“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
This inscription, on the world famous Statue of Liberty, conveyed a poignant message of hope to the countless thousands of refugees who were fleeing a war-torn, poverty stricken Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
As their ships completed the dangerous voyage across the Atlantic and reached New York, the statue would have been one of the first sights to greet them; a burnished colossus, promising freedom and new opportunity when they reached the shore.
But while it provided a spectacular welcome for them, it was not nearly so well received by black people in the USA. On its unveiling in 1886, The Cleveland Gazette, an African American newspaper of the time, thundered in an editorial:
“Shove the Bartholdi statue, torch and all, into the ocean until the “liberty” of this country is such as to make it possible for an inoffensive and industrious colored man to earn a respectable living for himself and family, without being ku-kluxed, perhaps murdered, his daughter and wife outraged, and his property destroyed. The idea of the “liberty” of this country “enlightening the world,” or even Patagonia, is ridiculous in the extreme.”
The ‘Bartholdi’ it refers to was Frédéric Bartholdi, the sculptor who designed the statue for its instigator, Édouard René de Laboulaye. They would have been deeply saddened by the comment, as their original intention was to celebrate the USA’s abolition of slavery.
Front page of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, week ending June 13, 1885. Source: Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain
De Laboulaye was an active abolitionist and President of the French Anti-Slavery Society. In a new book entitled The Statue of Liberty: A Transatlantic Story, Professor Ed Berenson asserts that the earliest designs of the statue symbolized the end of slavery much more strongly.
In an interview with Vice magazine, he explains:
“In the summer of 1871, Bartholdi traveled to the United States. He brought with him some sketches of a new statue … and he had a couple of small clay models that he put together. Those early statues still had the original idea, because there were broken chains in the hands that symbolized the abolition of slavery. And as those sketches evolved, the chains shrunk until all that’s left of them is what we see today, which is a chain under the Statue of Liberty’s foot. So you get a morphing of the Statue of Liberty from mainly being about the abolition of slavery to now being more generally about American liberty.”
Berenson goes on to point out that, by the time the statue was completed and shipped to France, 20 years had passed since the end of the American Civil War and the freeing of slaves. He says:
“The United States was trying to forget about the Civil War. It was trying to reunify, and that reunification took place at the expense of African Americans.
“But when you forget about the Civil War in order for the country to come back together, you forget about the terrible oppression that a whole group of people suffered. And when you forget about that terrible oppression, you’re less likely to be sympathetic to their demands for reform or better treatment or acknowledgement of the way history has treated them.”
He ends his interview with a nod to the political climate we are living in now:
“With all of our controversies over immigration, with our racial animosities and racial conflict, I think that if the three important meanings of the Statue of Liberty—liberty, abolition, and welcome to immigrants from around the world—if all of those things were remembered more explicitly, it might be a way of injecting something positive into our political situation that has become so troubled today.”
His views have been widely endorsed by other historians. Some of them even claim that the figure in the statue was originally intended to be a black woman. This video tells their story.
Featured image: George Hodan/PublicDomainPictures.net/CCo 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication
