This essay focuses on an archive of nineteenth-century visual images used to protest slavery and claim US citizenship for a group of Black individuals who previously had been denied it. One goal of picturing race in the nineteenth century in illustrated books, almanacs, print publications, paintings, pamphlets, and photography was not only to show the harms of slavery, but also to confer a type of symbolic citizenship onto African Americans, whether free or enslaved, that could be taken into the postbellum era. Yet especially before the war, illustrated works by white abolitionists often replicated binaries in which African Americans were continually in need of a white viewer’s assistance, whereas works by some African Americans undermined ideas of empathy and portrayed African Americans as exhibiting agency and self-determination. Black abolitionists such as Henry Bibb, Frederick Douglass, and Sojourner Truth used visual works to complicate flat portrayals of African American identity, and to play with the notion that such works created truth and captured their subjectivity. Their sophisticated manipulation of visual images exists as a contrast to the dominant culture’s practice of surveilling the bodies of the enslaved and configuring African Americans – whether enslaved or free – as passive and abject.

This chapter scrutinizes early frontispieces contained within books by Phillis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano and then proceeds to examine the illustrated antislavery books of Moses Roper and Henry Bibb (both of which also contain frontispieces as well as other types of illustrations). Although Roper’s book was published in 1837 and Bibb’s in 1849, this chapter argues that both men (being born in 1815 and having participated in the antislavery movement) were responding to the abject treatment of the enslaved in earlier antislavery materials. The words of the text interact with its visual optic to interpellate the reader and envision a figurative mode of agency and self-possession for the enslaved body and the freed Black subject. The chapter concludes with a forward glance at artworks by Kara Walker and Glen Ligon that also attempt to excavate (although in a more abstract way) the trace of a resistant visual tradition within African American literature and US visual culture.