06-26-2020, 11:51 AM
Lincoln Park’s memorial to the Great Emancipator should stand
Washington Post, June 25, 2020
The article reads in part:
A few blocks from my house [Washington DC, Lincoln Park area] stands a bronze monument to Abraham Lincoln, flanked by trees in a bustling park. But a vocal few — armed with bullhorns and invective — now threaten to forcibly topple it after 144 years.
It was a poor, recently freed enslaved woman, Charlotte Scott, who, distraught over Lincoln’s assassination in 1865, declared, “Colored people had lost their best friend on earth … I will give five dollars of my wages towards erecting a monument to his memory.”
Scott’s request and contribution to the Western Sanitary Society, a charity run by white abolitionists for freedmen and Union veterans, grew as black Union veterans and freedmen exclusively gave thousands more to the project.
Donations poured in with “$4,200 from colored troops at Vicksburg; $3,200 from another colored regiment; $500 from a battery unit; and more, until over $16,000 was amassed.
On the day the statue was unveiled, a crowd of 25,000 gathered, black and white. Supreme Court justices, Cabinet officials and the president shared the park and the day with freedmen.
Washington Post, June 25, 2020
The article reads in part:
A few blocks from my house [Washington DC, Lincoln Park area] stands a bronze monument to Abraham Lincoln, flanked by trees in a bustling park. But a vocal few — armed with bullhorns and invective — now threaten to forcibly topple it after 144 years.
It was a poor, recently freed enslaved woman, Charlotte Scott, who, distraught over Lincoln’s assassination in 1865, declared, “Colored people had lost their best friend on earth … I will give five dollars of my wages towards erecting a monument to his memory.”
Scott’s request and contribution to the Western Sanitary Society, a charity run by white abolitionists for freedmen and Union veterans, grew as black Union veterans and freedmen exclusively gave thousands more to the project.
Donations poured in with “$4,200 from colored troops at Vicksburg; $3,200 from another colored regiment; $500 from a battery unit; and more, until over $16,000 was amassed.
On the day the statue was unveiled, a crowd of 25,000 gathered, black and white. Supreme Court justices, Cabinet officials and the president shared the park and the day with freedmen.