page_title: Emancipation Memorial
section_title: Funding
hierarchical_section_title: Emancipation Memorial / Funding
caption_attribution_description: English: Emancipation Memorial, Lincoln Park, Capitol Hill, Washington DC 2014
context_page_description: The Emancipation Memorial, also known as the Freedman's Memorial or the Emancipation Group is a monument in Lincoln Park in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Washington, D.C. It was sometimes referred to as the "Lincoln Memorial" before the more prominent so-named memorial was dedicated in 1922.
  Designed and sculpted by Thomas Ball and erected in 1876, the monument depicts Abraham Lincoln holding a copy of his Emancipation Proclamation freeing a male African American slave modeled on Archer Alexander. The ex-slave is depicted on one knee, about to stand up, with one fist clenched, shirtless and broken shackles at the president's feet.
  The Emancipation Memorial statue was funded by the wages of freed slaves. The statue originally faced west towards the U.S. Capitol until it was rotated east in 1974 in order to face the newly erected Mary McLeod Bethune Memorial.
  The statue is a contributing monument to the Civil War Monuments in Washington, D.C. on the National Register of Historic Places.
context_section_description: The funding drive for the monument began, according to much-publicized newspaper accounts from the era, with $5 given by former slave Charlotte Scott of Virginia, then residing with the family of her former master in Marietta, Ohio, for the purpose of creating a memorial honoring Lincoln.  The Western Sanitary Commission, a St. Louis-based  volunteer war-relief agency, joined the effort and raised some $20,000 before announcing a new $50,000 goal.
  According to the National Park Service, the monument was paid for solely by former slaves:
  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 turbulent politics of the reconstruction era affected the fundraising campaign on many levels.  The Colored People's Educational Monument Association headed by Henry Highland Garnet wanted the monument to serve a didactic purpose as a school where freedmen could elevate themselves through learning. Frederick Douglass disagreed and thought the goal of education was incommensurate with that of remembering Lincoln.
caption: The Emancipation Memorial in 2014
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