Scope and Content Note
The records of the Frederick Douglass Memorial and Historical Association (FDMHA) span the years 1900-1990, with the bulk of the material concentrated in the period 1950-1980. The collection is arranged in six series: Correspondence; Corporate Records; Miscellany; Printed Matter; Clippings; and Additions.
Based in Washington, D.C., the FDMHA was first envisioned in the will of Helen Pitts Douglass, Frederick Douglass's second wife, who bequeathed their home in Southeast Washington (Anacostia) to the American people as a memorial to her husband. It became the main function of the association to preserve the Frederick Douglass Memorial Home at Cedar Hill and to reunite surrounding lands once part of the estate into the whole of the memorial. The FDMHA also undertook to disseminate knowledge concerning Afro-American history in Washington and throughout America.
The collection includes minutes of meetings, reports, and related material not only of the FDMHA but also of the Frederick Douglass Housing Corporation, Inc. (FDHC), an organization closely allied to the association. Interaction between the two organizations, occasionally via the National Park Service, is documented throughout the records.
Much material reflects the personal interests of FDMHA's past president Mary E. C. Gregory, whose papers were intermingled among the association's records she gave to the Library. Other organizations represented among her files include the Museum of African Art (located first in a Douglass home on Capitol Hill and later a part of the Smithsonian Institution), the Douglass Glenn Gardens apartment complex, National Association of Colored Women, National Council of Negro Women, National Urban League, Anacostia Neighborhood Museum, and the Phyllis Wheatley Young Women's Christian Association in Washington, D.C.