He described himself-and was described by others-as a “quadroon,” a now-archaic term meaning that he was one-quarter black, born of one white parent and one parent of mixed white and black background. He was forced to accompany his owner.ĭorr was born in New Orleans in 1827 or 1828 (he had no birth certificate, but we can deduce the date from later evidence), enslaved to a business owner named Cornelius Fellowes. In this period before the American Civil War, and before the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, Dorr-like some four million of his compatriots-was enslaved.
Others had been as far as Egypt.īut as far as we know, David Dorr was the first African American ever to visit Jerusalem. He called it A Colored Man Round the World.Īfrican American social reformers including Harriet Jacobs, William Wells Brown and, most famously, Frederick Douglass had traveled to Europe before Dorr, lecturing and publishing. The title of Dorr’s book gives a clue as to why this might be. The extraordinary story of his journey-and his life-remains almost completely unknown. Few quote his witticisms or commend his insights. More such writing would follow, partly inspired by Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad, published in 1869: this witty, much-celebrated travel memoir helped fuel a Western fascination for visiting (as well as shaping and colonizing) the Holy Land that has never really abated.īy contrast, Dorr’s memoir of his three-year journey around parts of Europe and the Middle East, self-published more than a decade before Twain’s, is virtually forgotten today. Europeans and Americans had long been exploring-and writing about-this part of the world.
Superficially, this is not such an unusual account. “One was higher than the rest, and from its summit I saw Jerusalem only half a mile ahead … The glittered in the sun beam … towered above all the other buildings.… I made my way straight to our humble edifice, and fell upon marble slabs. "At one o’clock we were passing over rolling mounds adorned with olive trees,” Dorr wrote later.