The Margins in Bloom: Rediscovering Sarah Mapps Douglas
The radical blend of art, science, and activism in the work of S. M. Douglass
History nearly forgot Sarah Mapps Douglass. Nearly. For decades, her name was a footnote, her voice overshadowed by louder figures in the abolitionist movement. I’ve never heard her name mentioned even once as a celebrated historical figure during Black History Month. Yet the flowers she painted still live, the words she wrote still burn, and the lessons she taught still resonate. To know her story is to uncover a radical truth: that even in the most constrained of times, Black women carved spaces of brilliance and resistance.
I discovered Sarah Mapps Douglass’s work while curating a botanical art series titled Selected Florilegium. Knowing that the African diaspora was generally barred from both fine art and the academic sciences, I searched with little expectation and instead found an anomaly. Buried deep in my image results was the cover of the International Review of African American Art (1995), an issue held by the Hampton University Museum. Yet nowhere on the cover, nor in the description of the contents, was Douglass’s name attributed to the luminous painting.
It was only through reverse image search that the invisible ink revealed itself. The trail led me to scans of her original manuscripts and to articles chronicling her legacy as an abolitionist, educator, and one of the earliest known African American women artists. What began as chance became revelation: Sarah Mapps Douglass had been here all along, her voice obscured but never extinguished.
Sarah Mapps Douglass was born in Philadelphia in 1806 into one of the city’s most prominent free Black families. Her mother, Grace Bustill Douglass, was a teacher and a tireless abolitionist; her father, Robert Douglass, Sr., owned a barbershop that anchored the family’s livelihood. Through her mother’s Bustill lineage, Sarah inherited a legacy of intellectual pursuit and social resistance. Her family’s parlor was a hub of antislavery organizing, a place where discussions of justice and equality were as present as bread and butter on the table.
Unlike many African American children of her time, Sarah had access to formal education, much of it through Quaker schools. The Quakers, though often paternalistic and limited in their views of racial equality, nonetheless gave her a foundation in literature and science that she would later transform into something larger than they ever envisioned. She understood early on that education was not a privilege but a weapon: a way to arm Black children, and especially Black girls, against the crushing weight of a society that doubted their minds.
By her twenties, Sarah was already teaching. She opened her own school for Black girls in the 1820s, insisting that her students deserved more than needlework and Bible recitation. She emphasised science; anatomy, physiology, and the natural world were at the center of her curriculum. Alongside them, she mentored her students on developing strong values and moral character. At a time when even white women were often barred from scientific learning, her decision was nothing short of radical. Years later, as head of the Girls’ Department of the Institute for Colored Youth (the institution that would evolve into Cheney University) she made science instruction for young women her hallmark.
But Sarah’s classroom was only one of her platforms. In 1833, she and her mother joined Lucretia Mott and other reformers to found the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society. The organization was unusual for its time: an interracial coalition of Black and white women united in the fight against slavery. For Sarah, it wasn’t enough to educate children in a schoolroom; she wanted to educate the nation’s conscience.
Beyond committee meetings, Sarah wrote essays and delivered lectures on slavery, women’s education, and racial prejudice. To see a Black woman speak publicly in the 1830s was in itself a radical act. Yet Sarah refused silence at the foot of societal expectations. In her lectures, she insisted that slavery degraded not only the enslaved but the entire moral fabric of the country. She linked the oppression of women to the oppression of African Americans. Over 150 years before Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” in 1989, Sarah understood that different systems of oppression worked hand in hand.
At the same time, Sarah was deeply involved in the Female Literary Association, one of the earliest known Black women’s literary societies. The group’s members shared essays and poems, sometimes anonymously, creating a space where Black women could sharpen their voices against the grinding silence imposed by society. Within these circles, Sarah combined her artistry and intellect, blending floral watercolors with impassioned words, building manuscripts that were at once beautiful objects and political interventions.
While Sarah’s lectures declared her convictions, her art invited contemplation of them. On the surfaces of friendship albums and manuscript pages, she painted botanical illuminations, sometimes underscored by messages of poetic advocacy. Black butterflies, their wings streaked with bright patterns, seemed to call attention to the beauty and persistence of Black movement.
These books, exchanged among African American women in Philadelphia’s tight-knit literary circles, became both personal keepsakes and political documents. They were proof that Black women not only participated in intellectual life but shaped it, binding beauty and resistance on every page.
“Lady while you are young and beautiful Forget not the slave, so shall ‘Hearts Ease’ ever attend you. S.M.D.”
At first glance, the illustrations might seem ornamental. But they were coded with meaning, part of a tradition known as floriography, or the “language of flowers.” (Planterra Events explains it well here.) In the Victorian era, each bloom carried a symbolic message: roses for love, lilies for purity, violets for loyalty, ivy for friendship. When Sarah painted these blossoms around the words of her friends and her own essays, she was weaving an extra layer of communication, one that merged the aesthetic with the political. A border of roses could signal devotion, yes, but also an insistence on dignity, on the enduring value of Black women’s voices at a time when the broader culture tried to erase them.
The friendship albums themselves functioned like proto-social networks. Contributors shared poems, reflections, sketches, and quotations, often addressed to the album’s owner. In a society that excluded them from mainstream literary institutions, these albums created a private archive of Black women’s intellect and creativity. Though marketed primarily to middle-class white women, Black women like Douglass co-opted them, leaving a distinct footprint within Black print culture. Sarah’s contributions stood out among the few who had access: her hand steady, her colors delicate, her choice of floral emblems deliberate. The very act of placing her art in these volumes challenged the prevailing belief that fine art and the sciences were off-limits to women like her.
“No marvel woman should love flowers, they bear
So much of fanciful similitude
To her own history, like herself repaying
With such sweet interest all the cherishing
That calls their beauty and their sweetness forth,
And like her too - dying beneath neglect”
Selected by S. M. Douglass
Through these painted manuscripts, Sarah Mapps Douglass joined two worlds: the disciplined study of natural forms and the social practice of literary exchange. Her watercolors demonstrate careful observation of plants, echoing the scientific training she valued in her classrooms. Yet they also pulse with emotional resonance, transforming natural specimens into metaphors of endurance, loyalty, and hope. To hold one of her albums today is to feel both her precision and her defiance, to see how she turned margins into monuments.
History may have tried to tuck Sarah Mapps Douglass into the margins, but her flowers outlasted the silence. What she painted into friendship books and manuscripts has become part of the larger story of African American art, women’s intellectual history, and the fight for education as liberation. Today her watercolors sit in rare book rooms and museum archives, carefully preserved, their colors still speaking. Each petal carries her defiance of erasure.
Her legacy is not measured only in the pages she left behind but in the generations she made possible. Every Black student who walks through the doors of a school that once excluded them, every woman who studies the sciences once denied her, every artist who turns beauty into resistance—each of them is, knowingly or not, in conversation with Sarah Mapps Douglass.
When I traced her image across databases and dusty catalog entries, it was as if she had been waiting, her work written on delicate pages oxidized by time.
Sometimes I wonder if her contributions have been overlooked because of the privilege of her birth into an elite free Black family. She did not approach civil rights from the strife of “coming from nothing.” But she did what we would expect any person of privilege to do: she used her voice against injustice, built institutions, and prioritized her community so that others who were less fortunate would be set up for a brighter future. She did it despite the odds against her and against those she touched.
Bringing her to light was not an act of discovery so much as recognition. She had always been there, speaking from the margins of history, reminding us that the pursuit of knowledge, the making of art, and the fight for freedom are inseparable.
To remember Sarah Mapps Douglass is to understand that beauty itself can be a weapon, and that flowers, once dismissed as decoration, can hold the weight of a revolution.
Further Reading & Resources
Library Company of Philadelphia – Holds Sarah Mapps Douglass’s illuminated manuscripts and friendship albums. https://librarycompany.org/
Houghton Library, Harvard University – Preserves albums and manuscripts containing Douglass’s contributions. https://library.harvard.edu/libraries/houghton
Colored Conventions Project – Documents the intellectual and activist networks of free Black Americans, including the circles Douglass moved in. https://coloredconventions.org/
Black Women’s Organizing Archive – Explores early Black women’s literary societies, such as the Female Literary Association. https://bwlp.hosting.nyu.edu/
Public Domain Review – Features essays on Sarah Mapps Douglass’s art and the significance of friendship albums. https://publicdomainreview.org/
African American Policy Forum (co-founded by Kimberlé Crenshaw) – Engages with the ongoing relevance of intersectionality, a concept Douglass anticipated in her own work. https://aapf.org/
To learn about Sarah Mapps Douglass is to encounter a voice that refuses erasure, a beauty that insists on meaning. Her flowers spoke for justice in the nineteenth century, and they still speak now - across archives, across centuries, across pages like these.
If you missed it above, my digitally restored print of Sarah Mapps Douglass’s Rose and Hearts Ease is also included here at the end. The piece can be found in the Archive of Arcane Air collection at [PLUMB RITUAL].