An interview with filmmaker Stanley Nelson on his two new documentaries about abolitionist heroes: Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass.

Stanley Nelson, that cinematic scourge of white supremacy, is back with two new documentaries co-made with producer Nicole London about two nineteenth century iconic abolitionist heroes. Harriet Tubman: Visions of Freedom is narrated by Alfre Woodard, who also provides Tubman’s voice, while Wendell Pierce speaks the title character’s words in Becoming Frederick Douglass. Both of the nonfiction films are enjoyable, educational, and each an hour in length—well-suited for viewing by adults, teens, and children alike.

Long one of our foremost filmmakers chronicling the African American experience, Nelson was born in New York City in 1955. The veteran producer/director was Oscar co-nominated for 2021’s gut wrenching Attica, about the 1971 prison uprising in Upstate New York, and won or co-won Emmy Awards for 2002’s The Murder of Emmett Till and 2010’s Freedom Riders. He was co-nominated for two other Primetime Emmys, including 2015’s The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution.

Q: The title of your Tubman biopic refers to her “Visions”? Why is that?  

Nelson: [As a child,] Harriet Tubman was hit in the head by a weight . . . . She was going to the store on a mission from her “owner,” and another African American kid came running in. The guy who was chasing him picked up a weight for measuring flour or corn and missed him, but hit Harriet in the head, knocking her unconscious. She suffered from that for the rest of her life . . . she received visions [that were likely epilectic seizures from her injury]. She thought in many ways they were visions from God; she thought she was responding to and guided by the visions she received. 

Q: Can you discuss Tubman’s life in bondage?

Nelson: She was a typical child and young woman in bondage. She did whatever she was told to do. She trapped muskrats in the swamps, she cut down trees, she worked in the fields. She preferred to be out in the fields. We talk about how many saw “House Negroes,” the African Americans who lived in [big plantation] houses, were seen as having it better. But as one of the historians says [in the film], they were still enslaved, and many times they were subject to horrible treatment because they lived close by to their so-called owners. So Harriet Tubman preferred to be out in the fields working than in the house. 

Q: Tell us about Tubman’s escape from slavery in 1849.

Nelson: Tubman decided she’d do her best to escape. She tried to escape once with two of her brothers, and they were caught and returned to slavery. Then she decided she was going to escape alone and made it to Philadelphia, [where] she was free. But after a while, she felt her mission was to free others. She went back [nineteen times] across the Mason-Dixon Line to free others from enslavement.  

Q: Why did abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison nickname her “Moses”?  

Nelson: She went back multiple times to free people. She led a great number of people out of slavery into the North and freedom. 

Q: What was the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and what did it do?

Nelson: The Fugitive Slave Act reaffirmed and put into law the fact that African Americans weren’t free anywhere in this country. It said that any free African American person in the North could be challenged and would have to prove they were not an escaped slave. If they were an escaped slave, then it didn’t matter if they were in New York, Philadelphia, or anywhere in the United States—they could be returned back to slavery.

It also made it illegal to help any African American escape from slavery. So, if you helped an African American escape, you’d also be punished; you were then complicit in that crime. It was a very devastating law. What it did, in many ways, is to say to African Americans and also to people in the North, that slavery was not to be over. It wasn’t a system that was slowly ending. The 1850 law  [in essence] said, “No, not only are we not ending it, but we’re instead going to strengthen the bonds of slavery.”

Q: Do you see any historical similarity between the Fugitive Slave Act and any of today’s anti-abortion laws?

Nelson: That’s an interesting question. In some ways, the laws that have just been passed, it pushes the will of a minority onto the majority of people in this country. And that’s a very dangerous thing to do. Just like, if you were in the North in 1860, it was your “duty” to return African Americans to slavery, even if you didn’t agree with it. In very much the same way, there’s some parts of the anti-abortion acts that say you have to report people that support women who attempt an abortion. The act of attempting an abortion is illegal.

Q: Can you describe Tubman’s relationship with John Brown and other abolitionists?

Nelson: Harriet Tubman had a special revered place [in the minds of] all abolitionists because she took direct action . . . and that example of direct action being taken by a five-foot-tall woman was really important to John Brown and everyone [in the movement to abolish slavery]. You had a personal responsibility to resist slavery, in any way possible . . . . White abolitionists were dedicated to ending slavery and were allies of Harriet Tubman for years.

Q: What did Tubman do during the Civil War?

Nelson: During the Civil War, she was first a scout and then a nurse. She led a raid into the South where hundreds of African Americans escaped from a plantation at the same time. At that point she started to be called “Moses.” 

Q: What was Tubman’s relationship with Susan B. Anthony and the suffragette movement?

Nelson: Harriet Tubman was known to be a friend of Susan B. Anthony and would speak at suffragette meetings and conventions. Tubman not only fought for the freedom of African Americans, but she fought for the freedom of all women in this country.

Q: Despite her turbulent life filled with danger, Tubman lived to an old age, passing away when she was about ninety-one years old. What is Harriet Tubman’s legacy and its relevance for the United States today?

Nelson: One thing that’s so fascinating is that Tubman died in 1913, and that slavery is not so far removed from today . . . . My great-grandfather was born a slave in 1859 . . . . That’s how close slavery was. The message we have to take from Harriet Tubman is that when we see a wrong, we have to try to fight with all our might to change it. And [believe] that we can make change. Harriet Tubman was instrumental in this country in [creating] change. She personally helped free hundreds of African Americans. Also, she was a shining light of the resistance to slavery and it’s important to remember that we can make change and that this country can change.

Q: Frederick Douglass was very media savvy. In your second recent film, Becoming Frederick Douglass, author John Stauffer says that more Americans heard Frederick Douglass speak in his lifetime than anybody else, with the possible exception of Mark Twain. Of course, that was live, on the lecture circuit, at rallies and so on. Who today is comparable to him in our public discourse?

Nelson: I’m not sure. I don’t think anybody is, really. It’s such a different time. African Americans don’t have spokespersons like they might have [had] back then or even fifty years ago . . . . You have to understand, Frederick Douglass is totally, totally unique in this country’s history. That’s one of the reasons why it was so exciting to make this film. He was born enslaved and basically taught himself to read and write, and then became one of the greatest speakers and writers this country has ever known.

Q: In Becoming Frederick Douglass he is called “the most photographed man in the nineteenth century.”

Nelson: There’s lots of photographs of Frederick Douglass. He’s kind of the opposite of Harriet Tubman, where there are six to eight photos of her, …there’s maybe fifty to 100 photos of Frederick Douglass. But the vast majority of Frederick Douglass are of him going to a photo studio and posing. There aren’t a lot of action shots. Even though the photos are very similar, you see him age and they tell us about Frederick Douglass and the times. He’s always impeccably dressed and staring straight into the camera and daring you to think of this person as being enslaved.

Q: He understood the power of representation and stereotypes.  

Nelson: Yeah. And as somebody says in the film, he was incredibly handsome, good looking, and statuesque. Just his gaze, just his picture says: “Maybe this man does not deserve to be enslaved. Maybe this is not an inferior being to who I am.” 

Q: Douglass lived until 1895. He wrote a memoir, among other books, as well as many speeches, he also founded the abolitionist newspaper The North Star in 1847. If Douglass were alive today, what mass media would he work in? Social media? Film? TV?

Nelson: He’d work in all of them. He used every single medium he could when he was alive. He actually wrote three autobiographies [Laughs] . . . To get his message out he’d use the new technology of photography, like nobody else had used it before, to get out his image and to say something about African Americans.  

Q: Tell us who Eric Foner is and the part he played in Becoming Frederick Douglass?

Nelson: Eric Foner is one of the preeminent historians in this country. His specialty is the nineteenth century. [For the film,] we sat down and talked with him about Frederick Douglass and the Fugitive Slave Act. 

Q: Today, in the Black Lives Matter movement and beyond, there’s much discussion about “allies” and what role they should play in the cause. Frederick Douglass’s allies included the abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and John Brown, plus President Abraham Lincoln. What can activists today learn from Douglass’s interaction with white allies?

Nelson: There’s a lesson, whites allies have their place and can be good. Garrison was an ally, until he wasn’t. He was instrumental in the beginning of Douglass’s writing and speaking career, but he wanted Frederick Douglass to be put in a box. And [Douglass] said, “No, I’m not going to be in that box.” To a certain extent, Douglass had Lincoln’s ear but they didn’t agree entirely that African Americans deserved to be free. It wasn’t about splitting up the nation, it was about the fact that millions of people were enslaved. And the economy of the United States was based on this enslavement. Just like any allies, white or Black allies, it was important you assess and reassess your allies.    

Q: What was Frederick Douglass’ relationship with the suffragette movement?

Nelson: Douglass was an advocate for equality for women, for women being given the right to vote. One of the reasons why we call the film Becoming Frederick Douglass is because the film is about the first half of his life. We realize that with Douglass, there’s no way you can talk about his whole life in an hour, it’ll probably take you more than two hours. We talk about the first part of his life, where he goes from being a young boy enslaved to becoming Frederick Douglass, and we go up to the Civil War. After that he had a very long, incredible life after that. 

Q: Whether you are documenting the Freedom Riders or the Black Panthers, you look at history through a distinctly Black lens, bringing an African American interpretation to events. A good example in Becoming Frederick Douglass is a truly despicable newspaper notice offering a bounty for an escaped enslaved person. The advertisement’s author is often referred to as “the author of our liberty”—Thomas Jefferson, that hypocritical slave owner who wrote “The Declaration of Independence.” Douglass’s 1852 “What is the Fourth of July to the Slave?” put a Black spin on this world class hypocrisy.

Nelson: There are something like 100,000 runaway slave ads. Many newspapers received huge incomes from placing those ads. The ads, when you read them, have great insight about what the slave owners cared about. The person’s physical traits, how they dressed . . . . It says African Americans attempted over and over and over again to escape from slavery. As we say in the film, the punishment for trying to escape could be horrendous and terrible. But again and again, African Americans attempted to escape from this horrible system of enslavement.

I try in all my films to be entirely factual and accurate . . . . None of my films have ever been successfully challenged about any of the things we say . . . . But I’m an African American and that lens I look with is from an African American. The problem is we don’t think that when white filmmakers are looking at history, they’re looking at it through a white lens, because they are. That’s one of the big problems we have in this country. We think about white as a blank slate. When I make a film, I’m looking at it from a Black point of view.

Q: What is Frederick Douglass’s legacy and relevance for the United States in 2022?

Nelson: Frederick Douglass has so many relevancies for us today, through his writings, his examples, his constant progressiveness . . . . For the first part of his life after he escaped, he could be recaptured and taken back at any time, but he wrote and spoke about it and traveled . . . . He continued to be progressive.  

Q: What’s next for the prolific Stanley Nelson?

Nelson: [Laughs.] We’re working on a film about African Americans and the police and talking about what’s been happening in the last ten to fifteen years, but also there’s a direct line from the Fugitive Slave Act to George Floyd.

​Harriet Tubman: Visions of Freedom premieres Tuesday, October 4, 2022, 10:00-11:00 p.m. ET, and Becoming Frederick Douglass premieres Tuesday, October 11, 2022, 10:00-11:00 p.m. ET (check local listings) on PBS. Both films will stream on PBS.org and the PBS Video App. 

L.A.-based film historian/reviewer Ed Rampell co-authored the third edition of “The Hawaii Movie and Television Book.”

Sign-up for our free weekly e-mail newsletter.

Sign up for our free email newsletter!

The Progressive Inc. publishes The Progressive magazine plus Progressive.org and Public Schools Advocate.

© 2022 • The Progressive Inc. • 931 E. Main Street, Suite 10 • Madison, Wisconsin 53703 • (608) 257-4626