Leave the Emancipation Memorial Alone – By Jack Butler (National Review) / June 24 2020
It deserves to stand forever, a silent monument whose history and character speak louder than anyone who would destroy it.
In a quiet, tree-lined area about a mile from the U.S. Capitol building, a statue has stood since 1876. Unveiled eleven years after Abraham Lincoln’s death, it depicts the 16th president holding the Emancipation Proclamation as a freed slave kneels below, his bonds being severed. Congress originally named the site of the statue, called the Freedman’s Memorial on the plaque affixed to it, Lincoln Square, making it “the first site to bear the name of the martyred president,” according to the National Park Service. It is also known as the Emancipation Memorial.
Lincoln Park’s typical quiet was broken on Tuesday by an increasingly familiar sight: a crowd seeking a statue to tear down. The more such groups deviate further from anything resembling legitimate protest against the unjust death of George Floyd, the more one questions their historical literacy. Indeed, it seems clear at this point that any old-looking statue will do: Figures of everyone from the Union general and racially progressive president Ulysses S. Grant to the abolitionist Hans Christian Heg have gotten the treatment. But if the protesters knew anything about the history and a character of the Emancipation Memorial, they would abandon their stated promise to tear the statue down.
It’s worth starting with an aspect of the statue that those who recently flocked to it in the hopes of consigning it to oblivion have the least excuse for not knowing. The man who appears to be leading these efforts on the ground proclaimed on Tuesday that he sees them as part of a campaign of consciousness-raising. “We are going to show up and wake these rich white people up,” he said while standing in front of the statue. If he had turned around, he might have noticed a plaque at the statue’s base that reads as follows:
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