A Matter of Stature

To celebrate Marian Anderson’s pivotal and breath-taking 1939 performance at the Lincoln Memorial, American Experience, the PBS series, published at their website a superb article on the history of two monuments to Lincoln in Washington, DC. Kirk Savage’s thoughtful “Who Owns a Monument?” compares the history and shifting meanings assigned to the Lincoln Memorial on the Capitol Mall and the Freedmen’s Memorial in Lincoln Park.

That prompted me to dust off the piece below, written on July 15, 2020

A Matter of Stature

What’s wrong with the Washington, D.C. Freedmen’s Memorial? The relative stature of the two figures is. The standing Lincoln and the crouching Black man express the 19th century notion that Lincoln freed the enslaved people of the United States of America. He did not. He freed the USA from the slavery system. He did not lift up African Americans; he elevated our nation’s conscience and status among nations, freeing us from the barbarism we represented.

African Americans needed no lifting up, no freeing. They were always free and knew it. That is why their enslavers had to maintain such a multifaceted, Draconian system of brutality, forced ignorance, humiliation, and entrapment of family members. From the moment the kidnapped Africans set foot on this continent they began escaping, some within days of arrival. Stripped of everything they knew – their continent, culture, their very names, the one thing they retained was their sense of freedom.

They devised ingenious strategies of survival and resistance against a monstrously vicious system that used their very capacity for love of family to hold them against their will. Some devised songs with escape instructions embedded in the lyrics. Some established support networks to assist escaped ones in fleeing north or living in the wilderness, mountains and swamps beyond the white gaze. Most formed bonds of love in the face of a demeaning social order that sought to use them as farm machinery, breeding stock and objects of rape. They loved their children even while knowing the family could be torn asunder at any change in white fortunes.

These people were always free. Think of the World War II movies about captive POWs, such as “Bridge on the River Kwai” or “The Great Escape.” If we were to create a monument to either of those events, the escapees would never be depicted as needing elevating. Those films depict free men who know they are free, who continually resist and devise means of escape, who walk on their own two feet. Those who were enslaved here were no different.

I defer to the African Americans who choose to honor the history of this memorial and agree it should stay. It was, after all paid for entirely by formerly enslaved people. Their wishes and hopes must be held sacred. But the monument needs context. I suggest interpretive signs on the new fence around it telling the history of its funding and new statuary flanking it, perhaps Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, standing equally tall beside Lincoln, striding forward with chains on the ground behind them.

Those millions of enslaved children, women and men were always free but the nation was not. Lincoln freed the USA from the inhumanity of the slavery system. More than one hundred and fifty years of legislation designed to emancipate voting and education systems continued the process of freeing us all from civic bondage to racism. Now, finally, we are engaged in authentically addressing the pervasive, systematic racism that limits the opportunities open to people of color in all areas of life, enslaves the minds of Euro-Americans, and cripples our nation’s advancement by robbing us of the accomplishments of untold brilliant innovators in the sciences and arts. Let’s dedicate ourselves to this process and free the nation of all racist systems. Freedom is the birthright of all of us. We have nothing to lose but our chains.