Shaquille Heath reflects on Lessons of the Hour, Isaac Julien’s cinematic tribute to abolitionist Frederick Douglass, and the ongoing struggle for justice across time, borders, and the present-day United States.
Six months into the year, on Juneteenth—now a national holiday in the United States—I find myself seated before Isaac Julien’s film Lessons of the Hour, a meditation on the life and words of Frederick Douglass, featured in his first U.S. retrospective at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. The exhibition spans twenty-five years of Julien’s practice in film and video, but the work that has nestled within my brain and made itself at home is Lessons of the Hour.
The largest gallery in the exhibition is washed in a deep red, carpet and walls alike—as if blood had surged up from the floor to claim the room the instant it oxygenated. At the end of the hallway, before you make your turn into the ten-screen gallery, sits a book: a first edition of Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom, on loan from Julien’s personal collection. Within it, Douglass critiques and condemns the hypocrisy of a nation that makes claims for liberty and freedom while actively enforcing subjugation. What a damning American moment to reflect upon Douglass’s writings. What a damning American moment to hold up the fragile documents upon which we as a United States assert liberation and sovereignty.
The film opens with a quote from Douglass’s well-known 1852 speech, What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? He says, “There is not a nation on earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.” This message struck me hard—not just as an indictment of 1852, but of this contemporary moment.
I am in Los Angeles, a city I now call home, when notifications start to pop up on my phone: ICE has shown up at Dodger Stadium. Just this morning, a few blocks from my apartment near Western and Sunset, Angelenos were snatched on the streets, away from their homes, families, and businesses. Something stirs in me—a quiet, ancestral hum—echoing the grief of being torn from what you’ve built as home. Of being made to vanish from a life you were shaping with the crumbs of the feast served to those born at the table. The powers that be have dressed up barbarity: call it policing, policy, preservation. But what does it mean, in a supposedly freer time, to still flinch at the sound of a knock on the door?
Within the first few minutes of Julien’s film, we hear the unmistakable sound of creaking trees. I can’t say I’ve spent enough time in the woods to know this sound intimately, and yet my bones recognise it. The sound stirs something in me, the way the clack of my keys does as a writer—mechanical, inherited, older than memory. I wonder why I know this sound as a signal to run. As Douglass walks through a haunted landscape, the main screen ultimately shifts: two Black feet swing in the wind. We’ve found our creaking tree. We’ve found the source of its aching.
Lessons of the Hour isn’t a biography, but an imaginative reconstruction—a space shaped by Julien’s imagination of what Frederick Douglass saw, felt, and endured. The camera follows him like a respectful documentarian, and we watch the art of body language as he cautiously yet purposefully flows through spaces that were developed specifically to make him never feel safe. How can you plan, how can you prepare, how can you equip yourself against an adversary when you’re constantly in a fight to find the essence of safety?
I had originally intended to write about the exhibition’s look and feel—about the incredible work of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF) design team: that of Tristan Telander and Alejandro Stein. I worked at FAMSF from 2018 to 2023, so I know how long it takes to overhaul galleries, and how much intention lives in the smallest of decisions: the monochrome palette, the plush carpeting, the gentle hush of soundproofed rooms. Outside the galleries, digital screens show the timestamp of the film, so you know exactly what point in the film you are entering. Inside, glass vitrines hold rare artefacts and educational materials. It’s a feat of curatorial care by Claudia Schmuckli, working alongside Abram Jackson, the museum’s Director of Interpretation, in developing sensitivity warnings that are not just disclaimers, but acknowledgements that even in a space of learning, harm can echo.
It is one of the most devourable exhibitions I’ve seen at the museum, on par with Contemporary Muslim Fashions and Wangechi Mutu: I Am Speaking, Are You Listening? It’s an exhibition that respects your time and your intelligence—unafraid to immerse, but also to orient. I wish I lived in an America where I could linger on the beauty of the other works. But beauty feels like a luxury today. At this moment, I feel particularly poised to speak upon the cycles of history and the fatigue of survival that is echoing in this America, and through the time-travelling device that is Julien’s imaginative vision.
Halfway through the film, a soft voice with a Scottish accent sings a melodic protest:
“Send back the money! Send it back!
Tempt not the Negro’s God
To blast and wither Scotland’s Church
With his avenging rod.
There’s not a mite in all the sum
But cries to Heav’n aloud
For wrath on all who shield the men
That trade in Negro’s blood.”
This moment in the film recalls Douglass’s international activism—his campaign urging the Free Church of Scotland to return donations it had received from American slaveholders. It broadens the abolitionist struggle beyond the U.S., reminding us that justice doesn’t stop at borders, and that complicity, like capital, travels far and fast. Just as it did then, so it does now.
I am now writing this when the President of the United States announces the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities, aiding in Israel’s “war” and their genocide of the people of Gaza. The history of these nations is complicated, but it doesn’t take much to be a compassionate intellectual when it comes down to it. How strange, once again, to bomb in the name of democracy, while effectively working to end such a form of government in your own so-called homeland.
The exhibition leaves me haunted, but sharpened. There’s no way to prepare for war in our contemporary society. But this film, as all good art, helps you to begin—and that beginning starts with consideration. Within all of his films, Julien doesn’t present history as something to merely watch. His art is insistent upon the reality that these events are never tied up with a bow. They transform, mutate, and repackage themselves into something that at first glance feels new. Julien insists that we see this—and more importantly, feel it. Lessons of the Hour is not a remembrance. It’s a reckoning. We are not merely remembering Douglass. We are being asked to see with his eyes—the essential saying, to walk in another’s shoes—and in that seeing, decide what we will refuse, what we will protect, and what we will no longer allow to go unanswered.
History isn’t behind us—it loops and it stalks. It is waiting in the corner to rear its head. And it appears to us, not as someday. Not as later. As now.
Written by Shaquille Heath
Isaac Julien: I Dream a World is on view at the de Young Museum, San Francisco, through July 13, 2025. The Museum will be open on the Fourth of July.
