Liberty for Who?       
   
   We never knew this. Lady Liberty's light originally was
meant for newly freed slaves.  
   
   The monument was imagined by a Frenchman named Laboulaye, an expert on the U.S. Constitution. He loved America, and even more when we abolished slavery. 

   At the close of the Civil War, he and others raised funds for newly freed slaves. He also partnered with Bartholdi the sculptor, whose first model showed Liberty's right hand with a torch. In her left hand were broken shackles.

   His final model showed Liberty holding a tablet with the Roman numerals for July 4, 1776. The broken chains are less visible, beneath her feet. 

   Bartholdi finished building the statue in Paris in 1884, and two years later oversaw its reconstruction in New York. By then, the original meaning was all but lost. 

   Ellis Island's station for immigrants didn't open for six more years. The plaque with the famous Emma Lazarus poem wasn't added until 1903. 

   Black newspapers called it meaningless and hypocritical, as reconstruction had been crushed, the Supreme Court had rolled back civil rights, and Jim Crow laws were tightening. 

   A Cleveland Gazette editorial called for the monument "to be shoved into the ocean until the liberty of this country made it possible that an inoffensive colored man in the South could earn a respectable living." 

   W.E.B. Du Bois in his autobiography recalled a "mischievous little French girl who said, 'Oh, yes, the Statue of Liberty! With its back toward America and its face toward France!'" 

- Edward Berenson, history professor, NYU

   Lady Liberty is still noble, but history is complicated.

      Jimmy