A statue of Abraham Lincoln with a freed slave apparently kneeling at his feet – optics that drew objections amid a national settlement with racial injustice, has been removed from his seat in downtown Boston.
Workers removed the Emancipation Memorial, also known as the Emancipation Group and the Freedman’s Memorial, early Tuesday from a park just outside Boston Common, where it has stood since 1879.
City officials agreed at the end of June to take down the memorial after complaints and a bitter debate over the design. Mayor Marty Walsh acknowledged at the time that the statue had made residents and visitors “uncomfortable”.
The bronze statue is a copy of a monument erected three years earlier in Washington, DC. The copy was installed in Boston because the city was home to the white creator of the statue, Thomas Ball.
It was created to celebrate the liberation of slaves in America and was based on Archer Alexander, a black man who escaped slavery, helped the Union Army and was the last man to be recaptured under the Fugitive Slave Act.
But while some see the shirtless man stand up as he shakes off the broken shackles of his wrists, others view him kneeling before Lincoln, his white emancipator.
Freed Black donors paid for the original in Washington; the white politician and circus performer, Moses Kimball, funded the copy in Boston. The inscription on both reads: ‘A race is free and the land in peace. Lincoln rests from his labor. ”
More than 12,000 people signed a petition demanding that the statue be removed, and Boston’s Public Arts Commission unanimously voted to remove it. The statue would be placed in storage until the city decides whether to display it in a museum.
“The decision to remove it recognizes the role of the statue in perpetuating harmful prejudices and obscuring the role of Black Americans in shaping the country’s freedoms,” the commission said in a statement. website 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 reflect the city’s diversity and do not offend the communities of color. The Arts Commission said they were paying extra attention to works with ‘problematic history’.
Last summer, protesters vowed to demolish the original statue in Washington, asking the National Guard to use a section to guard it.