A whiskey giant ripped off Frederick Douglass to promote its white founder
A whiskey giant ripped off Frederick Douglass to promote its white founder
A Fingers special report on Brown-Forman's bizarre, previously unconfirmed face-swap of the Black abolitionist and teetotaler
For a dozen years, George Garvin Brown, the founder of the Brown-Forman Corporation, loomed over Louisville’s famous Whiskey Row, his face blown up on a two-story promotional banner opposite the recently reopened location of his original Old Forester distillery. Millions of visitors and residents alike passed the black-and-white photo without a second thought between 2011 and 2023 while it graced the brick facade of a restaurant in the city’s reemergent distillery district. Bourbon is big business in Louisville, after all, and the industry’s history is a well-known point of civic pride.
In May of last year, though, executives at Brown-Forman’s headquarters in the city scrambled to remove the massive poster and contain an internal “uprising” about its mere existence. The banner disappeared, and a new one, featuring a photo of the powerful firm’s founding patriarch later in life, took its place. Few noticed.
Today, Fingers can report the reason for last year’s sudden corporate panic at Brown-Forman’s sprawling corporate campus in Louisville and the covert swap-out on Whiskey Row. The photo of George Garvin Brown on the original banner was actually two photos. The face is Brown’s, but the suited, bow-tied body belongs to Frederick Douglass, the legendary Black abolitionist and temperance advocate.
See for yourself:
Last week, Fingers presented Brown-Forman with analysis from a leading digital forensics expert that the banner was “definitely derived” from the image of Douglass, and criticism from a direct descendant of the abolitionist calling the rip-off a “dangerous dismissal of Black history.” On Tuesday, Brown-Forman admitted that the 2011 banner was a Douglass-based fake, and that this was the reason for its sudden removal and replacement with a “confirmed image” of Brown in 2023. As far as I know, this bizarre situation has not been previously confirmed in the press.
“We deeply regret this error and apologize for any offense it caused,” wrote director of corporate communications Elizabeth Conway in a brief emailed statement to Fingers. She declined to answer detailed questions about the matter.
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This is not the first time in recent years that Brown-Forman has faced scrutiny for erasing a Black man from the historical narrative. The parent company of Jack Daniel’s (among many other widely distributed brands) made headlines in 2016 by finally acknowledging the fact that Nearest “Uncle Nearest” Green, a Black distiller and slave, originally taught the eponymous Jack how to make whiskey.
The world’s fifth-largest spirits company, which is publicly traded but majority-controlled by the Brown family, made headlines again in August 2024 for a different racially fraught reason, announcing it would end several of the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives that it had launched less than half a decade earlier.
Conway declined multiple requests to make an executive available to address how such an odd situation came to pass, why it took so long to recognize it, or whether its abrupt about-face on DEI programming would make it harder to prevent gaffes like this in the future.
But former employees, including former Old Forester master taster Jackie Zykan, the first woman whose signature has appeared on the brand’s label in its 150-year history, were willing to say more about the matter. So was Kenneth B. Morris, Jr., Frederick Douglass’ great-great-great-grandson.