The Eyes of That Time

That simple bronze monument, with two figures, a tall white man, and a black man rising on one knee, alongside him. The first ever to include a black person in our Nation’s Capital. It would share that man, with the Emancipation Proclamation at his elbow, leaning benevolently over a slave who had broken his own shackles, suggesting that the slave rise!

Emancipation Memorial

Boston’s copy was placed there as a tribute to the people of Boston by its sculptor Thomas Ball, who was born there. That is what people of America saw when they visited your statue in 1876.