The Statue of Liberty National Monument consists of two islands: Liberty Island (which hosts the State of Liberty) and Ellis Island, the site of the Ellis Island immigration station and an associated hospital complex. Liberty Island became a national monument under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Ellis Island was included in the site in the 1960s. During its heyday from the late 19th century until its closure in the 1950s, 12 million people were processed on Ellis island, and it is for many the symbol of immigration in the United States. The Statue of Liberty plays a similar role. As Emma Lazarus’s 1883 poem, “The New Colossus," proclaims: Give me your tired, your poor,/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,/ The wretched refuse of your teeming shore./ Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,/I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” Indeed, the State of Liberty seems to beckon across the ocean to oppressed people everywhere, and, for many the Statue is a symbol of the hope for a new life in the United States.
Yet both islands have quite separate histories and roles. Ellis Island was an actual port of entry for millions, while the Statue of Liberty initially had nothing to do with immigration. In addition, both have at times symbolized the opposite of immigration and hope–exlcusion, racism, xenophobia and incarceration. In 2021, we received a grant from the National Park Service to work with interpretive materials on Ellis Island, and another grant from NPS through ASALH (the Association for the Study of African American Life and History) to explore the meanings of the Statue of Liberty for African Americans. Both of these gave us the opportunity to examine alternative stories and experiences of both Ellis Island and Liberty Island, and both have resulted in two different–but equally complex–projects. In the case of national monuments, the goal has often been to restrict them to a single set of meanings and significations, but Ellis Island and Liberty are much more than any single narrative.
What brings these two projects together is an emphasis on community collaboration and multimodal anthropology. Both were made through our work a team of scholars (including Samuel Collins, Matthew Durington, Monica Pelayo and Chayanne Marcano), and with Wide Angle Youth Media, a non-profit in Baltimore that instructs youth in multimedia production and seeks to address the many digital divides that persist in U.S. cities today.
Our goal for both was to open up that discourse to incorporate forgotten, suppressed and alternative meanings. It’s worth pointing out that both of these function as a commentary on other interpretive materials on the Monument, and our hope is that both open up other possibilities at a particularly fraught moment in U.S. history.
Ellis Island Encounters: ( https://www.ellisislandencounters.org/)
The Ellis Island Encounters website is designed to be read in different ways. First, it presents Ellis Island according to a well-established chronology from pre-colonization to the present (“Historic Periods”). These include Ellis Island in its heyday as a port of entry (1892-1924), its transformation into a port of deportation and a prison (1924-1954), and its afterlife in the U.S. imagination (1954-present). Second, the website presents “Stories of Ellis Island.” Taking our cues from the ways the site is interpreted, and the autobiographical narratives people have shared, the “Stories” portion presents a variety of thematic narratives that include personal experiences, incidents, and general themes.
Statue of Liberty: An American Icon in Black Culture and Beyond ( https://www.statueoflibertyicon.org/)
The Statue of Liberty site is a collection of short articles, archival materials and popular images, arranged into overlapping thematic clusters. The scope of the project was to elicit the meanings of the State of Liberty for Black people, and we have endeavored to do that through the historical record and the popular imagination. The site invites visitors to jump around through image and cluster, rather than explore in any linear way.
