Boston removes statue of freed slave kneeling before Lincoln

Statue had drawn objections for a number of years

(AP)

A statue of Abraham Lincoln with a freed slave appearing to kneel at his feet has been taken down in Boston.

The Emancipation Memorial was removed from its perch near Boston Common early on Tuesday morning.

The optics of the statue had drawn objections for some time, and the national reckoning with racial injustice and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement hastened action.

While some saw a Black man rising up and shaking off the broken shackles from his wrists, others saw him kneeling before the president, his white emancipator.

Officials had agreed in late June to take down the memorial, a copy of a monument erected in Washington, DC in 1876. The Boston version was put up in 1879 as its creator Thomas Ball was from the city.

Mayor Marty Walsh acknowledged in June that the design made both residents and visitors “uncomfortable”, despite its originally intended meaning. The Boston Art Commission voted unanimously to remove the statue.

The mayor said: “After engaging in a public process, it's clear that residents and visitors to Boston have been uncomfortable with this statue, and its reductive representation of the Black man's role in the abolitionist movement. I fully support the Boston Art Commission's decision for removal and thank them for their work."

The original was created to celebrate freedom from slavery, and paid for by freed Black donors, while the Boston version was financed by Moses Kimball, the white politician and circus showman.

The freed slave depicted was based on Archer Alexander, a Black man who escaped slavery, helped the Union Army, and was the last man recaptured under the Fugitive Slave Act.

Both versions are inscribed with the words: “A race set free and the country at peace. Lincoln rests from his labors.”

The original in Washington became a flashpoint of protests in the summer with demonstrators vowing to tear it down. The National Guard was subsequently dispatched to guard it.

Boston had been reviewing the status of the memorial since 2018 when a comprehensive review of public sculptures, monuments and artwork was launched to assess whether they reflected the diversity of the city and did not cause offence.

Works with “problematic histories” were given extra attention by the arts commission.

The statue will now be stored while officials determine how to display the memorial in a new public setting such as a museum, providing it context.