The tragedy was that the architect of that abolition, Lincoln, had to sacrifice his life. So Laboulaye thought that the victory of the North in the Civil War was a great development because it abolished slavery once and for all. And he wasn't blind to slavery, because Laboulaye was also the head of France's abolition society. He felt more sympathetic to the American version of liberty than the one that came out of the French Revolution, which he thought was too radical and violent. VICE: How did Laboulaye conceive of the Statue of Liberty?Д®d Berenson: During his time, Laboulaye was the leading French expert and admirer of the United States. And with so many people today asking out loud whether or not black lives actually matter, it's clear that the liberty celebrated by the statue continues to evade African Americans, even though their emancipation was a catalyst for the statue's creation. Legendary black historian and civil rights activist WEB Du Bois wrote in his autobiography that when he sailed past Lady Liberty on a trip returning home from Europe, he had a hard time feeling the hope that inspired so many European immigrants because as a black man, he didn't have access to the freedoms she promised. In an ironic twist, the Statue of Liberty has became a painful symbol of the rights and freedoms denied to the people whose liberation it was initially supposed to celebrate. In the 20 years it took between the conception and the statue's dedication in 1886, as part of the effort to re-unify the country after the Civil War, the statue grew to take on the centennial symbolism and broader meaning it has today. He enlisted sculptor FrГ©dГ©ric Auguste Bartholdi, who took an unused design he had created for a lighthouse near the Suez Canal and turned it into a monument for America. Edouard de Laboulaye, French abolitionist and president of the French Anti-Slavery Society, is the undisputed 'Father of the Statue of Liberty.' After the United States's Civil War, Laboulaye conceived the idea of a gift to the United States to memorialize President Abraham Lincoln and celebrate the end of slavery.

Black statue of liberty poem