Male or Man?: American Slavery, Public Monuments, and the Containment of Black Manhood

When: Wednesday, April 2nd, 2025; 7:00pm – 8:00pm EST

Where: Wortmann Ballroom, Roanoke College, Salem, Virginia, USA

What: Annual Emancipation Week Lecture: “Male or Man?: American Slavery, Public Monuments, and the Containment of Black Manhood”

Cost: Free

Organizer: Prof. Jesse Bucher, Director of Center for Studying Structures of Race

Contact & Registration: bucher@roanoke.edu; 540-375-2049

Website: https://www.roanoke.edu/events/emancipation_week_lecture

Abstract: The strategic marginalization of black populations lay at the heart of Transatlantic Slavery. For black men this entailed a hyper-sexualization, criminalization, and animalization which sought to banish them from the category of manhood. To be owned and controlled by another – to be chattel – was as far away from western definitions of manhood as one could get. In the nineteenth century, how did this social, material, and political disenfranchisement impact their representation within the realm of neoclassical sculpture and within the landscape of American monuments? This lecture explores how sculptors sought to immobilize and infantilize black male subjects depicting the newly freed (recently liberated, formerly enslaved people), through compositional and aesthetic strategies which, even within the realm of abolitionist representation, standardly depicted the black male as socially and physically impotent. This symbolic visual denigration occurred even when black males were depicted as fully-grown and physically powerful. Through an exploration of the case studies of John Quincy Adams Ward’s Freedman (1863), Thomas Ball’s Lincoln Memorial (c. 1866), and Mary Edmonia Lewis’s Morning of Liberty/Forever Free (1867), this lecture examines whether any of these artists was able (or willing) to create sculptures which depicted enslaved black males gaining their freedom, as men.