As the old saying goes, a picture is worth 1,000 words. This does not, however, mean that everyone who views an image will agree on what it is saying. The same thing is true for statues.
Americans have been arguing about the meaning of the Emancipation Memorial in Washington, D.C., ever since the image was created, erected and then dedicated. At the heart of the debates is a basic question: What is this statue saying? What is happening in this image?
Apparently, there are two ways of “reading” this statue. People who know the story that the artist was telling may — repeat “may” — see the statue differently than those who do not. The question for journalists is whether readers need to hear from people on both sides of this debate as it has unfolded over the decades and now, in the #BlackLivesMatter age, has reached a boiling point.
Here is the top of a recent Washington Post story that offered a summary of the speech that the great Frederick Douglass delivered when the statue was dedicated. Here is the overture:
On April 14, 1876, Frederick Douglass arrived at the unveiling ceremony for the Emancipation Memorial, the statue now under attack by some protesters in Washington’s Lincoln Park.
A crowd of 25,000, many of them African American, had gathered to hear Douglass speak on the 11th anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination.
By all accounts, Douglass, the great orator and abolitionist, was not pleased with the monument, which depicted Lincoln holding a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation while towering over a kneeling black man who had broken his chains.
Yes, note that the freed slave had the strength to break his own chains. Other crucial questions: Is the slave kneeling or, with one knee raised, is he rising to his feet? Also, is he rising because Lincoln has told him he should not kneel to a man? That would be the opposite of what critics see in this image.
