The Emancipation Memorial in Lincoln Park was funded entirely by freedmen and women. They should have gone with Harriet Hosmer& #39;s design — which would have showed Abraham Lincoln flanked by black Civil War soldiers — but the act of commemoration here doesn& #39;t deserve to be torched. https://twitter.com/shomaristone/status/1275554703955365888">https://twitter.com/shomarist...

The statue is cringe. Even in its own time it was deemed paternalistic. Still, its debut in 1876 drew a crowd of 25,000 people. Frederick Douglass delivered the keynote. The big storyline at the time was about how it was paid for entirely by formerly enslaved people — a big deal.

Capitol Hill residents would like nothing more than for protesters to tear it down. It& #39;s an important artifact, though! The line has migrated from tearing down all the Confederate memorials built during Jim Crow to terrorize African Americans if we are torching freedmen& #39;s statues