A statue of abolitionist Frederick Douglass was downed and destroyed in upstate New York, on the 168th anniversary of his most famous anti-slavery speech.
Rochester police said the statue of the former slave was taken Sunday from Maplewood Park, a site along the subway where Douglass and Harriet Tubman helped transport slaves to freedom.
It was found on the edge of the Genesee river gorge about 50 feet away, and damage to the base and a finger on the left were deemed irreparable, authorities said.
The destruction occurred on the anniversary of Douglass’s 1852 speech “What a Slave is the Fourth of July,” one that had been widely shared recently amid continued Black Lives Matter protests.
In it, Douglass said that for a slave, Independence Day is a day that reveals “the great injustice and cruelty of which he is the constant victim.”
This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You can rejoice, I must cry, “he said of the hypocrisy of celebrating freedom while many were slaves.
Those who helped bring the statue to Rochester felt the timing was too coincidental not to be deliberate, along with the recent surge in statues of slave owners who were toppled by anti-racism protesters.
“Is this some kind of retaliation due to the national fever on Confederate monuments at this time? Very disappointing, it’s more than disappointing, “Carvin Eison, project leader who brought the Douglass statue to the park, told WROC.
He also told Rochester Democrat & Chronicle: “It is particularly painful that it has happened at this time. It’s really sad because here in Rochester, the Frederick Douglass statue has always been a face of good. ”
Eison vowed to replace the monument.
“They can collapse on this monument, they could collapse on all of them, this monument will still stand because the ideas behind it are bigger than the monument,” Eison told the Democrat & Chronicle.
President Trump, who previously criticized the destruction of the statues as “lawless,” blamed the latest attack on “anarchists.”
“This shows that these anarchists have no limits!” Trump tweeted early Monday.
Douglass escaped slavery in Maryland in 1838 and settled in Rochester for about 30 years. It is buried in the mount of the city. Cemetery of hope.
More than a dozen of his statues were placed around Rochester, including the one that was downed in Maplewood Park in 2018, in memory of its 200th anniversary, the Democrat & Chronicle noted.
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