This was the scene at Lincoln Park this evening; Sahraa wouldn’t let me take too many pictures, and in fact she knew something was off about the whole thing and clearly didn’t want to stick around. Maybe it was the horses. (See previous three pictures for the rest of the story.)

The protest is now scheduled for tomorrow, when the street surrounding the park will be closed to traffic. I really don’t like the idea of this going on less than a block from our house.

Some information on the statue:

The Emancipation Memorial, also known as the Freedman's Memorial or the Emancipation Group, and sometimes referred to as the "Lincoln Memorial" before the more prominent so-named memorial was dedicated in 1922, is a monument in Lincoln Park in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Washington, D.C.

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, with one fist clenched, shirtless and shackled at the president's feet.

"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) ..." (according to the National Park Service)


Best to view in "Original" because other versions resized by Pbase are decidedly unsharp.

Winding down, posted earlier: