'Power to the people': Protesters plan to topple Emancipation Memorial Friday evening despite new protective fence
by Nicholas Rowan, Staff Writer
| June 25, 2020 07:54 PM
Washington, D.C. — Police on Thursday built a fence around the Emancipation Memorial, after an activist announced during a Tuesday rally that he intends to tear it down.
The activist, Harvard University junior Glenn Foster, told a crowd of about 200 people that the memorial, which depicts President Abraham Lincoln ending slavery, embodies the “disempowerment of black people that is forced upon us by white people.†And after decrying systemic racism in the United States, he announced that he, along with his newly formed group, The Freedom Neighborhood, would pull it down with ropes on Thursday.
Foster’s proclamation went viral, igniting a heated debate over the memorial, which, although financed entirely by freed slaves and dedicated by abolitionist Frederick Douglass, has long been controversial. That same day, Washington, D.C., shadow Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton announced that she would like to see the “problematic†statue of Lincoln and a newly freed slave “placed in a museum.â€
As tension around the memorial tightened, police increased their presence in Lincoln Park, where it is located. At one point on Wednesday, more than eight police vehicles were parked on either side of the statue. And on Thursday, while construction crews enclosed the memorial in a fence and concrete barriers, the U.S. Park Police told the Washington Examiner that they intend to keep the protection up “as long as people keep protesting.â€
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https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/power-to-the-people-protesters-plan-to-topple-emancipation-memorial-friday-evening-despite-new-protective-fence
