National Portrait Galleries

     At the National Portrait Gallery in London, I first saw the room with these portraits of Richard III, Henry VII,  and Elizabeth I.  But I'm not a royaltist, so having asked for directions at the front desk, I went to see Ayuba Suleiman Diallo.  My request raised eyebrows for a second, but someone knew the portrait was in Room 11.

Richard III

Henry VIII

Elizabeth I

     Diallo was a Fulani Muslim who was brought as a slave to Maryland in 1731.  I write about him in my book From Slave Ship to Harvard.  Indeed, I have a black and white image of him in the book.  When I wrote the book in 2012, his portrait was at the NPG but owned by the Qatar Museum, which had recently purchased it but agreed to leave it with the NPG in England.  I know this because I had to obtain the image and permission from the Qatar Museum.  After arriving as a slave in Maryland at age 16, Diallo was put to work on a tobacco plantation on the Eastern Shore.  Literate and terribly unhappy, he did a surprising thing.  He wrote a letter to his father in Africa, saying essentially "get me out of here."  Of course, the letter didn't reach his father, but men in England read it and arranged for his passage to London where he was feted and painted by William Hoare, a student of the great portrait painter Thomas Gainsborough.
       As I was looking at Diallo's portrait, two different school groups came by, one composed mainly of descendants from India or Pakistan and the other of descendants from Africa.  I am not shy about sharing stories from my book, so I gave each a short talk on African Muslims in America, showing a photo of Peale’s portrait of Yarrow on my cell phone.  Both groups as well as their teachers seemed quite appreciative.  One of the people with me said, “That is one of the few faces in the National Portrait Gallery that is the same color as theirs,” as you can see from the photograph below.
        This brings me to the difference between the NPG in London and the NPG in Washington DC with respect to racial sensitivity.  At the Washington gallery, former curator Asma Naeem arranged to borrow the James Alexander Simpson portrait of Yarrow from the Georgetown Library and placed it prominently among those of Yarrow’s white contemporaries to make the point that white males weren't the only founders of the country.  Diallo isn't given such treatment in England.

Jim and Diallo

Diallo in Room 11

Impromptu lecture