IV. The Metropolis of Unfreedom: Washington City

This is the final of four lectures in America’s Architecture of Freedom and Unfreedom, the 74th A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts presented by Mabel O. Wilson of Columbia University.

In the first two decades of Washington City’s establishment, what was life like for free and enslaved Black residents such as domestic Anne Williams, who eventually sued her enslaver for her family’s freedom? Piecing together the tragic story of Williams’s leap from the window of a notorious slave depot, which led to a lifetime of disability, requires traversing the spaces of the capital’s taverns, congressional halls, and city block interiors. This lecture will sift through the ways that Williams’s humanity was exploited by her enslavers, examining how her plight was commandeered by early slavery reformers like physician Jesse Torrey. Williams became a symbol of the evils of the slave trade and the irreconcilability of the free Black population into the nation’s citizenry, which catalyzed the formation of the American Colonization Society in 1816.

Inaugurated in 1949, the Mellon Lectures is the longest-running lecture series at the National Gallery of Art. The series was founded “to bring to the people of the United States the results of the best contemporary thought and scholarship bearing upon the subject of the Fine Arts.” Learn more: https://www.nga.gov/research/center/p...

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