A statue of Abraham Lincoln with a freed slave who appears to be kneeling at his feet – optics that raised objections amid a national rally of racial injustice – has been removed from its place in downtown Boston.
Workers removed the Emancipation Memorial, also known as the Emancipation Group and Freedman’s Memorial, from a park near Boston Common early Tuesday, where it had stood since 1879.
City officials had agreed to remove the monument at the end of June after complaints and a bitter debate over the design. 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 statue’s white creator, Thomas Ball.
Founded to celebrate the liberation of slaves in America, it was based on Archer Alexander, a black man who escaped slavery, helped the Union Army, and was the last man to be recaptured under the Fugitive Slave Act.
But while some saw the shirtless man rise to his feet as he shook off the broken cuffs on his wrists, others saw him kneel before Lincoln, his white emancipator.
Freed Black backers paid for the original in Washington; white politician and circus man Moses Kimball funded the copy in Boston. The inscription on both reads: “A race liberated and the land at peace. Lincoln is resting from work. “
More than 12,000 people had signed a petition demanding the removal of the statue, and the Boston Public Art Commission unanimously voted to remove it. The statue would be stored until the city decides whether to put it on display in a museum.
“The removal decision recognized the statue’s role in perpetuating harmful prejudice and obscuring the role of black Americans in shaping the country’s freedoms,” the committee said in a statement posted on its website.
The monument had been on Boston’s radar since 2018, when it launched a comprehensive investigation into whether public sculptures, monuments, and other works of art reflected the city’s diversity and didn’t offend the color communities. The art committee indicated that it would pay extra attention to works with ‘problematic histories’.
Last summer, protesters pledged to tear down the original statue in Washington, prompting the National Guard to deploy a detachment to guard it.