Demeaning memorial?
"Dispute with multiple shades of gray"
NOTE: This Substack newsletter began on Juneteenth, 2023, with the quite short—and I hope useful for newcomers—introductory post “Why ‘The Self-Emancipator’?” Recently, following three posts on the Civil War contrabands, I’ve been promising a post about a film being made for PBS about those self-emancipators and their descendants in Tidewater Virginia. That post remains delayed because I have prospects for more information.
The Emancipation Memorial, Washington, D.C.—also called the Freedman’s Memorial or the Emancipation Group. (National Park Service photo)
I asked a friend about the pictured Emancipation Memorial, in Lincoln Park near the U.S. Capitol. He lives a block away. “I’ve never liked that statue,” he said. “It always seems demeaning to me.”
Me too. But I also think it’s important to consider the extensive view of Yale’s David W. Blight, the Frederick Douglass biographer who directs the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. He sees the objection, but has urged keeping the monument.
Under the headline “Protesters denounce Abraham Lincoln statue in D.C., urge removal of Emancipation Memorial,” the Washington Post in 2020 reported the objection this way: “Critics say the Emancipation Memorial—which shows Lincoln holding a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation as an African American man in a loincloth kneels at his feet—is demeaning in its depiction of African Americans and suggests that they were not active contributors to the cause of their own freedom.” And this way: “Critics say the image of a paternalistic Lincoln and subservient enslaved man discounts African Americans’ role in winning their freedom.”
It all calls to mind this Substack’s foundational proposition: Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that Americans will come to esteem the Civil War’s multitudes of freedom-striving, emancipation-forcing slavery escapees.
Boston removed its replica of the memorial on grounds of disregard for Black Americans’ estimable place in emancipation history. Douglass, a few days after speaking at the Washington original’s grand 1876 dedication, wrote “What I want to see before I die is a monument representing the negro, not couchant on his knees like a four-footed animal, but erect on his feet like a man.”
Douglass’s wish came to light when Carnegie-Mellon University’s Scott A. Sandage discovered it in a Douglass letter. Sandage and Jonathan W. White, of Christopher Newport University, cited the wish in their 2020 Smithsonian Magazine article “What Frederick Douglass Had to Say About Monuments.” The two historians observed, “As the nation continues to debate the meaning of monuments and memorials, and as local governments and protesters alike take them down, the Lincoln Park sculpture presents a dispute with multiple shades of gray.”
Shades of gray
The memorial probably doesn’t do much to foster esteem for those multitudes of freedom-striving, emancipation-forcing Civil War slavery escapees. Yet as noted frequently in this Substack, Sean Wilentz, W. E. B. Du Bois, James M. McPherson and other scholars have numbered in the hundreds of thousands those Americans whom some historians call self-emancipators. Brent Leggs, African American heritage director at the National Trust for Historic Preservation, says it was a half million. That’s one in every eight enslaved Americans.
Columbia’s Eric Foner says Civil War slavery escapees “forced the fate of slavery onto the national political agenda.” Leggs sees in that the “unknown story” of a “catalyst for emancipation” and an example of “uplift” that positions Black Americans “not just as spectators in history,” but as actors in it.
Unknown story, yes—a puzzling national memory deficit. Consider even the New York Times best-selling anthology Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019. Its 90 authors—including coeditor Ibram X. Kendi, antiracism’s founder—survey history pretty comprehensively, but don’t address the self-emancipating multitudes.
In The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States, University of Maryland slavery historian Ira Berlin wrote that by “offering their labor and their lives” and acting with “resolute determination,” those multitudes contributed importantly to the Union cause. Many in the North came to see that the Union’s security required slavery’s destruction.
That 2015 book repeats verbatim the most important sentence from Berlin’s 1992 Washington Post op-ed “How the Slaves Freed Themselves”: “No one was more responsible for smashing the shackles of slavery than the slaves.” Berlin emphasized shackle-smashing by the Union’s 180,000 Black soldiers and 20,000 Black sailors. The movie Glory portrayed some of them. More than 135,000, Berlin says, were formerly enslaved.
In 2020, National Public Radio broadcast a David Blight interview that NPR.org headlined “Why A History Professor Says ‘Racist’ Emancipation Memorial Shouldn’t Come Down.” Michel Martin asked Blight why he thought the memorial should be kept. His reply began, “Because we can’t purify our history. Yes, that’s a racist image. But there’s a much larger story about that monument, about its unveiling, about what it meant at that time.”
Blight sees that much larger postbellum story as so important that he begins Chapter 1 of Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, which won a Pulitzer, with nine pages about the Emancipation Memorial’s 1876 dedication day and the Douglass speech.1 In 2013 at the Smithsonian, Blight spoke2 at length about the dedication, pointing out early on that Douglass was the 19th century’s most photographed American—more than even Lincoln or Mark Twain.
In that 2013 presentation, Blight declared that Douglass’s speech was really about the federal government’s betrayal of Reconstruction in the South. “Black freedom and the fate of the Civil War, constitutional amendments, the civic lives and personal survival of the freed people, were on the line in the South at that very moment, 1876,” Blight said, and “Grant and the government had to be called to action. That was Douglass’s subject.”
For framing, Blight elaborated on the grandness of the biracial dedication day:
Throughout the spring morning of April 14, 1876, a huge crowd, largely African American, began to assemble in the vicinity of 7th and K Streets in Washington ... 11 years to the day since the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. A parade involving nearly every colored organization in the city, as the press put it, was about to step off at noon en route to the unveiling of an extraordinary monument to Lincoln. The city had witnessed many remarkable parades since the end of the war, but this one would be a first. The day was declared a public holiday in the capital. ... At the head of the procession rode a contingent of 27 mounted police, followed by three companies of colored troops headed by the Philharmonic Band of Georgetown. Numerous other cornet bands, marching drum corps, youth clubs in colorful uniforms, and fraternal orders from both Washington and Baltimore filled in the long line with pride and pomp. The Knights of Saint Augustine carried a large banner with a painting of the martyred Lincoln on it. Horse-drawn carriages carried, among others ... the order of the day, the newly arrived resident of Washington, the famed abolitionist, Frederick Douglass. ... President Ulysses S. Grant, now nearing the end of his second term, arrived before the parade reached the park and was accompanied by US senators, ... members of the president’s cabinet, the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, many members of the House of Representatives, and a large contingent of other government officials, as well as some Union generals. This was an amazing audience. Near the platform, the Marine Band struck up “Hail Columbia” as the speakers walked from their carriages, and the hundreds and hundreds of marchers found their places in a vast audience.
Blight noted to his 2013 Smithsonian audience that the memorial’s sculptor had altered his original conception “from a kneeling slave represented as perfectly passive to an emancipated slave, agent of his own deliverance”—something not universally perceived by 21st century eyes. And Blight reported that Douglass, “from his own visceral experience as a slave and a fugitive slave who plotted his own escape … fully understood just how much freedom for Black Americans was both seized, but also given.”
Blight emphasized Douglass’s commandeering of the historic event. “African Americans had tenuously arrived, finally and openly, in the center of the country’s highest affairs,” Blight said, and declared, “Man, he wasn’t gonna miss this moment.” No Black speaker had ever addressed all of the country’s leadership in one place, “and no such speaker ever would again until Barack Obama was inaugurated president in January of 2009.”
Blight imagined that Douglass “must have caused some squirming” in that
he injected race … into this rhetorical tribute. It was as though he had decided to give voice to the kneeling slave on the statue, who would now say thank you as well as speak some bitter truths about a real history and not merely allow the occasion to be one of proud national self-congratulation. It was as though Douglass was saying, you gave me this unique platform today, and I will therefore teach these lessons about the complex, jagged, and tragic paths by which Black people …achieved freedom in the agony of war. “He,” said Douglass, meaning Lincoln, “was preeminently the white man’s president.” And as he continued in that baritone voice of his, he said Lincoln was “entirely devoted to the welfare of the white man. He was ready and willing … at any time during the first years of his administration to deny, postpone, and sacrifice the rights of humanity and the colored people to promote the welfare of the white people of the country.”
Blight called this “a stunning level of honesty and directness for such a ceremonial occasion.” And he called the Douglass speech itself “the tortured effort of a national stepchild to find the words that might still make the high and mighty of the United States hold the remaining lifeline to his people.”
A monument to teach with
Here’s more of what Blight said in that NPR interview several years after his Smithsonian presentation:
There’s a much larger story about that monument, about its unveiling, about what it meant at that time, about why it wasn’t done during Reconstruction that would truly be lost if you simply remove it and stick it in the corner of some museum, where it would become some kind of curiosity. … I’ve taken teachers and students to that monument. That monument is something to teach with. So, you know, my fear is that the circumstances, the conditions, the context when that thing was unveiled will be lost. But I think if you had it there next to a great, new, modern, beautiful emancipation memorial—what an amazing way to mix past and present and learn from it. If that was a national creation, as Douglass said, let’s create another national memorial there next to it.
Maybe that’s right. But on a distinguished panel at Norfolk State University just before the 2011-2015 Civil War Sesquicentennial, former National Park Service chief historian Dwight T. Pitcaithley asked, “Where’s the national monument to emancipation?” He specified Washington, D.C., but only in a general way. Panelist Blight reacted enthusiastically.
I’ll note, speaking only as a nonhistorian advocate for public history, that I’ve argued in a short History News Network essay that a national monument to emancipation already exists. It’s in plain sight, though paradoxically hard to see, given the deficit of civic memory concerning the self-emancipation movement.
It’s not the Lincoln Park monument near the U.S. Capitol, whether or not Blight’s supplemental monument gets added there. It’s Tidewater Virginia’s Point Comfort, the 1619 place containing Fort Monroe—Freedom’s Fortress, as self-emancipators called the Union’s majestic moated citadel in Confederate Virginia when their movement began to flourish there in 1861.
That was a quarter millennium after captive Africans’ 1619 arrival. At Point Comfort, the arc of freedom’s history was long, but it bent toward emancipation.
I’ve quoted from the transcript at https://americanart.si.edu/videos/days-mourning-days-jubilee-scholar-david-w-blight-154160.