The original statue of Liberty gifted by the French to America was not the stern-faced green Roman looking woman that you see today holding a tablet and a torch. The original and first Statue of Liberty was a Black woman holding the broken shackles of slavery. She was refused on the notion that the black statue would be a constant reminder of the liberty that the slaves earned, from successfully fighting in the American Civil War. The true Black Statue of Liberty remains rejected, forgotten and lost in broken fragments of Black history.

Abolition Movement, Organized attempt to outlaw institutionalized slavery that relied on means ranging from philosophical debate to outright and illegal violence. The movement's greatest influence was in the United States, England, and the West Indies.

Institutionalized slavery had declined in Europe during the Middle Ages, when serfs began taking the place of slaves as feudalism spread. With the colonization of the New World, however, came a sudden demand for labor that led to the capture of some nine million West Africans by 1800 and exportation of them as slaves to British colonies in America and the West Indies. Quaker sects in both England and New England were the first to protest this slave trade in 1671. Only after the French Revolution, however did the worldwide political climate become receptive to the idea of abolition. England's Abolition Society, founded in 1787, was enabled by this general change in attitudes to end the British slave trade in 1807.

In 1831 William Lloyd Garrison began publication of the Liberator, which helped draw many famous names to the cause, including the poet John Greenleaf Whittier, clergyman Theodore Weld, and free blacck Americans such as Frederick Douglass. In 1833 Garrison founded the American AntiSlavery Society in Philadelphia.