Emma Lazarus

Emma Lazarus was a New York poet and translator who, in the early 1880s, threw herself into helping Jewish refugees fleeing the pogroms in Eastern Europe as they arrived in the city. In 1883 she was asked to write a poem for an auction to raise money for the Statue of Liberty's pedestal, and she wrote The New Colossus, a sonnet that turns the statue into a mother of exiles.

She died in 1887, at thirty eight, before the poem became famous. In 1903 a friend had its lines, give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, placed on a bronze plaque inside the pedestal. On our harbor walk you meet the plaque itself in the Statue of Liberty Museum on Liberty Island, beside the statue's original torch.