FRIDAY, March 29, 2024
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Protesters denounce Abraham Lincoln statue in D.C., urge removal of Emancipation Memorial

Protesters denounce Abraham Lincoln statue in D.C., urge removal of Emancipation Memorial

WASHINGTON - Police in the nation's capital were bracing Thursday night for protesters who planned to denounce and urge the removal of a statue of Abraham Lincoln, paid for by people who had been enslaved, that celebrates emancipation and depicts the former president standing over a kneeling African American man.

Federal and District of Columbia law enforcementpatrolled and erected barriers earlier in the day around the Emancipation Memorial, which stands in Lincoln Park in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. Protesters have announced plans to gather at the statue both Thursday and Friday nights, though it was unclear whether they would seek to topple it or simply rally in favor of a more orderly removal.

District Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, argued for the latter approach at a news conference Thursday, saying the city should debate the fates of statues and "not have a mob decide they want to pull it down." On Monday, police broke up an effort to tear down a statue of former president Andrew Jackson in Lafayette Square.

Critics say the Emancipation Memorial - which shows Lincoln holding a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation as an African American man in a loincloth kneels at his feet - is demeaning in its depiction of African Americans and suggests they were not active contributors to the cause of their own freedom.

The drive to remove the statue comes amid a wave of calls to take down monuments to figures ranging from Confederate Gen.Robert E. Lee to former president Theodore Roosevelt. The furor over the Lincoln statue represents a new front in that campaign, as demonstrators who decry racism set their sights on a monument to a president who is principally remembered for ending African American slavery. 

But the current push to take down the statue is also an extension of a long and complicated history that in some ways mirrors the mixed legacy of Lincoln, who led the fight to end Southern states' tradition of human bondage but also defended the racist views held by many whites of his era.

More than 25,000 people attended the statue's dedication on April 14, 1876, the 11th anniversary of Lincoln's assassination, including President Ulysses S. Grant. Abolitionist Frederick Douglass delivered the keynote address to the crowd which included many black Washingtonians. In that famous speech, Douglass captured the contradictions that defined Lincoln's work on behalf of black Americans. 

"He was preeminently the white man's president, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men," Douglass said, while adding that for African Americans "the hour and the man of our redemption had somehow met in the person of Abraham Lincoln" and "under his wise and beneficent rule we saw ourselves gradually lifted from the depths of slavery to the heights of liberty and manhood."

The memorial has had detractors ever since it was put in place. 

 

The statue was commissioned and paid for by African Americans, including many former Union soldiers and those who had been enslaved, but its design was overseen by an all-white committee. Critics say the image of a paternalistic Lincoln and subservient enslaved man discounts African Americans' role in winning their freedom. The model for the kneeling figure was Archer Alexander, a former slave who assisted Union troops and escaped on his own. 

Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, a Democrat, the District's nonvoting representative in Congress, said this week that it should be placed in a museum. 

"Although formerly enslaved Americans paid for this statue to be built in 1876, the design and sculpting process was done without their input, and it shows," Norton said in a statement. "The statue fails to note in any way how enslaved African Americans pushed for their own emancipation.

But some scholars are urging caution as such calls intensify.

The statue, they say, is hugely important in African American history. For many years it was the only statue commissioned and paid for by African Americans and was the only statue dedicated to the promise of the Emancipation Proclamation. 

"Even though the image is problematic it's part of our history that African Americans themselves paid for this monument and it was their way of saying slavery had ended," said Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, chairwoman of the history department at Harvard University and a prominent African American historian.

"The detractors are right: The image it is setting forth is the image of Lincoln bestowing freedom on African Americans without capturing the sensibility that black men were fighting in that war," Higginbotham said. However, she added, "For a man of his time, the job Lincoln got done was astounding, and so African Americans had positive feelings about him and most still do." 

Yale historian David Blight, whose biography of Douglass won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for history, agreed that the Emancipation statue is problematic but said he opposes its removal, in part because Douglass's speech at the dedication "was one of the greatest speeches of his lifetime." 

"He didn't just honor Lincoln. He was very blunt, very direct," Blight said. "He delivered a warning to Grant and to the government that America was losing Reconstruction." 

Today we would produce a different image to honor emancipation, Blight said, but he urged that the statue in Lincoln Park not be removed. 

"The day it was dedicated there was a huge parade by black Washington," he said. "To just say get rid of it is in some ways an insult to those people. It was the way they chose to or had to choose to commemorate emancipation at that time. We don't have many monuments about emancipation in this country. We ought to be fighting to protect the ones we have and also build some better ones."

Early Thursday afternoon, construction workers in orange vests arrived at Lincoln Park and began encircling the Emancipation Memorial with tall metal fencing, reinforced by white concrete barriers. 

After that, they placed similar protections around a nearby monument to Mary McLeod Bethune, a prominent African American educator, stateswoman and civil rights activist.

Bethune's memorial was the first statue built on public land in the nation's capital that commemorated an African-American woman. Angie White, a black Virginia resident who had come to see the Emancipation Memorial before it could be removed, broke off her conversation with another onlooker as she noticed the new precautions for the Bethune statue.

"Oh gosh," White said. "I guess they think they've got to protect her, too."

A half-dozen U.S. Park Police stood guard around the Lincoln monument. At a corner of the park, a set of D.C. police officers also stood watch, too. Three police cars blocked vehicles' access to North Carolina Avenue. 

As nightfall approached, protesters began to gather, though only a handful had appeared by 7:30. 

Pedestrians were still allowed in, and many District residents out for late-afternoon strolls, jogs or dog walks stopped to take in the new fencing and snap photos. Some approached police and asked why officials felt they needed to protect the statue. Others began discussing the history and symbolism of the monument, which demonstrators have said promotes white supremacy and neglects to acknowledge the role enslaved people played in fighting for freedom. 

"This is a great example of something that should be a museum," said David Travis, 59. "It went up with good intentions, but this is just a different time." 

Leslie Sinsay, 61, nodded in agreement. Sinsay, an African American teacher in the District, had walked past the statue almost every day for the past two decades. She never liked looking at the kneeling man who had been enslaved but tried not to think about it. 

When she spotted the police and construction workers Thursday, she phoned her husband five times, growing more frustrated every time he failed to pick up. Finally, she ran back to the apartment and grabbed him. Sinsay wasn't hopeful that the protesters will actually manage to take the monument down on Thursday evening, but she planned to come back to the park around 8 p.m. to watch anyway. 

If it happened, she didn't want to miss it.

 

 

 

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