WATCH: House Opens Historic Frederick Douglass Press Gallery

The House Daily Press Gallery was renamed last week after the abolitionist icon. I made a YouTube video about how it all went down (scroll down).

WASHINGTON — The sign went up last Thursday, February 12, right above the door where reporters file in to watch Congress argue about who gets to eat and who gets to starve. Frederick Douglass Press Gallery, it says now. First time in over a century they’ve named the place after an actual person instead of just calling it what it is.

Frederick Douglass worked up there from 1871 to 1875, back when covering Congress meant something more dangerous than missing your filing deadline. He was the first Black journalist they let in with credentials, him and his son, covering the House and Senate for the New National Era until the paper went broke and they auctioned off the printing press. Then it took 72 years before they let another Black reporter through the door.

Speaker Mike Johnson pulled the sheet off the sign with Rep. Byron Donalds, the Florida Republican who spent a year pushing this through, and everybody clapped. The Acting Librarian of Congress brought up some Douglass artifacts. Conservatives and Black lawmakers stood together for the photo op. They called it bipartisan and historic, which in Congress means they all agreed on something that costs nothing.

The reporters who actually work up there — the living ones, not Douglass — they got a nameplate over their heads now. “Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist,” says the quote they carved onto the commemorative placard back in 2007. “That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants.”

Douglass wrote that. He knew something about tyrants. Born enslaved, taught himself to read, escaped, became the most dangerous thing a democracy can produce: somebody who tells the truth about it. He loved America enough to call it a liar to its face. Did it in speeches. Did it in books. Did it from those gallery seats where CNN and NBC and the wire services now plug in their laptops

My oil painting of Frederick Douglass for the Press Gallery (2024)

They dedicated the thing during Black History Month, middle of February, on Lincoln’s birthday. Donalds talked about Douglass going “from the slavery fields to the world stage.” Johnson said it was about giving “honor where honor is due.” They said it 14 times in different ways, honor this, honor that, everybody agreeing that Frederick Douglass was a great American.

Nobody mentioned that Douglass spent his press years writing about Reconstruction, about whether this country would actually mean what it said after the slaves were freed. He lost that fight. The compromise of 1877 ended it. Jim Crow came next. Took another 90 years to fix even some of it.

Selfie by me.

Here’s what they don’t tell you at these things: Douglass got the gallery named after him the same week the President signed orders about what museums and schools can say about slavery and whose version of history gets taught. The same Capitol where Douglass sat and reported the truth now argues about whether teaching that truth is divisive.

But the sign went up. The plaque is there. And Frederick Douglass, who’s been dead 131 years, still has better credentials than half the people filing stories from that gallery.

He earned it. He sat there when it meant something. And now his name is over the door where everyone can see it, which means every reporter walking in has to pass under the words of a man who knew exactly what the job was supposed to be.

The ceremony lasted 45 minutes. Then the politicians went back downstairs to argue, and the reporters went back to their desks, and Frederick Douglass stayed where he’s been since 1895 — watching, saying nothing, and still telling everybody exactly what they need to hear.

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