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Lincoln Park - A Lens on Two Legacies. 

This park celebrates two of the nation’s greatest leaders. Before there was the Lincoln Memorial, that was Lincoln Park. Today, it is also home to the Mary Mcleod Bethune Memorial…And the Emancipation Statue. The Mary McLeod Bethune Statue was unveiled on July 10, 1974, the 99th anniversary of her birth. The statue features Mrs. Bethune handing a copy of her legacy to two children. Bethune was an educator, presidential advisor and civil rights activist. She was the first person in her family born free and the only one with a formal education. She founded the Daytona Normal and Industrial School for NEgro oGirls, which she developend into Bethune-Cookman College…one of the few institutions in the Southern U.S. where African Americans could attend college.  In 1935, Bethune became the highest ranking African American woman in the federal government. President Roosevelt appointed her Director of the Negro Division of the NAtional Youth Administration, a New Deal program. And in an effort to combat racial, class, and gender discrimination worldwide…she founded the National Council of Negro Women. This was the first monument to honor a black woman in a public park in D.C. The Emancipation statue was unveiled on April 14, 1876, the 11th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s death. The African American man was modeled after Archer Alexander, the last enslaved person captured under the Fugitive Slave Act in Missouri. An African American woman named Charlotte Scott, used her first $5 earned in freedom to start a fundraising campaign for the memorial. Formerly enslaved African Americans, many of them Union veterans, were the sole contributors to the statue.  In 2018, the National Park Service re-created the unveiling ceremony to celebrate DC Emancipation Day.  Frederick Douglass delivered the keynote address before President Ulysses S. Grant and members of the Congress. The bicentennial of Douglass’s birth was in 2018. For many people, including Douglass, the monument perpetuated stereotypes about black peoples’ ability and participation in anti-slavery activity.“ Truth Compels me to admit, even here in the presence of the monument we have erected to his memory, Abraham Lincoln was not in the fullest sense of the word, either our man or our model. In his interest, in his associations, in his habits of thought, and in his prejudices, he was a white man.” The National Park Service hosted a community dialogue to talk about the statue. “Are you hearing anything you’ve never heard before? as far as the history of the statue? Yeah?” “As someone who lives in this neighborhood, and as a millennial, I definitely see this statue as… offensive. But I think its history and the whole scope of who raised the money for it, who built it, what expression of loss and pain and honor came from formerly enslaved black people, I think it’s in large part a reflection of that same spirit. So I think history essentially is just never black and white.”  Both Statues were seen by many as progressive in their own time.  The statues still play a role in helping visitors reflect on the past. To learn more about Lincoln Park visit: nps.gov/cahi 

Duration:

3 minutes, 31 seconds

In Lincoln Park, you can find statues to two important figures in the American civil rights movement: Abraham Lincoln and Mary McLeod Bethune. Both have stories to tell.