Lewis made this sculpture two years after the end of the US Civil War, and its title ‘Forever Free’ was taken from Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation issued in 1863. It depicts a man standing, with a broken chain hanging from his raised left arm. Next to him, a woman kneels in a prayer position. Charmaine Nelson explains: “Unlike Thomas Ball’s Emancipation Memorial (c.1866) and John Quincy Adams Ward’s The Freedman (1863), Lewis’s proud, black male is not crouching at a benevolent Abraham Lincoln’s feet nor merely contemplating standing… Rather, Lewis’s black male is erect and already clearly a man. With his foot trampling a ball and chain and his right hand caressing the woman’s shoulder, they are one unit, a family and he is their protector – a status strategically denied to black males within Transatlantic Slavery.”

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