Boston orders removal of statue of Abraham Lincoln standing over kneeling slave

A statue of the former US president standing over a kneeling black man perpetuated ‘harmful prejudices’, mayor says.

‘Frozen in time’: Boston’s Great Emancipator Memorial. Picture: Getty Images

A statue of Abraham Lincoln standing over a kneeling black man newly freed from slavery has been removed from a square in Boston on the orders of the city’s mayor, who said that it perpetuated “harmful prejudices”.

The statue is a replica of another that stands in Washington and was meant to commemorate the Emancipation Proclamation.

After Lincoln’s assassination, in 1865, Charlotte Scott, a woman from Virginia, is said to have put up the first $US5 of the wages she had earned as a free woman and begun a fundraising drive for a Freedman’s Memorial monument.

18th US President Ulysses S. Grant.

She collected donations from freed slaves including many who were veterans of the Union army. But a war relief agency took charge of the funds and it commissioned a sculptor named Thomas Ball, whose design was cast in Munich and shipped to Washington in 1876, where it was placed on a pedestal in Lincoln Park.

Another was then erected in Boston, Ball’s home town. The freed man in the piece was based on Archer Alexander, the last man captured under the Fugitive Slave Act; it was intended to show him rising, his shackles broken, at Lincoln’s proclamation.

Even some of the first viewers saw problems with the arrangement. Frederick Douglass, who escaped slavery in Maryland and became a leader of the abolitionist movement, spoke at its dedication. But in a letter to the National Republican a few days later, he added that it did not “as it seems to me, tell the whole truth”. He wrote that “perhaps no one monument” could do so, but he felt that while president Lincoln had broken the chains of enslaved people, it was president Ulysses Grant who made them American citizens by giving them the vote.

He added: “What I want to see before I die is a monument representing the negro, not couchant on his knees like a four-footed animal, but erect like a man”.

Last northern summer after the death of George Floyd, protesters gathered before the sculpture in Washington, calling for it to be torn down.

In Boston an artist, Tory Bullock, began a petition that gained 12,000 signatories, calling for its removal. He said the black man in the piece was “frozen in time” and told a radio station: “This man will never stand. He will always be on his knees. So for me, I see a white saviour helping people who would have never been able to do it on their own.”

The city’s arts council ruled in favour of its removal.

As it was hauled away this week, the office of Martin Walsh, the mayor, said in a statement that “the decision for removal acknowledges the statue’s role in perpetuating harmful prejudices and obscuring the role of black Americans in shaping the nation’s fight for freedom”.

The Times