Protesters: Remove statues of slave kneeling before Lincoln
Calls are intensifying for the removal
of twin Emancipation memorials in Washington, D.C., and Boston that
depict a freed slave kneeling at Abraham Lincoln’s feet – optics that
jar and offend many in a nation confronting racial injustice through a
fresh lens.
The Emancipation
Memorial, also known as the Emancipation Group and the Freedman’s
Memorial, was erected in Washington’s Lincoln Park in 1876. Three years
later, a copy was installed in Boston, home to the statue’s white
creator, Thomas Ball.
Protesters gathered earlier this week to demand the
removal of the original in Washington, where the Army activated about
400 unarmed National Guard personnel ahead of calls circulating on
social media to tear it down Thursday evening.
And
in Boston, where a petition is circulating for the copy to be taken
down, the city’s arts commission is holding public hearings Thursday and
next Tuesday to discuss its fate.
What originally
was intended in 1876 to celebrate liberation, critics contend, looks
more like subservience and supremacy in 2020.
“I’ve
been watching this man on his knees since I was a kid,” said Tory
Bullock, a Black actor and activist leading the campaign to get the
Boston memorial removed.
“It’s supposed to
represent freedom but instead represents us still beneath someone else. I
would always ask myself, “If he’s free, why is he still on his knees?’”
Bullock said.
The memorial has been on Boston’s
radar at least since 2018, when it launched a comprehensive review of
whether public sculptures, monuments and other artworks reflected the
city’s diversity and didn’t offend communities of color. The Boston Art
Commission said it was paying extra attention to works with “problematic
histories.”
Black
donors paid for the original in Washington; white politician and circus
showman Moses Kimball financed the copy on a downtown square a block
away from Boston Common. The inscription on both reads: “A race set free
and the country at peace. Lincoln rests from his labors.”
But
Blacks weren’t part of the design process, and the memorial’s central
visual takeaway – a Black man with broken shackles kneeling before his
white savior, with a whipping post and chains in the background – has
had people cringing for years.
“How
can you say you care about Black lives and then leave a statue up for
decades that actually promotes a disgusting and demeaning image of those
very lives?” asked Lilian McCarthy, among more than 12,000 people who
signed Bullock’s petition.
Similar scorn has dogged
the original in Washington since it was unveiled. At its dedication
nearly a century and a half ago, abolitionist and Black statesman
Frederick Douglass spoke critically of the freed slave’s depiction as
kneeling before Lincoln.
“Blacks
too fought to end enslavement,” Norton tweeted this week, saying she
was introducing a bill to move the statue to a museum.
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