“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
The images flickered. Faces. Smiling. Flashing across the screen and then gone too soon. The children just arriving on Ellis Island, a part of the Ken Burns’ PBS documentary, the Statue of Liberty. I wanted to replay the images, pause them. Take them in. “THIS is what we once were,” I whispered silently.
No more. When I saw the mural of the Statue of Liberty created by Judith de Leeuw and revealed in France just before the 4th of July, I fully understood. Our great lady ashamed, covering her face, grieves her loss.
And so, she should. How starkly different those faces were just a few years ago after crossing our southern border. In Trump’s America, we showed zero-tolerance. Instead of laughter, cries pierced the stale air, raw and shrill, from the shock of being taken from loved ones and put in makeshift cages. Children. In cages. Roughly 4,600 of them separated.
The Biden administration instituted a task force to reunite the children with their parents or relatives but Trump rescinded it, even with hundreds still searching, as part of his first executive order. Today, the policy continues. In June of this year, CNN reported that approximately 500 migrant children had already been taken from their homes and put in government custody. The cries resume now though largely hushed from the public ear.
And our grieving great lady reminds us, “This is NOT who we once were.”
Designed by Frederic Auguste Barthold, the statue was a gift from France to commemorate the centennial of the American Declaration of Independence and dedicated by President Grover Cleveland on October 28, 1886. However, it may surprise some to learn that the well-known words on the statue welcoming immigrants, taken from “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus, were not added until 1903, nearly two decades after the statue was unveiled.
The original inspiration for the monument was not immigration but emancipation, notably symbolized by the broken shackle and chains laying at our lady’s feet. Just after the Civil War, they were a visual representation of the end of slavery in the United States. Of course, this ideal has been slow to find a living space where our African American brothers and sisters may breathe free.
Courageously, in the words of the late Congressman John Lewis, the “good trouble” continues for the tempest-tost in search of a home in this land where each “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” The broken shackle and chains echo across time the great dream herald by the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
But in Trump’s America, these echoes are fading, almost silent now, in what can only be called a targeted attempt to white-wash history. Juneteenth Day was snubbed. Federal agencies continue to eliminate or obscure the contributions of Black heroes such as the Tuskegee Airman and Harriet Tubman. Diversity, equity, inclusion are dirty words now needing to be eradicated in order to create a more perfect, colorblind, union. Trump even had the bronze bust of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. removed from the Oval Office which had been there since 2009.
And again, our grieving great lady reminds us, “This is NOT what we once aspired to be.”
And the broken shackle and chains, which have come to speak for all forms of oppression, also represented the hope of women who, at the time, were fighting for the right to vote. Only two women were invited to the unveiling of the statue which sparked protests by suffragists. American abolitionist Matilda Joslyn Gage, cursing the irony of a female figure representing liberty, described the whole affair as “the sarcasm of the 19th century.”
But, undaunted, the suffragists chartered a boat to sail around the harbor to protest. And our lady must have smiled as she knew that soon, on the teeming shore, she would become the focal point for discussions on gender equality.
Today in Trump’s America, many older women, in particular, are desperately trying to lift the lamp and shine a light on what is quickly being lost – some of the very freedoms those suffragists, and many others since, so courageously fought to obtain for us. Their efforts left all women with the greatest of gifts: most notably, choice. Choice to live a life of our choosing.
And so, we see it’s no accident that the Statue of Liberty is a woman, a depiction of Libertas, the Roman goddess of freedom, offering her torch to guide all who flee oppression.
Americans, will we choose freedom or Trump’s American autocracy? Will we help our great lady to lift her torch high once again and light the way for all of us and for those to come?
I pray so for in all her glory, welcoming those children of long ago, our great lady reminds us, “THIS is what we once were.”
Stephanie Rutt 