BOSTON: A statue of Abraham Lincoln with a freed slave appearing to kneel at his feet optics that drew objections amid a national reckoning with racial injustice has been removed from its perch in downtown Boston.

Workers removed the Emancipation Memorial, also known as the Emancipation Group and the Freedman’s Memorial, early on Tuesday from a park just off Boston Common where it had stood since 1879.

City officials had agreed in late June to take down the memorial after complaints and a bitter debate over the design. Mayor Marty Walsh acknowledged at the time that the statue made residents and visitors alike uncomfortable.

The bronze statue is a copy of a monument that was erected in Washington, DC, three years earlier. The copy was installed in Boston because the city was home to the statues white creator, Thomas Ball.

It was created to celebrate the freeing of slaves in America and 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.

But while some saw the shirtless man rising to his feet while shaking off the broken shackles on his wrists, others perceived him as kneeling before Lincoln, his white emancipator.

Published in Dawn, December 30th, 2020