SAVANNAH, Ga. — Frederick Douglass passed through this elegant Southern city only once, for the briefest of visits — a half-hour whistle-stop on his rail journey to a speaking engagement in Jacksonville, Fla.

It was April 1889, just the second foray into the Deep South for the great orator, five decades after his escape from Maryland as a fugitive slave. Douglass was now a major political figure, with an elegant hilltop home in Washington, D.C. Across the South, Jim Crow laws and racial terror were demolishing the gains of Reconstruction.

In Savannah, Douglass greeted the cheering crowd and reviewed a company of black troops at the railway depot, and then he was gone.

“Within a stone’s throw of one of the largest cotton-trading centers,” writes the historian David W. Blight, “and in a city with thousands of black freedmen struggling to survive and live meaningful lives amid hostile white supremacy festering around each of its beautiful squares, the locals had only glimpsed their mysterious hero.”