A statue of Abraham Lincoln with a freed slave kneeling at his feet – optics that objected amid a national count with racial injustice – has been removed from its placement in downtown Boston.
Workers removed the Emancipation Memorial, also known as the Emancipation Group, and the Freedman’s Memorial, from a park near Boston Common, where it had stood since 1879, on Tuesday.
City officials had agreed in late June to remove the monument following complaints and a bitter design debate. Mayor Marty Walsh acknowledged at the time that the statue made residents and visitors alike “uncomfortable.”
The bronze statue is a copy of a monument that was erected in Washington, DC, three years earlier. The copy was installed in Boston because in the city was 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 recovered under the Fugitive Slave Law.
But while some saw the shirtless man standing up as he shook the broken shackles on his wrists, others saw him kneeling before Lincoln, his white emancipator.
The freed black donors paid for the original in Washington; white politician and circus showman Moses Kimball funded the copy in Boston. The inscription of both says: “A liberated race and the country in peace. Lincoln rests from his work. “
More than 12,000 people had signed a petition calling for the statue to be removed and the Boston Public Arts Commission unanimously voted for the removal. The statue had to be kept until the city decided if you want to exhibit it in a museum.
“The withdrawal decision recognized 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 posted on its website .
The memorial has been on Boston’s radar since at least 2018, when a comprehensive review was launched on whether public sculptures, monuments and other works of art reflected the city’s diversity and did not offend communities of color. The arts commission said it was paying special attention to works with “problematic stories.”
Last summer, protesters vowed to tear down the original statue in Washington, prompting the National Guard to deploy a detachment to protect it.