Lady Liberty racial roots probed

Statue may have been meant for freed slaves,

the Park Service says.

Boston- Could it be that Lady Liberty was given to the United States as a monument to freed slaves?

National Park Service resesearches are in Boston trying to unraeravel the intent of the French historian who suggested a colossus as a gift in 1865. The 151-foot tall statue was erected in 1886.

The Park Service's official history notes that the monument was proposed by French historian Edouard de Laboulaye in 1865 to commemorate the friendship between France and the United States born during the Revolutionary War.

But an unsourced text began appearing on the Internet several years ago and quickly spread the theory that the widely accepted history of the Statue of Liberty isn't true, said Rebecca Joseph, a Park Service anthropologist based in Boston.

The Internet report stated " the statue was intended as a monument to the abolition of slavery in the United States and that the orginal model was a black woman," Joseph said.

De Laboulaye was a leader of the French Abolitionist movement with a commitment to fighting slavery, notes Diane Dayson, the Statue's superintendent.

Richard Newman, a research officer at Harvard University's W.E.B. DuBois Institute for Afro-American Research, said it's widely believed in academic circles that de Laboulaye meant for the statue to memorialize the slaves, as well as commemorate the Union victory in the Civil War and the life of Abraham Lincoln.

However, by the time sculptor Frederic Auguste Bartholdi's 27,000 ton statue was erected in New York Harbour, European immigration had begun to rise dramatically, and the statue took on a new symbolism, he said.

"It was entirely related to slavery, and not about immigration at all," Newman said.

Joseph also is checking into the possibility a 21-inch model of Lady Liberyt completed by Bartholdi in 1870 may have been based on the likeness of a black woman. That model, in the Museum of the City of New York, has a broken chain around its hand; the statue in the harbour has a broken shackle on its foot.