The Emancipation Memorial (sometimes referred to as the Freedman’s Memorial) features President Abraham Lincoln with the Emancipation Proclamation in his right hand and holding his left hand over the head of a liberated slave kneeling at his feet.
The bronze statue, designed by sculptor Thomas Ball, was built almost entirely with funds donated by formerly enslaved people and dedicated in 1876. The statue was unveiled on the 11th anniversary of Lincoln’s death, with Frederick Douglass delivering the keynote address and with President Ulysses S. Grant and more than 25,000 people in attendance.
Douglass immediately wrote a letter to the editor of the National Republican newspaper, which was published five days later on April 19, 1876. In it, he criticized the statue’s design and suggested the park could be improved by more dignified monuments of free Black people. “The negro here, though rising, is still on his knees and nude,” Douglass wrote. “What I want to see before I die is a monument representing the negro, not couchant on his knees like a four-footed animal, but erect on his feet like a man.”
In 2020, U.S. Delegate for D.C. Eleanor Holmes Norton announced plans to introduce legislation to remove the memorial.
This was the nation’s first monument to Lincoln: The Lincoln Memorial was dedicated in 1922.
In 1974 the statue was rotated east to face a memorial built to honor Mary McLeod Bethune, also located in Lincoln Park.
A plaque on the monument names it as “Freedom’s Memorial in grateful memory of Abraham Lincoln” and reads:
This monument was erected by the Western Sanitary Commission of Saint Louis Mo: With funds contributed solely by emancipated citizens of the United States declared free by his proclamation January 1 A.D. 1863. The first contribution of five dollars was made by Charlotte Scott. A freedwoman of Virginia being her first earnings in freedom and consecrated by her suggestion and request on the day she heard of President Lincoln’s death to build a monument to his memory.
