Meta Warrick Fuller, Emancipation

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0:00:06.9 Dr. Renée Ater: We are in the south end of Boston in Harriet Tubman Square, and in this park is housed a memorial created by Meta Warrick Fuller entitled Emancipation, originally created in plaster around 1912–1913, cast in bronze in 1999 and put in this park. She was commissioned by W.E.B. Du Bois, the political theorist and civil rights activist, to create this monument for the National Emancipation Exposition, which opened in New York City in October of 1913.

0:00:42.0 Dr. Beth Harris: This is just one of many events planned to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation.

0:00:49.8 Dr. Renée Ater: It’s really important that African Americans choose to represent emancipation through their own lens, through their own claiming of history, but also to re-situate slavery as essential to the story of the Civil War.

0:01:03.4 Dr. Beth Harris: The memory of the Civil War was conceived in terms of reconciliation, and the memory of slavery was really marginalized.

0:01:12.0 Dr. Renée Ater: And it’s interesting to think back even before this celebration in 1913, Frederick Douglass, he’s pushing really hard for this recognition that there’s starting to be an obscuring of slavery as part of the reasons of the Civil War, and that this focus on reconciliation displaces African Americans from this story of the Civil War.

0:01:31.6 Dr. Beth Harris: And in fact, ends up heroizing Confederate soldiers within the myth of the Lost Cause.

0:01:38.5 Dr. Renée Ater: So at the same moment that you’re having the rise of the Lost Cause, you’re having this quest to remember emancipation, you also have the 50th anniversary of Gettysburg. And so at Gettysburg, there’s this moment where Union and Confederate soldiers reach across the line and shake hands, and it’s supposed to be symbolic of this moment of reconciliation. But what is important about the African American men and women who are participating in the National Emancipation Exposition, is to reclaim history, to tell a story that is more nuanced, a story that focuses on both slavery as an institution, but also looks to the future, looks forward to the ways in which African Americans have made progress in the United States.

0:02:19.9 Dr. Beth Harris: And I think that’s exactly what this sculpture is about.

0:02:23.0 Dr. Renée Ater: So in the image, we have two semi-nude figures at the front of the statue, a man and a young woman. The young man wears what looks to be a loincloth. We see a young woman who is bare-breasted, wrapped around her waist is a piece of cloth, her hair is braided. Fuller wants to be sure that you understand that these are a Black man and woman who are making steps into the future. And Fuller said that she had looked to ethnographic photographs of a Senegalese when she created that image. The two figures are standing under what is a tree-like form, almost like hands over their heads. But behind the young man is an allegorical figure of humanity who has one hand resting on his shoulder while she covers her forehead, signaling that she understands that this move to emancipation, the move to freedom, is a difficult one. What I’ve always found fascinating is that the man stands with his feet together, and it is in fact the female who’s taking the step forward.

0:03:22.9 Dr. Beth Harris: There’s a confidence not only in her body and this lovely contrapposto, but her pose is so much more natural than the male figure who has his palms turned forward and seems to be more hesitant about moving forward.

0:03:37.8 Dr. Renée Ater: I’ve always wondered as a woman artist who had to work very hard for recognition, that this is her celebration of the place of Black women in self-emancipation, of Black women being leaders to progress.

0:03:51.2 Dr. Beth Harris: I think it’s so interesting that we don’t have the usual iconography of the shackles, the kneeling Black figure. She’s inventing a new iconography to think about and memorialize emancipation.

0:04:04.0 Dr. Renée Ater: So it’s really important that she’s resisting this standard iconography, particularly the Thomas Ball Emancipation Statue that is in Washington, D.C. There is also a cast here in Boston that has since been removed. The idea of Abraham Lincoln as the emancipator with a crouching Black man at his feet with shackles broken was really offensive for some.

0:04:22.5 Dr. Beth Harris: So Fuller is giving us these two figures who are very specifically African, and they’re also nude.

0:04:28.7 Dr. Renée Ater: For the men and women who are involved in the National Emancipation Exposition, respectability politics are at play. So the notion that Black men wear a tie and jacket and a hat and are educated and that women are wearing high-necked blouses and are the domain of their home. And so when this statue was shown, and we should say that it was shown inside a pseudo-Egyptian temple, people were what I would say flummoxed about, how do we deal with this nudity? What are we to understand it to be doing? And what I can say here is that she also was highly influenced by the French sculptor Auguste Rodin, who worked with the nude often. And she’s not only interested in the nude body, but also in capturing interiority, this sense of the emotions, the psychology of being human. What we do know is that there was very little critical response to it. I believe that someone from the New York Age said that it was unusual. And that to me is so coded. When someone uses that kind of word, they’re trying to sort out like, what do we make of the nudity? Why do they look like they’re African? Why are they wearing what seems to be traditional African clothing?

0:05:35.9 Dr. Beth Harris: It seems to me there’s all these associations to ideas that were laid on the Black body about savagery or about ignorance.

0:05:44.2 Dr. Renée Ater: These are really important because at the same time that Fuller is becoming an artist and that she’s creating work, we also have the divvying up of Africa. We have this notion of missionaries going to tame the savages. Right in 1912, we’re getting all these stereotypes from Currier and Ives prints. We are seeing stereotypes of banjo players. We are seeing the rise of Aunt Jemima flipping pancakes. But we’re also going to world fairs where you can visit the old plantation and have this very nostalgic, problematic experience of what white organizers think is the good old days of the South. So there’s this conflict of the old and new South that’s playing out that she is in part, I think, also responding to.

0:06:24.3 Dr. Beth Harris: Looking at this sculpture, one would never mistake it for a classical sculpture. It is so clearly of that modern, end-of-the-century moment of Rodin, of creating sculpture, even in bronze, that reveals the hand of the artist.

0:06:40.4 Dr. Renée Ater: You can see her thumbprints kind of pushed down in that movement of clay that was so important for the modern artist, that you’re in the materials, you’re making them work and express what you want them to do, and so that your hands are very present. Something that’s quite different from the work of Edmonia Lewis, another African-American woman who created a piece called Forever Free about emancipation, but uses a language of neoclassical sculpture. So the white marble, the woman kneeling at the feet of the man, and the image of the broken shackles. Fuller’s kind of resisting that language, the neoclassical. She’s let go of those older traditions.

0:07:14.8 Dr. Renée Ater: If we walk around to the front, the bronze statue, which is life-size figures, rests on top of a granite square base. And when this was first installed, they only had who the work was created by in the title of the work. They have since come back several years after the dedication of the monument and put two quotes from Fuller. On the front of this base, it reads, “Humanity weeping over her suddenly freed children, who, beneath the gnarled fingers of fate, step forth into the world, unafraid.” On the side where the young woman is standing, it reads, “The Negro has been emancipated from slavery, but not from the curse of race hatred and prejudice. It was not Lincoln alone who wrote the emancipation, but the humane side of the nation.” Here we have this emboldened notion of what freedom might look like, and it’s tenuous. I think that’s also a really important point.

0:08:06.4 Dr. Beth Harris: And that’s what this quote reminds us of.

0:08:09.1 Dr. Renée Ater: That’s right.

0:08:09.8 Dr. Beth Harris: The unfinished work of emancipation.

0:08:12.1 Dr. Renée Ater: That’s exactly right. I think she would be quite proud to know that it was in this public space and for us to be having these kinds of conversations about it.

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This sculpture on Contemporary Monuments to the Slave Past

Renée Ater, Remaking Race and History: The Sculpture of Meta Warrick Fuller (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).

Mabel O. Wilson, “Remembering Emancipation Up North,” Negro Building: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), pp. 139–90.

Lee Ann Timreck, Pieces of Freedom: The Emancipation Sculptures of Edmonia Lewis and Meta Warrick Fuller (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2023).

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