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Activists Want to Tear Down an Abraham Lincoln Statue Next - A Statue Tied Directly to Freed Slaves

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A statue of Abraham Lincoln that has stood in Park Square in Boston, MA, for more than a century honoring the "Great Emancipator" has now been targeted by an activist. 

The Boston Globe reports Tory Bullock, a social media influencer, appealed to Mayor Martin J. Walsh to remove the memorial to Lincoln. He has also started a petition drive to have the statue removed. 

"Dear Boston. This statue needs to go," wrote Bullock, signing it: "Your Black Friend." 

The statue of the 16th President shows him standing by a black slave who is shirtless and down on one knee. One of Lincoln's hands is extended over the man as though motioning him to rise. The man's shackles are broken. In the president's other hand is a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation – the document that would ultimately give all slaves in the US their freedom at the end of the Civil War. 

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The pedestal on the memorial carries the inscription: "A race set free and the country at peace. Lincoln rests from his labors."

Bullock explained to the newspaper that as a young black man from nearby Dorchester, he didn't see Lincoln as a liberator. He sees a white man standing over a less powerful black human.

Now Mayor Walsh, who last week declared racism a public health crisis, is willing to engage in a dialogue about the statue's future in Boston, The Globe reported. 

The statue is a replica of the Emancipation Memorial (or Freedman's Memorial) in Washington, DC. The original monument was paid for solely by former slaves, according to the National Park Service. 

"The campaign for the Freedmen's Memorial Monument to Abraham Lincoln, as it was to be known, was not the only effort of the time to build a monument to Lincoln; however, as the only one soliciting contributions exclusively from those who had most directly benefited from Lincoln's act of emancipation it had a special appeal ... The funds were collected solely from freed slaves (primarily from African American Union veterans)" - the park service explained. 

Boston's replica monument was donated to Boston in 1879 by a man named Moses Kimball, who once worked for the Boston Museum. The memorial's sculptor, Thomas Ball, once worked for Kimball at the same museum. 

Jeremy Frankel, a writer for The Dan Bongino Show noted, "The mayor's office said that Walsh wants a "community discussion" about its future and whether a "new statue commemorating the end of slavery should be commissioned to take its place."

Boston's replica of Washington's Emancipation Memorial was intended to show Lincoln freeing the slave, but "the new petition says it isn't good enough", saying that it "represents us still beneath someone else."

Tory Bullock, the petition's organizer, says the statue, while purporting to represent freedom, actually represents submissiveness, and would like to see it replaced with a statue representing equality.

"Just another example of how the Left ruins everything," Frankel said.

As CBN News reported, last week protesters wrecked a statue of Philadelphia abolitionist and philanthropist Matthias Baldwin. They defaced the face of the statue, covered it in paint, and scrawled the word "colonizer" on the sculpture's pedestal.

Baldwin was a 19th-century entrepreneur, whose plant built more than 1,500 locomotives, not only argued against slavery and for the right of black Americans to vote but also used his own, personal income to pay for the education of black children.

"He hired blacks in his shops when that was not the norm," said Joe Walsh, a member of the Friends of Matthias Baldwin Park, in an email to National Review. "He was BLM (Black Lives Matter) before there was a slogan."

"The irony of vandalizing a monument to those who died to end slavery is lost" on them, Walsh added.

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About The Author

Steve Warren is a senior multimedia producer for CBN News. Warren has worked in the news departments of television stations and cable networks across the country. In addition, he also worked as a producer-director in television production and on-air promotion. A Civil War historian, he authored the book The Second Battle of Cabin Creek: Brilliant Victory. It was the companion book to the television documentary titled Last Raid at Cabin Creek currently streaming on Amazon Prime. He holds an M.A. in Journalism from the University of Oklahoma and a B.A. in Communication from the University of