In Memoriam, By Charles Christian Nahl And Louis Nagel

With slavery in mind, Charles Christian Nahl and Louis Nagel created a lithograph, titled In Memoriam in 1865. The Lithograph was created in memory of Abraham Lincoln who was credited with ending slavery. This art work shows the Emancipation Act dissolving the chains of slavery. Chains are a metaphor for the bonds that Lincoln broke with the “Emancipation Proclamation.” The dragon represents slaveholders who have put their slaves in chains. The dragon died by the hand of Minerva—a goddess of wisdom, war, art, schools, and commerce. She was the Etruscan counterpart to Greek Athena—with the sword who has broken the chains of slavery. With Lincoln’s “Emancipation Proclamation,” Lincoln knew that the county could not move forward if the North had
This momentous decree is a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity. But 100 years later the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later the life of the Negro is still badly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself in exile in his own land. So we’ve come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.
Again, Sundquist saw what King knew about the struggles for minorities and the working class, he writes,
King anchored his modern adaptation of the Exodus more securely in its American historical equivalent-not simply the end of slavery but rather the ensuing century-long struggle to make real the promises of the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments (Sundquist, 578).
Morality to end oppression was important for King, and he knew that it was an honorable task to keep a promise of the “Emancipation Proclamation” and the Amendments that were created to help abolish slaves from chains. Sundquist describes how Fredrick Douglas was frustrated by the fact of how many black people have struggled for freedom.
Douglas and King felt like that African Americans and white ethnic immigrants are still bound in chains to their own country (Sundquist, 580). Martin Luther King Jr. believed that the Founding Fathers of America wanted the country to be equal for all men and wanted to keep that