Calls from protesters to tear down the Emancipation Memorial in Washington D.C.'s Lincoln Park shows that "cancel culture has now just become the ignorant culture," Rep. Michael Waltz said Friday.
"This is not a Confederate statue," the Florida Republican said on Fox News' "Fox and Friends." "This was a celebration after the Civil War of the Emancipation Proclamation."
The monument depicts President Abraham Lincoln holding the Emancipation Proclamation while standing over a kneeling, newly-freed slave. The statue, which was put up nearly 150 years ago, has come under controversy for decades because of the positioning of Lincoln standing over the slave, and because of the implication that it was Lincoln alone, and not the efforts of Black people, that led to the end of slavery, reports The Wall Street Journal.
Waltz on Friday noted that the statue was the original national Lincoln Monument before the current structure was built, and that money had been raised for it by freed slaves and emancipated Black citizens.
"The first $5 was dedicated by a woman from Virginia, Charlotte Scott," he said. "It's the first $5 that she earned as a Black woman. There was a massive parade led by the Dean of Howard University law school. Frederick Douglass gave the keynote speech."
Waltz added that he does not see how it's possible that "this left-wing group" gets to "cancel out the wishes of the slaves that were freed back then and the slave that's depicted actually breaking the bonds, breaking the changes in the statute of slavery and emerging as a free man and as a free American."
Waltz added that he thinks it's "fine" for local communities to make decisions on statues, but not the "mob culture."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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