A Monument to Our Shared Purpose (with Allen C. Guelzo)
- patricklewisbaker
- Jun 29, 2020
- 1 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
(On the Freedman’s Memorial in Washington, D.C.)
At the end of the Civil War, on April 11, 1865, Abraham Lincoln gave a speech proposing that, in Louisiana, freed slaves and black Union Army soldiersbe given the right to vote. An enraged white supremacist who was in attendance left promising that he would “put him through.” Three nights later, he—the actor John Wilkes Booth—did.
One hundred and fifty-five years on, it is the descendants of those Lincoln determined to free who are demanding the toppling of the bronze Freedmen’s Memorial (sometimes known as the Emancipation Memorial) to Lincoln in Lincoln Park in Washington. It “embodies the white supremacy and the disempowerment of black people,” announced Glenn Foster, the founder of Free Neighborhood, at a raucous meeting at the site on June 23. Marcus Goodwin, a candidate for the D.C. District Council, has collected more than 5,000 signatures on a petition to remove the statue…