Boston Removes Statue of Formerly Enslaved Man Kneeling Before Lincoln (Published 2020) (2024)

A statue depicting a formerly enslaved man kneeling before President Abraham Lincoln was taken down from a Boston park on Tuesday after officials this summer voted unanimously for its removal.

The bronze statue, called “Emancipation Group,” had been a fixture of Park Square in downtown Boston since 1879, but has long courted criticism for its depiction of a freed man at the feet of Lincoln.

The statue is a replica of the Emancipation Memorial in Washington, a bronze statue intended to commemorate the Emancipation Proclamation, the executive order Lincoln signed that ended slavery in the Confederacy. They were designed by Thomas Ball, a Boston native.

In the statue, Lincoln holds the Emancipation Proclamation in his right hand. His left hovers above the shirtless back of Archer Alexander, a formerly enslaved Black man who assisted the Union Army and was captured under the Fugitive Slave Act.

Frederick Douglass, who attended the dedication of the statue in Washington, expressed his disappointment in an 1876 letter to the editor of The National Republican.

“Admirable as is the monument by Mr. Ball in Lincoln park, it does not, as it seems to me, tell the whole truth, and perhaps no one monument could be made to tell the whole truth of any subject which it might be designed to illustrate,” he wrote.