Quote (Handcuffs @ Jun 24 2020 12:41am)
But even Fredrick Douglas had issues with the final design. The funding was indeed collected by formerly enslaved people, but my understanding is that they had no input into the design of the monument. The monument's design does in some ways depict the continuance of Black subservience to white people.
if you read Frederick Douglass's speech, he doesn't really say anything at all about the monument, its solely directed at Abraham Lincoln himself and spends half the speech criticizing him as infected with white man's prejudice and being too willing to compromise to preserve slavery. Douglass's issues were with Lincoln, and it amazes me how many words he can use to say the same thing over and over and over and over and over again until I was scrolling through like 10 pages of the same diatribe. Musta been a real windbag in life.
https://transcription.si.edu/view/12955/ACM-2007.19.32_02ex'
Quote
He was pre-eminent the white man's President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men. He was ready and willing at any time during the first years of his administration to deny, postpone, and sacrifice the rights of humanity in the colored people to promote the welfare of the white people of this country. In all his education and feeling he was an American of the Americans. He came into the Presidential chair upon one principle alone, namely, opposition to the extension of slavery. His arguments in furtherance of this policy had their motive and mainspring in his patriotic devotion to the interests of his own race. To protect, defend, and perpetuate slavery in the States where it existed Abraham Lincoln was not less ready than any other President to draw the sword of the nation. He was ready to execute all the supposed constitutional guarantees of the United States Constitution in favor of the slave system anywhere inside the slave States. He was willing to pursue, recapture, and send back the fugitive slave to his master, and to suppress a slave rising for liberty, though his guilty master were already in arms against the Government. The race to which we belong were not the special objects of his consideration. Knowing this, I concede to you, my white fellow-citizens, a pre-eminence in this worship at once full and supreme. First, midst, and last, you and yours were the objects of his deepest affection and his most earnest solicitude. You are the children of Abraham Lincoln. We are at best only his step-children; children by adoption, children by force of circumstances and necessity. To you it especially belongs to sound his praises, to preserve and perpetuate his memory, to multiply his statues, to hang his pictures high upon your walls, and commend his example, for to you he was a great and glorious friend and benefactor.
This post was edited by Goomshill on Jun 24 2020 12:24am