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historical notes
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Edward M. Thomas was born in Philadelphia in 1821 and carved out a successful clerical career
in Washington, D.C., culminating in his position as the official messenger of the House of
Representatives. He was also a member of the Contraband Relief Association, an abolitionist
organization that raised funds for formerly enslaved people, and belonged to the elite Social, Civil, and Statistical Association (SCSA).
Thomas is first mentioned as a collector in a November 1860 article in the Weekly Anglo-African, although the size of the collection described must have taken many years to assemble.
Alongside a library of 500 rare books, 2000 coins, and about 3000 autographs hung paintings by Black artists such as John G. Chaplin, William Simpson, and William Dorsey.
In 1862, Thomas began his campaign to mount an exhibition of Black arts and technology in one of “our central cities—either New York or Brooklyn.” Over the course of the next 18 months, this idea took shape as the first exhibition of the Anglo-African Institute for the Encouragement of Industry and Art; it was slated to take place in New York in October of 1863. Thomas put out
a call for submissions, titled “Colored Inventors, Artists, Mechanics, &c.,” in various Black publications. Women were encouraged to exhibit as well. Thomas died on March 9, 1863, and the exhibition was left without an organizer. Advertisements ceased following the New York
City draft riots that summer.
Thomas’s collection was put to auction following the death of his wife in 1865, but there is no record of the paintings, prints, or sculptures sold. |
