A week later more than 5,400 people have joined in his mission to petition the U.S. National Park Service to eliminate the statue, which depicts a naked slave on his knees with broken chains looking up in adoration to President Abraham Lincoln.

Also known as the Freedmen’s Memorial, the statue was paid for by free African Americans as a thank you to President Lincoln, who freed slaves in the District on April 16, 1862, prior to signing the Emancipation Proclamation in January of 1863.

In addition to Lincoln Park being NPS land, the Emancipation Memorial contributes to the Civil War Monuments of the National Register of Historic Places, thus making the monument itself a meaningful part of history.

“I recognize fully the racial limitations of the image, but I also understand its meaning as a memorial to the moment of the Emancipation Proclamation, which was understood by most people in the Black community in 1876 when the statue was erected and, in fact, this moment is still remembered and acknowledged by a great many of our people in our Watchnight Church Services on New Year’s Eve,” said Harvard University African American studies professor and Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) President Dr. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham.

Despite the historicity of the statue depicting the former President, Goodwin noted that there’s already an Abraham Lincoln monument in the District- the Georgia White marble, 175-ton, 19-foot wide and tall Lincoln Memorial.

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