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Wednesday, February 09, 2000 Page:
For 114 YEARS, Lady Liberty has lifted her lamp beside the golden door of
New York Harbor, welcoming millions of immigrants to become citizens of a
nation that prides itself on freedom.
But researchers now suspect that the French historian who first proposed the
casting of the Statue of Liberty intended it to honor another class of
“huddled masses yearning to breathe free” – the slaves liberated during and
after the American Civil War.
It’s fitting that the accepted wisdom about one of America’s most cherished
symbols should be called into question during Black History Month, which was
designed to counteract years of neglect, distortion and suppresion of
African-American history.
The National Park Service’s investigation into the origins of Lady Liberty
may lead to a more thorough and honest discussion about the competition,
animosity and occasional violence that typified the interaction between
European immigrants and their descendants and blacks in the 19th and 20th
centuries.
According to officials histories, French historian and abolitionist Edouard
de Laboulaye proposed the statue in 1865 to commemorate the friendship between
France and the United State.
But recently uncovered – and as yet unauthenticated – documents seem to
indicate that the statue was also intended as a monument to the abolition of
American slavery and that its model was a black woman. An early 21-inch model
of the statue by its sculptor, Frederic Auguste Bartholdi, had a broken chain
around its hand. The finished 151-statue has a less noticeable broken shackle
around one foot.
By the time Bartholdi’s Liberty was erected in the harbor in 1886, European
immigration had taken off and the statue took on a new symbolism. It wasn’t
until 1903 that Emma Larzarus’ poem welcoming “the wretched refuse from your
teeming shore” was affixed to the base of the statue.
By then, Recomstruction had ended. Voting laws, Jim Crow regulations and
mob violence had largely shut blacks out of American public life while new
immigrants were clawing their way out of poverty and second-class citizenship.
If Lady Liberty was indeed intended to honor those blacks who had
unwillingly arrived on U.S. shores under circumstances even more trying than
those experienced by European immigrants, that does not diminish the
accomplishments of those later immigrants and their descendants.
But it might bring about a better appreciation for how America has been
shaped by the complicated and sometimes confrontational interaction between
citizens of various backgrounds.
Black History Month was initially proposed as a way to corrrect an
imbalance in the way many Americans study, explain and understand their own
history – an imbalance that resulted from a unwillingness to recognize the
contributions of a sizable part of our population.
By acknowledging a possible alternative history for the Statue of Liberty,
we do not minimize the contributions of any group of Americans, but rather
legitimize the contributions of all.
The “huddled masses” might have been freed salves, not immigrants.