Boston city workers removed the Emancipation Memorial – also known as the Emancipation Group and the Freedman’s Memorial – from its location in a park just off Boston Common.
The monument to one of America’s most significant achievements – the abolition of slavery – has stood in its Boston location since 1879.
The statue shows President Abraham Lincoln with a freed slave throwing off his shackles and rising to stand equal with the President.
But ignorant, history re-writing, woke activists see he freed slave figure as kneeling at Lincoln’s feet. The “optics” triggered objections from the historically oblivious amid a self-serving pseudo national reckoning with racial injustice.
City officials, led by Mayor Marty Walsh (D), agreed in June to take dismantle the memorial after complaints and a partisan debate over the design. Walsh said the statue made woke residents and visitors alike “uncomfortable.”
Lincoln statue removed from polite society in Boston because, doggone it, black lives just didn't matter enough to him. "Boston Removes Lincoln Emancipation Memorial" https://t.co/k2iRV1aZdd
— Bryan Fischer (@BryanJFischer) December 29, 2020
The statue – cast in bronze, is a replica of a monument erected in Washington, DC, three years earlier in 1876. Boston’s version was erected because the city was home to the statue’s sculptor, Thomas Ball.
The monument is based on Archer Alexander, a Black man who escaped slavery and who fought for the Union Army, which Lincoln commanded as Commander-in-Chief. Alexander has the unfortunate distinction of being the last man recaptured under the Fugitive Slave Act.
Ironically, freed Black donors paid for the original sculpture in Washington, DC. The inscription on both sculptures reads: “A race set free and the country at peace. Lincoln rests from his labors.”
More than 12,000 woke and misinformed people signed a petition insisting on the statue’s removal.
Boston’s public arts commission voted unanimously to remove it, placing it in storage until a decision can be made whether or not to display it in a museum.
