WHAT DID DAVID RUGGLES LOOK LIKE?
David Ruggles From Google
As PARJE gets closer to our goal of painting our Sister Murals, we turn our eye to one of the themes of the Norwich mural, David Ruggles (1810 - 1849). A contemporary of Frederick Douglass, Ruggles was active in the underground railroad and owned the first Black-owned bookstore in New York.)
Since murals are visual artworks, we started wondering “What did David Ruggles look like?” and the answer is we don’t really know. This is the trouble with many historical figures from the 1800’s, there just isn’t much photographic evidence to tell us what they looked like.
When we Google David Ruggles the image here keeps popping up. Its a simple cartoonish sketch of a black man with small circular glasses. Upon further investigation we see that the image is from a larger cartoon of Ruggles and his friends called “The Disappointed Abolitionists.” The cartoon is a snapshot of Ruggles New York Committee of Vigilance, an early abolitionist group that fought against slavery in words and action.
