Kirk Savage, PhD is the William S. Dietrich IProfessor at University of Pittsburgh. According to his bio, Savage has ” taught and written about public monuments and public art as they intersect with issues of loss, trauma, deindustrialization, militarism, and racial justice. As a scholar and teacher, he takes seriously the responsibility to reckon honestly with the past, bearing in mind Ta-Nehisi Coates’ admonition, “You must struggle to truly remember this past in all its nuance, error, and humanity.” Because monuments are a microcosm of the world their makers hope to enforce or to invent, every research project necessarily has social, political, and ethical dimensions. With much of the world now finally turning its attention to the legacies of white supremacy built into the memorial landscape, Kirk has been working more intensively with artists, planners, preservationists, and activists in the public sphere who are looking for new ways forward. He is proud to be serving on the advisory board of the innovative organization Monument Lab, and to consult with other organizations that are reexamining their intersection with – or their stewardship of – the memorial landscape.”
On a Saturday in April 2000, I woke up early and made the four-hour drive from Pittsburgh to Washington, D.C. to see Emancipation Day celebrated in Lincoln Park. One hundred and thirty-eight years earlier, on April 16, 1862, Abraham Lincoln signed a law freeing the 3,000 human beings enslaved in the District. The act granted financial compensation too – not to the people who deserved it most, but to their enslavers, the very men made rich off the backs of their enslaved laborers. It was this weirdly unjust act of justice that had become DC’s own special holiday, honored off and on into the twenty-first century.
On that cool spring day in 2000, the festivities unfolded against the backdrop of a notorious memorial erected in 1876. This was the Freedmen’s Memorial to Abraham Lincoln, financed by the remarkable generosity of poor Black Union soldiers in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. Over the years the monument had become better known, and indeed iconic, as the “Emancipation Memorial.” It featured a mostly nude black man crouching at the feet of Abraham Lincoln, a white savior bestowing the gift of freedom on a man just awakening to his newfound condition. It was this same monument that had inspired such mixed feelings from Frederick Douglass, who said he wanted a figure not “on his knees like a four-footed animal, but erect on his feet like a man.” It was also the monument I chose for the cover of my first book. That book contended that the nation’s monuments to the Civil War and emancipation had profoundly failed the American people, having wasted a golden opportunity to imagine a new interracial freedom. Watching the ceremonies that day, I couldn’t help wondering if we would ever be able to create a monument that was even remotely adequate to the great promise of emancipation.
Fast forward twenty-one years to last year. On September 22, two weeks after the equestrian statue of Robert E. Lee finally came down from its pedestal on Monument Avenue, a million-dollar Monument to Emancipation and Freedom was unveiled in downtown Richmond before the Mayor and Governor and a crowd of two hundred. Correcting the most obvious flaw of the old Emancipation Memorial, this new monument refuses to glorify white agency. Instead two colossal, beautifully modelled bronze figures of a Black man and Black woman, facing in opposite directions, fill the space. Smaller portraits along the pedestal represent ten historical Black figures known for their resistance and activism. With this rich representation, it is still worth asking whether the monument has met the moment.
Douglass would certainly have been happy with the Black freedman who stands erect “like a man,” not to mention shirtless, revealing a perfect muscular physique, despite the scars of the whip on his back. For Douglass, freedom was mainly about Negro manhood. The woman also stands mightily erect, though she cradles an infant in her left arm. If the gender roles are traditional, the figures with their backs turned to each other deny us the easy, comforting resolution of a family grouping.
With her right arm the woman holds up a sheet with the date of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, January 1, 1863. It’s an odd choice since the proclamation had no local effect in Richmond. Slavery held on for more than two full, crushing years in the capital of the Confederacy, until the city finally fell to the Union army on April 3, 1865. In later years this early April date became Richmond’s “Juneteenth,” celebrated in parades and speeches. The January 1st date held aloft in the woman’s hand is not the only allusion in Richmond’s new monument to the messaging behind the old Emancipation Memorial. One of the ten historical portraits on the pedestal depicts John Mercer Langston, who worked as an official fundraiser for the Freedmen’s Memorial. His pitch asked freedmen to show their appreciation that “Lincoln was our emancipator.”
Perhaps it is too much to ask any monument to emancipation in the U.S. to overthrow all the old baggage of the theme, especially when we are still living in the shadows of so many problematic histories. Whether we date emancipation to April 16 or January 1 or April 3, it remains an unfinished process. None of us knows what shape it will ultimately take in future history. Richmond’s new monument is less a statement about history than a source of inspiration for the struggle that must and will continue. If that struggle ever ends in triumph, there may be no need for a monument to mark its passing.
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This post was previously published on Historian Speaks.
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