Clint Smith’s 2021 book “How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America,” looks at the connection between the Statue of Liberty and the end of African slavery in the United States.
Smith wrote: “For most of my life the Statue of Liberty was one of a number of pieces of American iconography that seemed to memorialize an idea that had never materialized. It is a feeling I suspect many Black Americans experience with respect to pieces of history that commemorate an ideal of U.S. history.”
The Tenement Museum’s president, Dr. Annie Polland, said Smith’s reflections on the Statue of Liberty—along with his remembrance of James Baldwin’s 1960 short story “This Morning, This Evening, So Soon,” which has a Black man watch a white father tell his daughter about the grand symbolism of the statue and yet note, “I would never know what this statue meant to others, she had always been an ugly joke for me”—gave her museum the impetus to partner with the Cooper Union on a program about why Lady Liberty was initially created and the ways it has been interpreted in the U.S. over the years.
“Rethinking the Statue of Liberty,” which took place Oct. 8, featured Smith, Hunter College sociology professor Nancy Foner, New York University (NYU) history professor Edward Berenson, and playwright Anna Deavere Smith, who also teaches at NYU.
Smith’s book looks at how the legacy of African enslavement is acknowledged at times but more often obscured throughout the United States. In New York City, the fact that the Statue of Liberty was created to commemorate the end of African slavery is hidden within the statue itself: Original designs for the statue featured Lady Liberty’s left hand discarding the broken chains of slavery, instead of supporting the tablet she now carries.
According to Berenson, the statue’s model was altered over the space of five years after its original design in 1870. The Reconstruction era, which followed the U.S. Civil War, was so volatile that a gift from France that highlighted the broken chains of slavery would have been controversial. In the U.S., northerners joined southerners in not wanting to spotlight the crimes that had been perpetrated against Black people. In France, Berenson said, the then-recent convening of the revolutionary Paris Commune, which could have permanently upended that nation’s system of government, remained a sore spot.
“The radicalism behind that also scared those who were involved in conceptualizing the Statue of Liberty, so I think it was the fear of both how Reconstruction unfolded and the radicalism of the Paris Commune [that] led to a distancing from the idea of commemorating the abolition of slavery,” Berenson said.
Fundraising for the Statue of Liberty and its establishment in New York Harbor took more than two decades to complete; neither the French nor U.S. government paid for it. Private citizens from both nations donated all the monies for the statue.
But not all private citizens were interested in celebrating Lady Liberty. Smith read excerpts from articles and letters from groups that did not want to partake in any celebration of the Statue of Liberty. Suffragettes called the unveiling of a Statue of Liberty who had the body of a woman a farce since U.S. women were not truly free. Chinese immigrants, who suffered race-based immigration restrictions under the Chinese Exclusion Act, called celebrations of a liberty statue and appeals to help fund it an insult.
Foner, who was part of the recent redesign of the exhibition space on Ellis Island, noted that one of the new documentaries at the site, points to Lady Liberty’s abolitionist movement origins.
The Ellis Island documentary also re-examines the understanding of the “liberty” immigrants received in the U.S., Foner added. The first waves of immigrants to arrive at Ellis Island were despised and referred to as the dregs of Europe. The large numbers of eastern and southern European Jews and Italians who came to the U.S. in the early 1900s were often said to be undermining U.S. values and “polluting America’s racial stock,” Foner said. They faced housing, educational, and job discrimination.
It wasn’t until the late 1950s to early 1960s, when the children of this generation of immigrants had assimilated and often intermarried with other European ethnic groups, and after immigration levels began to drop, that immigration waves were viewed nostalgically. “Nativism,” or efforts to keep immigrants from entering a country, “seems to never disappear in American society,” Foner said: “It rears its head periodically when there are these huge immigration flows.”
The exclusions and discriminations immigrants and enslaved Black people experienced in the U.S. can’t be forgotten, particularly in the context of the statements coming out of the campaign of former President Trump, who promises to install a virulent nativist administration if he is re-elected to office. “Knowing that other groups in the past experienced this hostility and nativism, and had difficulties being accepted into American society, and that they eventually were, gives a lot of immigrants—certainly, my students at the City University of New York and people that I’ve interviewed in my research—an identification with immigrants in the past,” said Foner, “and a feeling that there may be hope for the future, so let’s hope there is better hope for the future.”
“Rethinking the Statue of Liberty” can be viewed on the Cooper Union’s YouTube channel. The Tenement Museum will also hold the free virtual Tenement Talk “Three Historians Walk into a Saloon: Immigration and Voting Rights,” featuring Jelani Cobb, dean of the Columbia University School of Journalism, and Columbia University history professor Mae Ngai, on YouTube on Oct. 21, at 6:30 p.m.