Rape Eleanor Holmes Norton, D.D.C., has reintroduced legislation to remove the statue that replaced the statue, arguing that the 19th-century memorial is not enough to honor slaves’ contribution to their freedom .
Dedicated in 1876, the statue depicts former President Lincoln, who had signed the emancipation prologue, extending his hand over a shackled slave who is kneeling beside him. It was erected after a freed slave, Charlotte Scott, started a fundraising campaign, which collected money from freed slaves.
“Although formerly enslaved Americans paid for this statue, the design and sculpture process was done in some way without their input or participation, and it shows,” Holmes Norton said in a press release last week.
“The statue fails to note how African Americans pressed for their own emancipation. Presumably, they were only recently freed from slavery and were grateful for any recognition of their independence. However, in his keynote address at the statue’s unveiling, Frederick Douglass did not explicitly praise the statue, and, in fact, in private commentary, went away to say, ‘It showed a negro on his knee when more masculine. Attitude would be a sign of independence. ”
Congressmen introduced the law last year amid a wave of demonstrations of racial accusations, including occasional memorials. A copy of the statue was removed from Boston last year.
According to Smithsonian Magazine, the famous frenzied Frederick Dougall sought to erect another memorial with Lincoln and the kneeling man.
He was reportedly uncomfortable with the depiction of the statue. During his address, he dedicated the statue, stating that Lincoln was “a predominantly white-man president, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men.”
In a letter to the editor of the National Republican Newspaper, Dougal stated: “The only act of breaking the chains of the negro was the act of Abraham Lincoln, and it is beautifully expressed in this memorial. But the act by which the negro was sent to the United States Was made a citizen of and invested with an alternative franchise, a major function of President US Grant and is nowhere to be seen in the Lincoln Monument. “
Markia Cole, who portrays Scott in the Female Re-Actors of Distinction, protested the removal of the statues last year.
“What? [freed slave] According to WUSA9, Cole and said that me and others symbolize that he is indicating his past position, but he is getting out of it.
“I hate to see this modified or torn because Ms. Charlotte worked hard to put it there.”
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