On November 18, the University of Maryland dedicated Frederick Douglass Square on campus with a formal ceremony and statue unveiling. A few days earlier, however, students had already unofficially christened it, gathering in the square to stand in solidarity with the students at the University of Missouri whose protests for social justice on campus took the nation by storm.
In front of the campus library, a 7½-foot-tall bronze statue of an urgent and youthful Douglass in Ireland, created by renowned sculptor Andrew Edwards, stands amid stone pavers and a vertical Corten steel wall, both engraved with the words of Douglass.
Dr. Ira Berlin, a Distinguished University Professor in the Department of History at the university, started a campaign five years ago to honor Douglass ― who would have been ineligible to attend the university, though he had won his freedom by the time it opened its doors in 1859.
Berlin said he and then-Assistant Vice President for Undergraduate Admissions and Enrollment Planning Barbara Gill “realized there was nothing on our campus, absolutely nothing, not a building, not a room, nor a plaque that honored” one of the greatest men in Maryland history, and noted that the omission “was an embarrassment or more.”
Thus Berlin and Gill sought out to rectify this “embarrassment.”
“Some agreed, some didn’t agree” with their efforts, Berlin said.
“I remember that someone asked me if Douglass was an alumnus of the university, and I explained that he was otherwise occupied in slavery,” the professor quipped, before acknowledging that Douglass was actually not enslaved when the university doors opened.