Excerpt from Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture: A Study in Interpretation When preparing the manuscript for print ing as a monograph, some changes in the Wording were made in order to render the forms of expressions less direct and didactic. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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The history of racism in America is also the history of ordinary Black Americans who accomplished extraordinary things in their pursuit of freedom. Faced with oppression throughout their journey, they built vibrant communities and lived purposeful lives. Pieces of Freedom: The Emancipation Sculptures of Edmonia Lewis and Meta Warrick Fuller brings that history to life by analyzing the first fifty years of Black freedom through the emancipation sculptures of two nineteenth-century African American sculptors, Mary Edmonia Lewis (1844–1909) and Meta Warrick Fuller (1877–1968). Lewis's and Fuller’s sculptures—and their visual narrative of a people’s strength and humanity in the face of oppression—present a textured historical diorama of Black life during an era of transformative, yet sorrowful, events. In this book, Lee Ann Timreck integrates Lewis's and Fuller’s visual narrative with oral narratives of the newly emancipated, all set within the historical context of Reconstruction, segregation, and Jim Crow. The sculptures also reflect the artists’ gendered perspective of emancipation, conveying a strong narrative on the contributions and sacrifices made by newly freed Black women. These emancipation sculptures provide both a historical narrative of the Black emancipation experience and a moral narrative of America’s failure to create a nation where “all men are created equal.” Pieces of Freedom challenges the twenty-first-century reader to learn and accept this history so we might address our nation’s lingering social and economic injustices.