Lincoln Park’s memorial to the Great Emancipator should stand

[David Lockmiller]

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.