Exhibits
Drapetomania: A Disease Called Freedom
Drapetomania, A Disease called Freedom, opened in March 2010. The title of this exhibition is taken from an article in the Southern Journal entitled The Georgia Blister and Critic, v. 1, #7 (Sept. 1854), which dealt with the “diseases and physical peculiarities of the Negro Race.” Termed by Dr. Samuel A. Cartwright, a Louisiana surgeon and psychologist, the word drapetomania is a combination of the Greek words drapetes for “runaway sIave” and mania “mad or crazy.” Drapetomania thus was used to describe the “mental disease” that “induces the Negro to run away from service, [and] is as much a disease of the mind as any other species of mental alienation, and much more curable, as a general rule.” The exhibit helps debunk the myth of this supposed illness, and illuminates how pseudoscientific methodologies were used to perpetuate racist practices.
Drapetomania moves viewers through a journey reliving U.S. history, with artifacts and objects (pamphlets, pictures, furniture, rare books, and other items) used in the slave trade illuminated in clear relief. These tools of oppression are seldom seen in formal exhibitions, due largely to our country’s historic and ongoing struggle with the notion that one group of people could or would treat another as our country’s forefathers have.
About the Collector: Derrick Joshua Beard
Mr. Beard is widely considered the leading collector of the 18th-, 19th- and early 20th century African American decorative arts, photography, rare books, and unique documents. Since he began to focus on accumulating these often overlooked and under-appreciated objects of African American material culture, he has been responsible, almost single-handedly, for elevating the area of collecting to the heightened status it presently enjoys among scholars and collectors around the globe.
