Emancipation Memorial

Freed people paid for it. Others chose it. Its main speaker went after it in the newspaper within the week.

Collection: Washington: More Stories · USA · Open in OpenStreetMap

How the story begins

The first five dollars Charlotte Scott earned in freedom went toward this statue. She was sixty, lately enslaved in Virginia, and she gave it the morning after Lincoln died. Other Black Americans followed, until they had given some twenty thousand dollars. A white-run body in St. Louis, the Western Sanitary Commission, held the money and picked the design. The Park Service puts it in nine words: "Black folks paid for it; white folks chose it."

The rest is in the app. Peplos plays the full story when you reach the place. You can also listen ahead of time.

Visiting

Lincoln Park, East Capitol Street between 11th and 13th Streets. Open public park.

Sources

• National Park Service: Emancipation Statue
• National Park Service: Emancipation Memorial
• Mental Floss: Frederick Douglass's letter about monuments
• Frederick Douglass, Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln (1876), Teaching American History

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