"The statue is of Libertas, the Roman goddess of liberty. She holds a plaque in her left hand inscribed with July 4, 1776, in Roman numerals, the date of the Declaration of Independence. Her feet are circled with a broken shackle and chain celebrating US abolition of slavery. France's original idea for the gift occurred at the end of the Civil War. But the idea of liberation of the formerly enslaved rang hollow to those under the boot of a restored Southern order of racist repression. As the editor of the Black-owned newspaper the Cleveland Gazette, put it: “‘Liberty enlightening the world,’ indeed! The expression makes us sick. This government is a howling farce. It cannot or rather does not protect its citizens within its own borders. Shove the Bartholdi statue, torch and all, into the ocean until the "liberty" of this country is such as to make it possible for an inoffensive and industrious colored man to earn a respectable living for himself and family, without being ku-kluxed, perhaps murdered, his daughter and wife outraged, and his property destroyed. The idea of the "liberty" of this country "enlightening the world," or even Patagonia, is ridiculous in the extreme." And it is certain that "liberty" was laughable to the captive Geronimo and his people, who at the time were being shipped in chains to a dungeon prison at Fort Marion, Florida, or to those Indigenous nations that had been incarcerated in reservations carved out of their former homelands, learning that Congress was set to divide the reservation lands into marketable allotments, which would end up privatizing three-fourths of the already shrunken Native land base. Or for that matter, those teeming masses of Lazarus's poem, huddled in the overcrowded slums of the Lower East Side in New York City, who were doubtfully even aware of the festivities celebrating liberty…The Statue of Liberty was a marker on the path to the twentieth-century myth of the American Dream."