A statue of Abraham Lincoln with a freed slave looking kneeling at his feet – optics that drew objections amid a national reckoning with racial injustice – was removed from his perch in downtown Boston.
Workers removed the Emancipation Memorial, also known as the Emancipation Group and Freedman’s Memorial, on Tuesday from a park near the Boston Common, where it had been since 1879.
City officials agreed in late June to withdraw the memorial after complaints and a heated debate over the project. Mayor Marty Walsh acknowledged at the time that the statue made residents and visitors “uncomfortable”.
The bronze statue is a copy of a monument erected in Washington, DC, three years earlier. 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 recaptured under the Fugitive Slave Law.
But while some saw the shirtless man get up while shaking the broken cuffs from his wrists, others found him kneeling in front of Lincoln, his white emancipator.
Freed Black donors paid for the original in Washington; White circus politician and showman Moses Kimball financed the copy in Boston. The inscription on both says: “A liberated race and the country at peace. Lincoln rests from his work. “
More than 12,000 people signed a petition demanding the statue to be removed, and the Boston public arts commission unanimously voted to remove it. The statue should be kept until the city decides whether to display it in a museum.
“The removal decision recognized the statue’s role in perpetuating harmful prejudices and obscuring the role of black Americans in shaping the nation’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 it launched a comprehensive review of whether sculptures, monuments and other public works of art reflected the city’s diversity and did not offend communities of color. The arts commission said it was paying extra attention to work with “problem stories”.
Last summer, protesters vowed to topple the original statue in Washington, prompting the National Guard to deploy a detachment to protect it.