"God Almighty Made but One Race": Racial Theology, Visual Culture, and the Interracial Marriage of Frederick Douglass to Helen Pitts

On January 24, 1884 Frederick Douglass married Helen Pitts, a radical white feminist. As Americans of all hues struggled to understand the implications of this marriage relative to black citizenship claims, shifting gender norms, postemancipation racial boundaries, and the institution of marriage itself, they frequented turned to the religious and the visual. 

Contrary to existing scholarship, African Americans were overwhelmingly supportive of both the marriage and its political implications.  Many African Americans at the time cited the moral benefits and religious sanctity of marriage in general and the healing power of interracial marriage specifically.  African Americans also understood the Douglass marriage through theological claims that affirmed the common humanity of all people before a divine Creator.  In this way, the Douglass marriage offers an excellent prism through which to explore postemancipation black theology and its relationship to the social transformations of the late nineteenth century.

White Americans also read the marriage through spiritual and religious eyes. A few white progressives boldly adopted a theology of monogenesis.   Others begrudgingly resigned themselves to the logical extension of black citizenship claims. The most reactionary, however, held that God created racial difference and expected sexual segregation as an act of obedience to a divine natural order.  The same interracial marriage that served as a sanctified demonstration of racial progress for many African Americans became an utter abomination and a sign of ominous times for many white Americans. 

In the realm of the visual, Douglass explicitly used his marriage and the materiality of his multiracial body to challenge the visualization of racial boundaries and their pernicious assumptions.  Visual depictions of the Douglass marriage through photography and political cartoons further reveal how observers were working to make sense of interracial marriage, God’s plan, and racial ideology during this remarkably fluid moment in American history.