by NILES NIEMUTH
The unanimous decision of the Boston Art Commission (BAC) Tuesday to remove the Emancipation Group, a public monument to Abraham Lincoln and the ending of slavery, is a reactionary attack on the progressive legacy of the Civil War that will have far-reaching consequences.
The public monument that is to be removed and “temporarily” placed into storage is a replica of the Emancipation Memorial in Washington, DC, depicting Abraham Lincoln with his arm outstretched over a formerly enslaved man rising up from the ground, his shackles broken and his eyes to the sky and right fist thrust outward. The base reads “Emancipation.”
That such an attack on Lincoln and the progressive legacy of the Civil War can take place in Boston, the cradle of the American Revolution that contributed so much to the fight against the slave power, is an indication of deep historical ignorance among the general population that has been encouraged by the Democratic and Republican parties for their own political purposes.
The movement against police violence and racism that erupted after the murder of George Floyd is being derailed by the Democratic Party and its operatives down a right-wing path, turning the justified demands to tear down Confederate statues into attacks on monuments to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant and abolitionist Union officers like Robert Gould Shaw and Hans Christian Heg.
The decision in Boston sets a precedent for the removal of the original in Washington, DC on the same spurious grounds. Protestors have declared their intention to tear down the monument, and Democrat Eleanor Holmes Norton, the nonvoting representative for the nation’s capital in Congress, has announced a plan to introduce a bill authorizing the “problematic” statue’s removal from Lincoln Park.
The ignominious vote by the Boston Art Commission came after two hours of public testimony in which the gates were flung open for a flood of racialist falsifications and slanders of Lincoln and the monument.
Anne Boelcskevy, a lecturer in African American Studies at Boston University, told the commission that walking past the statue made her feel “nauseated” and repeated the false claim that abolitionist Frederick Douglass did not like the monument. Thalia Yunen, a public relations specialist at Liberty Mutual Insurance, said that the monument to emancipation was a “microaggression” against African Americans and Hispanics because it depicts Lincoln as a “white savior.”
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