couldn’t be bothered to get Frederick Douglass’s name right?
