ABSTRACT
In 1916 Freeman Henry Morris Murray (1859-1950) self-published his book Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture: A Study in Interpretation.1
This volume began as a series of illustrated lectures the author gave in 1913, in part to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, at the African Methodist Episcopal Church’s (AME) Summer School and Chautauqua of the Religious Training School in Durham, North Carolina. Some of these also appeared in the AME Church Review. Passionate and pointed, political and personal, Emancipation and the Freed is a catalogue raisonné of sorts, one that charted and critically analyzed the image of black people in American sculpture. What resulted is an incredibly complex volume, one that not only explores the intersection of race and representation but also seeks to teach its reader how to “read” representations of blacks in art. While Murray tells his viewer in no uncertain terms where representation succeeds and fails, Emancipation and the Freed ’s most riveting feature rests in how the author combined the very act of looking, historical context, the relationship between history and blackness, as well as his own experience and political beliefs to address the presence and absence of black people in American sculpture as a means not only to insist upon but also to create a black subjectivity.
