Dr. Walter O. Evans shares collection with a Frederick Douglass descendant, a British film crew and a leading American scholar
The Frederick Douglass papers of Savannah art collector Dr. Walter O. Evans will come to life tonight as the great-great-great grandson of the famed abolitionist reads from them during a National Geographic Channel special that commemorates the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War.
Kenneth B. Morris Jr., the president of the Frederick Douglass Family Foundation, said he “was quite surprised by the extent” of Evans’ holdings; a carefully conserved accumulation, which includes stacks of letters, speeches, scrapbooks and photographs.
The focal point of the Savannah segment of the special, filmed in Evans’ house, is the wartime correspondence of Frederick Douglass’ oldest son Lewis, who was an NCO in the famed 54th Massachusetts.
Before this episode, said Morris, he knew “very little” about Lewis Douglass, who was seriously wounded in the 1863 attack on Fort Wagner, a brutally fought battle in South Carolina that was immortalized by the movie “Glory.”
During the visit to Evans’ house, the cameras capture Morris reading from Lewis Douglass’ letters to his fiancée, Amelia Loguen.
In one of the letters, dated in April of 1863, Lewis wrote to Amelia that “I may be wounded, and that is not so bad you know, it will be an honor.” Building a collection
A Savannah native, Evans began buying works by such famous artists as Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden in the 1970s when he was a surgeon in Detroit. Since then, he has amassed one of the nation’s largest collections of African-American art.
He retired and returned to his hometown some 10 years ago. He bought and restored a number of buildings along Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. And then, in 2006, he made a massive contribution to that corridor’s future when he decided to donate 70 works of art worth an estimated $10 million to the Savannah College of Art and Design.
SCAD will establish the Walter O. Evans Center for African-American Studies in a state-of-the-art museum inside a renovated antebellum railway depot on MLK, a project that’s expected to be completed later this year.
Along with his artwork, Evans put together an impressive collection of rare books and documents, including many belonging to and associated with Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave who became a fiery soldier in the lengthy fight for African-American freedom and equality.
It was those acquisitions that brought him to the attention of Wide-Eyed Entertainment, a London-based media-production company that put together “Civil Warriors,” the three-hour National Geographic Channel special that will air from 8 p.m.-11 p.m. tonight.