Anna & Fredrick Douglass Pavillion

The Anna and Frederick Douglass Pavilion is a proposed public monument and gathering space for Douglass Park in Chicago’s North Lawndale neighborhood. This space will honor and celebrate Anna Murray Douglass (c. 1813-1882) active within the Underground Railroad, the Suffragist and Abolitionist movements and wife of 44 years to Fredrick Douglass as a partner and confidant. Fredrick Douglass (1818 – 1895) was one of the most active Black Abolitionist, authorsand orators of the 19th century. Conceived as an architectural pavilion rather than a traditional statue, the project centers literacy, listening, and community exchange as pathways to freedom, the core values embodied by Anna and Frederick Douglass. The idea for the pavilion emerged from a powerful act of youth-led civic engagement that began in 2017, when middle school students from Village Leadership Academy successfully advocated to rename the park from Stephen A. Douglas, a pro-slavery politician, to honor the Douglass family instead.
 
Following the renaming, artist and designer Norman Teague and muralist and community artist Dorian Sylvain were tapped by the Chicago Park District’s TRACE Youth Community Curatorial Fellowship to design a monument for the park. In 2023, the team developed and installed a full-scale prototype titled Testisi. We activated the space through public programming including jazz performances, poetry readings, free book exchange, and educational workshops, demonstrating the pavilion’s potential as a living civic structure. We are now raising funds specifically to support the design development phase of the permanent pavilion, including architectural refinement, engineering consultation, community engagement sessions, and design documentation required to move the project forward. 
 
The Anna and Frederick Douglass Pavilion aims to set a new model for monuments that prioritizes its use over symbolism, education over spectacle, and community voice over top-down narratives. Looking ahead, the pavilion will serve as a programmatic space for learning, reflection, and cultural engagement, while standing as a permanent acknowledgment of the Douglass family’s legacy and the community that fought to honor it. Led by two Chicago based practitioners deeply rooted in public art, design, and neighborhood engagement, this project demonstrates how monuments can evolve into tools for justice, literacy, and collective memory. Support for this design phase is a critical step toward realizing a pavilion that not only commemorates history, but actively participates in shaping a more equitable future.