I am on the fence as well, it is a beautiful piece of art. I don't believe any of these things should be destroyed because they are at the end of the day art. I just don't think they should be on public spaces.
Okie dookie. I cannot imagine what could possibly go wrong with Trump sending in Marshall's......... nothing at all.
Wisconsin-Madison students want campus statue of Lincoln gone: https://www.change.org/p/university...d-replace-the-lincoln-statue-from-bascom-hill
While the person who donated the statue might've been an awful person does that taint the legacy of Lincoln? I think this is one area we do need to be careful. A lot of awful people have donated a lot of money that has gone for a lot of good causes and private philanthropy is a major support for universities, museums and other institutions of culture.
full text of Frederick Douglass's speech at the dedication of the Freedmen’s Memorial statue in 1876: https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/06/frederick-douglass-speaks.php
It doesn't taint Lincoln's legacy, but I think it does taint the symbolic worth of the statue itself.
My understanding is that the freed slaves had no say in how the statue (made in Germany) would look.... and supposedly the statue was pretty cringe worthy even back then. I do like the rather frank speech of Fredrick Douglass....... but I am guessing he was thinking of the sweet German ass of his mistress who was staying with him while his wife raised their children.
All I can say is whoever designed this was racist AF. The paternalistic white savior stands exalted over the "sort of human" figure on his knees with oddly contorted limbs and a submissive appearance. The white messiah graciously grants the half beast looking figure under him the right to be treated like a human being. Put it in a museum or put up an explanation of why the hell it looks like a man beating his dog......... or put up a new statue next to it that is more appropriate. Seriously....... these examples just highlight how incredibly racist this country has been and still is in some ways.
To respond to you and Durvasa I suspect it has to do with that they might've had a change of heart late in life and they felt guilty or to deflect from negative attention someone suggested they make a donation of a statue. I think we entering into a very problematic territory if we consider the philanthropic works of bad people to be tainted. I know there has been a lot of moves by foundations to give back money from the Sacklers of Purdue Pharma, and also donations from Harvey Weinstein. Some foundations haven't with the argument that it's not the money that raped people or got people hooked on Oxycontin. Looking back in history we have many institutions such as Rice, Stanford, and Vanderbilt all founded by people who did do horrible things yet those institutions have also done a lot of good. Should those universities not only change their names but also returns their endowments that were funded by those families?
Lincoln probably would've approved of it. Lincoln was the Great Emancipator but he never believed that blacks were equal to whites. He didn't even think that slavery should be ended until the middle of the Civil War. That said the idea behind this statue wasn't that Lincoln is lording it over the black man but that he is blessing a downtrodden black man so he can get off his knees. In this statue the pose of the black man is rising up since his gaze isn't down but lifted up. Unfortunately with modern views I can see how that can be lost in the interpretation of the piece and I agree it is probably best in a museum with an expository plaque than outside.
There is a discussion to had about all of this, that does not mean people should be destroying things willy neely. Sadly some people just want to be upset about something and will just create a controversy.
A powerful essay by Caroline Randall Williams in the New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/26/opinion/confederate-monuments-racism.html NASHVILLE I have rape-colored skin. My light-brown-blackness is a living testament to the rules, the practices, the causes of the Old South. If there are those who want to remember the legacy of the Confederacy, if they want monuments, well, then, my body is a monument. My skin is a monument. Dead Confederates are honored all over this country — with cartoonish private statues, solemn public monuments and even in the names of United States Army bases. It fortifies and heartens me to witness the protests against this practice and the growing clamor from serious, nonpartisan public servants to redress it. But there are still those — like President Trump and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell — who cannot understand the difference between rewriting and reframing the past. I say it is not a matter of “airbrushing” history, but of adding a new perspective. I am a black, Southern woman, and of my immediate white male ancestors, all of them were rapists. My very existence is a relic of slavery and Jim Crow. It is an extraordinary truth of my life that I am biologically more than half white, and yet I have no white people in my genealogy in living memory. No. Voluntary. Whiteness. I am more than half white, and none of it was consensual. White Southern men — my ancestors — took what they wanted from women they did not love, over whom they had extraordinary power, and then failed to claim their children. What is a monument but a standing memory? An artifact to make tangible the truth of the past. My body and blood are a tangible truth of the South and its past. The black people I come from were owned by the white people I come from. The white people I come from fought and died for their Lost Cause. And I ask you now, who dares to tell me to celebrate them? Who dares to ask me to accept their mounted pedestals? You cannot dismiss me as someone who doesn’t understand. You cannot say it wasn’t my family members who fought and died. My blackness does not put me on the other side of anything. It puts me squarely at the heart of the debate. I don’t just come from the South. I come from Confederates. I’ve got rebel-gray blue blood coursing my veins. My great-grandfather Will was raised with the knowledge that Edmund Pettus was his father. Pettus, the storied Confederate general, the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, the man for whom Selma’s Bloody Sunday Bridge is named. So I am not an outsider who makes these demands. I am a great-great-granddaughter. And here I’m called to say that there is much about the South that is precious to me. I do my best teaching and writing here. There is, however, a peculiar model of Southern pride that must now, at long last, be reckoned with. This is not an ignorant pride but a defiant one. It is a pride that says, “Our history is rich, our causes are justified, our ancestors lie beyond reproach.” It is a pining for greatness, if you will, a wish again for a certain kind of American memory. A monument-worthy memory. But here’s the thing: Our ancestors don’t deserve your unconditional pride. Yes, I am proud of every one of my black ancestors who survived slavery. They earned that pride, by any decent person’s reckoning. But I am not proud of the white ancestors whom I know, by virtue of my very existence, to be bad actors. Among the apologists for the Southern cause and for its monuments, there are those who dismiss the hardships of the past. They imagine a world of benevolent masters, and speak with misty eyes of gentility and honor and the land. They deny plantation rape, or explain it away, or question the degree of frequency with which it occurred. To those people it is my privilege to say, I am proof. I am proof that whatever else the South might have been, or might believe itself to be, it was and is a space whose prosperity and sense of romance and nostalgia were built upon the grievous exploitation of black life. The dream version of the Old South never existed. Any manufactured monument to that time in that place tells half a truth at best. The ideas and ideals it purports to honor are not real. To those who have embraced these delusions: Now is the time to re-examine your position. Either you have been blind to a truth that my body’s story forces you to see, or you really do mean to honor the oppressors at the expense of the oppressed, and you must at last acknowledge your emotional investment in a legacy of hate. Either way, I say the monuments of stone and metal, the monuments of cloth and wood, all the man-made monuments, must come down. I defy any sentimental Southerner to defend our ancestors to me. I am quite literally made of the reasons to strip them of their laurels.
Forget strippers and bartenders It's going to be hard being a Sculptor in this new era Got to find a new line of work
The whole point of the civil war was slavery. if he didn't think slavery needed to be ended what was the point of the civil war? If you want to say it was states rights, the biggest issue was these states wanted to have slaves.
