Last week, I wrote a post about the speech Frederick Douglass delivered at the unveiling of the D.C.’s Emancipation Memorial, also known as the Freedmen’s Memorial, dedicated to Abraham Lincoln on the eleventh anniversary of his assassination.
In the recent furor over American statuary, a group of angry D.C. locals decided the monument must come down, because it shows a freedman kneeling before Lincoln, a design they’ve written off rather simplistically as racist. And it wasn’t just an angry mob making this claim: D.C.’s non-voting congresswoman, Eleanor Holmes Norton, has advocated removing the monument to a museum. In her statement on the subject, Holmes Norton asserted that African Americans did not have buy-in as to the statue’s design and that Douglass had “in his keynote address at the unveiling of this statue . . . expressed his displeasure with the statue.”
As I pointed out in my post last week, Douglass’s formal remarks did not contain any such expression and in fact seemed strongly to refute the view that the monument was degrading to freedmen and women. The memorial to Lincoln was, after all, funded by recently emancipated slaves, specifically to honor him for all that he had done to help them achieve emancipation; Douglass’s speech as recorded makes this especially clear. And as this video illustrates, there is more than one way to interpret the statue’s imagery. Some might view the kneeling man as being in a position of supplication, especially looking back with modern eyes. But, per Douglass, this certainly wasn’t how the monument was intended by those who sponsored it, nor is it the only accurate way to read the design — others see the man looking up and out of bondage.
But I wanted to add something further to the subject, because I’ve since received some additional information from a scholar of Douglass, political-science professor Peter C. Myers, who pointed me toward some clarifying material. Apparently, the likeliest source for Holmes Norton’s claim (which she seems to have taken from the D.C. Park Service’s website, itself uncited) that Douglass disliked the memorial is Benjamin Quarles’s biography of Douglass. Quarles himself does not cite a specific source for this claim, but he reports that someone at the unveiling overheard Douglass suggesting that the design did not do justice to the dignity of the freedman.
That said, as Douglass’s remarks illustrate, the freedmen and women who dedicated the monument didn’t see it as an insult to their dignity or humanity, in fact quite the opposite. It was, in his view, a humble offering from grateful emancipated slaves, who owed much to Lincoln for having helped them achieve freedom. To reduce the abolitionist’s complex views on Lincoln, emancipation, and the memorial to a mere assertion of, “He disliked the statue, so we should rip it down,” is a grave error.
What Douglass believed about the monument’s design matters to some extent, to be sure. But the simple point of whether he loved or hated or had mixed feelings about or was ambivalent about it shouldn’t be a central point in the debate over what we ought to do with the statue today. Using one offhand comment from Douglass as a trump card — as if that comment, ripped out of context, proves the statue has to go — is ahistorical nonsense, an effort to ignore the complexity and context of each historical moment in favor of scoring political points and flexing raw power, with some slight cover from the partial view of one man.
I was troubled by this recent dispute over the Emancipation Memorial not because I had reason to believe that Douglass was an unmitigated champion of everything about it. Rather, I was troubled by how the fight over this particular memorial continued the trend of recent weeks, as outraged mobs have cast about wildly for any justification whatsoever for their desire to rip down statues, divorcing leaders and events from their historical context and in fact not making any effort to think about their context at all. Even if Douglass absolutely detested the monument, I wouldn’t cheer to see it torn down. But, as the record shows, his views were far more complex than that, which makes the lack of context even worse.