Visualizing Equality: African American Rights and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century by Aston Gonzalez (review)

Reviewed by: Visualizing Equality: African American Rights and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century by Aston Gonzalez Ryan Charlton Aston Gonzalez. Visualizing Equality: African American Rights and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2020. 324 pp. $29.95. In Visualizing Equality, Aston Gonzalez sets out to address a specific oversight of previous scholarship: “Though many scholars have written about black subjects [End Page 345] in early photography, few have written about black image-makers in the nineteenth century” (5). To rectify this, Gonzalez examines the lives and activism of African American artists working in a variety of visual media. Moving chronologically through the antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction eras, Visualizing Equality highlights the ways that African Americans crafted visual arguments to advance African American rights. Gonzalez skillfully demonstrates how these artists subverted the stereotypical depictions of blackness that emanated from the press and the minstrel stage by creating images that “normalize and commemorate black achievement in the face of immense challenges” (6). Were this Gonzalez’s only accomplishment, this book would be a worthwhile, though somewhat predictable endeavor. However, the great strength of Visualizing Equality lies in its analysis of not only the images themselves but also the networks in which they were shaped and disseminated. The first two chapters focus on the antislavery activism of Black visual artists in the 1830s. Chapter one explores the work of Robert Douglass, Jr., a Philadelphia painter and lithographer whose portraits and abolitionist images depicted the dignity and intellect of Black Americans in both the United States and Haiti. Chapter two examines the work of New York engraver Patrick Henry Reason, whose images of fugitive slaves repudiated the scientific racism of the day by supplying a “vision of blackness defined by achievement, respectability, and national belonging” (64). While Gonzalez provides insightful readings of the images in question, perhaps more compelling is his exploration of the communities and organizations that promoted and circulated them. His description of Black Philadelphia—its religious institutions, benevolent societies, and educational establishments—illuminates the social and political worlds that fostered Douglass’s artistry and activism. Similarly, Gonzalez’s examination of New York City situates Reason within a vibrant African American community sustained by churches, mutual aid societies, Black newspapers, and the African Free School, where Reason first honed his skills as a visual artist. The third chapter explores how Douglass and Reason expanded their political activism in the 1840s. While Reason continued producing engravings of revered Black leaders and fugitive slaves, he became increasingly involved with a variety of coalitions working to secure African American rights. Gonzalez focuses primarily on Reason’s involvement with organizations that championed Black male suffrage, campaigned against Black colonization, and worked to ensure the free passage of escaped slaves through New York. During this same period, Douglass traveled to England, where he refined his skills as a painter and strengthened his connections with British artists and abolitionists. Upon his return to Philadelphia, Douglass exhibited his copies of British and Italian masterpieces alongside his portraits of Haitian leaders, a move Gonzalez interprets as a rejection of “the assumed racial and cultural hierarchy between black Haitians and white Europeans” (91). Chapter four continues Gonzalez’s investigation of the role of visual culture in Black abolitionism by exploring how Henry “Box” Brown, William Wells Brown, and James Presley Ball used moving panoramas to spread antislavery sentiment in both the United States and Europe. Relying on a combination of published reviews and, when available, descriptive booklets provided to audiences, Gonzalez reconstructs the scenes and narratives that unfolded in each panorama. Although typical mid-century panoramas displayed landscapes largely devoid of human presence, the men discussed in this chapter harnessed the medium in order to spotlight the horrors of slavery and the dangers facing those who sought their freedom by fleeing to Canada. Having been born into slavery, Henry “Box” Brown and [End Page 346] William Wells Brown possessed a credibility on the subject that Ball, the Cincinnati-based daguerreotypist, lacked. Gonzalez explains how Ball compensated for his lack of personal experience with the institution by expanding the scope of his panorama to emphasize the degrading effects of slavery on both...

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