The closest thing the United States has to a national monument to the end of slavery is in a park in the capital, a little more than half a mile from the National Mall. It depicts two figures: Abraham Lincoln, tall and stately, holding out his left arm and looking down at a barely clothed Black man with broken shackles kneeling at his feet. A single word, Emancipation, is emblazoned on the base below him. Dedicated on April 14, 1876, the 11th anniversary of Lincoln's assassination'and 150 years ago this month'the imagery of the Freedman's Memorial was as unsettling then as it is now. What had begun as an effort among Black Americans to honor the fallen president and emancipation has become a bronze-cast symbol of the movement's limits. The story of the Freedman's Memorial shows just how quickly a nation's ideals can erode. The concept for the monument began with a single donation of $5 from a formerly enslaved woman named Charlotte Scott following Lincoln's assassination. The...
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