Frederick Douglass

PHOTO COURTESY OF WIKIMEDIA

ROCHESTER, N.Y. (AP) – Items pertaining to abolitionist Frederick Douglass have sold for more $150,000 at a recent auction in New York City.

The Douglass items were among the slavery and abolition-era documents and manuscripts sold Thursday at Swann Galleries in Manhattan. The top seller was an album containing a previously unknown photograph of abolitionist and Underground Railroad hero Harriet Tubman that sold for $161,000, including auctioneer fees.

The top-selling Douglass item was a signed letter he wrote to a novelist in 1880. It sold for $100,000. The other items included an 1845 inscribed first edition of “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass” ($37,500) and a July 1851 edition of The North Star ($15,000), the anti-slavery newspaper he published in Rochester.

Douglass lived in Rochester for 25 years.