Introduction of the Emancipation Statue Removal Act
Floor Speech
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Ms. NORTON. Madam Speaker, today, I rise to introduce the Emancipation Statue Removal Act, the first in a series of statue and memorial removal bills I will introduce during Black History Month. The bill would remove the Emancipation Statue from Lincoln Park, a federal park in the District of Columbia, and require the Secretary of the Interior to donate the statue to a museum or a similar entity.
The Emancipation Statue was dedicated on April 14, 1876, the 11th anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln's assassination. Although formerly enslaved Americans paid for this statue, it was designed and sculpted without their input, and it shows. The paternalistic statue depicting a Black man on his knees in front of President Lincoln fails to recognize African Americans' agency in pressing for their own emancipation.
Understandably, recently liberated African Americans during the Reconstruction era were grateful for any recognition of their freedom in a country where they still experienced virtually total exclusion from American life. However, even at the time of its unveiling, prominent Black Americans expressed their displeasure with the statue's design, including Frederick Douglass. During his keynote address at the statue's unveiling, Frederick Douglass pointedly did not praise the statue. Rather, in a letter to the editor of the National Republican a few days after the unveiling, Douglass expressed his dismay at the statue: ``The negro here, though rising, is still on his knees and nude. 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.''
At the end of last year, Boston removed its replica of the statue and plans to place it in a publicly accessible location where it can be better contextualized. It is time for Congress to place the original statue in a museum, too.
I strongly urge my colleagues to support this legislation.
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