As the old saying goes, a picture is worth 1,000 words. This does not, however, mean that everyone who views an image will agree on what it is saying. The same thing is true for statues.
Americans have been arguing about the meaning of the Emancipation Memorial in Washington, D.C., ever since the image was created, erected and then dedicated. At the heart of the debates is a basic question: What is this statue saying? What is happening in this image?
Apparently, there are two ways of “reading” this statue. People who know the story that the artist was telling may — repeat “may” — see the statue differently than those who do not. The question for journalists is whether readers need to hear from people on both sides of this debate as it has unfolded over the decades and now, in the #BlackLivesMatter age, has reached a boiling point.
Here is the top of a recent Washington Post story that offered a summary of the speech that the great Frederick Douglass delivered when the statue was dedicated. Here is the overture:
On April 14, 1876, Frederick Douglass arrived at the unveiling ceremony for the Emancipation Memorial, the statue now under attack by some protesters in Washington’s Lincoln Park.
A crowd of 25,000, many of them African American, had gathered to hear Douglass speak on the 11th anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination.
By all accounts, Douglass, the great orator and abolitionist, was not pleased with the monument, which depicted Lincoln holding a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation while towering over a kneeling black man who had broken his chains.
Yes, note that the freed slave had the strength to break his own chains. Other crucial questions: Is the slave kneeling or, with one knee raised, is he rising to his feet? Also, is he rising because Lincoln has told him he should not kneel to a man? That would be the opposite of what critics see in this image.
In a GetReligion post the other day, I noted the following:
While critics claim that the statue depicts a white man towering over a subservient black man, that is not what it mean to the former slaves who created it. They knew the story behind the image.
Now, there is a crucial error in that statement that I need to correct. Former slaves funded the statue, but it was created by a white artist — Thomas Ball — working for an all-white committee. That’s a crucial part of the debates about this image.
Also, as I mentioned in the previous post, historical accounts of the creation of the statue claim that the artist was showing Lincoln beckoning to the slave to rise, stating: “Do not kneel to me; from now on, you kneel only to your God.” The model for the freed slave was Archer Alexander, who aided Union troops and, through his own efforts, escaped slavery.
Alas, this message is not included on the dedication plaque mounted on the base of the statue.
There was a different description of the statue in a Post story that ran with this headline: “Protesters denounce Abraham Lincoln statue in D.C., urge removal of Emancipation Memorial.”
Critics say the Emancipation Memorial — which shows Lincoln holding a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation as an African American man in a loincloth kneels at his feet — is demeaning in its depiction of African Americans and suggests that they were not active contributors to the cause of their own freedom.
The drive to remove the statue comes amid a wave of calls to take down monuments to figures ranging from Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee to President Theodore Roosevelt. The furor over the Lincoln statue represents a new front in that campaign, as demonstrators who decry racism set their sights on a monument to a president who is principally remembered for ending African American slavery.
No broken chains, no act of rising to his feet, no Lincolnian message that free people should kneel only to God. It is clear that many people simply do not see that content, since they do not know the story that led to the creation of the image.
This Post story also included a strong reference to the address by Douglass:
More than 25,000 people attended the statue’s dedication on April 14, 1876, the 11th anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination, including President Ulysses S. Grant. Abolitionist Frederick Douglass delivered the keynote address to the crowd, which included many black Washingtonians. In that famous speech, Douglass captured the contradictions that defined Lincoln’s work on behalf of black Americans.
“He was preeminently the white man’s president, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men,” Douglass said, while adding that for African Americans “the hour and the man of our redemption had somehow met in the person of Abraham Lincoln” and “under his wise and beneficent rule we saw ourselves gradually lifted from the depths of slavery to the heights of liberty and manhood.”
The memorial has had detractors ever since it was put in place.
The story includes plenty of voices supporting a negative view of the statue and its message, the idea that it shows a subservient black man at the feet of a towering white president. There is no material quoted in the story that offers the artist’s alternative interpretation, which has also been circulating since the statue was created.
The closest readers get to understanding the heated arguments about this monument comes at the end of the story, with this fine passage:
“I grew up in this neighborhood,” said Steve Langley, 61, an African American artist and writer who still lives in his childhood home a few blocks away. “It was a symbol of white supremacy then, and it’s a symbol of white supremacy now. And it needs to go.”
Another woman, who is also African American and lives nearby, disagreed.
“It’s about humanism,” said the woman, who declined to give her name. “Not racism. Humanism.”
The two argued for five minutes.
“We are going to have to agree to disagree,” Langley said. “We could have this debate all night long. You’re not going to change my mind, and I’m not going to change yours.”
My question: Where did these two Washingtonians get the content of their arguments? Their eyes alone, or were they quoting arguments that have been made for decades and heard in schools or in mass media?
Do readers need to hear both sides of that debate?