America’s Newest Monuments Unveil a Different Look at the Nation’s Past

For nearly 100 years, Robert E. Lee’s 10,000-pound monument rode high over the city of Charlottesville, Virginia. Now, it’s been melted into bronze slabs and another memorial in town has risen to national prominence.

It’s on the University of Virginia campus, titled the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers. It stands as the antithesis to the Confederacy, honoring the slaves forced to work at the university in the 1800s as carpenters, blacksmiths, roofers, stone carvers and other back-breaking trades.

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That same monumental transformation in thinking is playing out across dozens of states in the USA, as communities from Alabama to Alaska rethink who the true heroes were from their pasts. The result is memorials and renaming of historic places that pay homage to honorees who, not so long ago, would have been seen by some community leaders as too obscure or too underprivileged to merit such recognition.

“It is exciting to see local visionaries are being celebrated for the role that they have supported in their local community,” said Brent Leggs, executive director of the African American Cultural Heritage Fund, after seeing Sojourner Truth memorialized in Akron, Ohio.

Truth, born into slavery, was an American abolitionist and activist for African American civil rights in the 1800s. Along with the memorial in Akron, she is also the first African American woman to have a statue in the U.S. Capitol building.

Four years after momentum kicked in for removing Confederate monuments in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder in May 2020, historians and families of prominent national and Black figures have started permanently memorializing their histories, signifying a shift in who gets honored.

The monuments honoring states’ first Black politicians, veterans, or other Black pioneers are popping up across the country. Significant statues stand tall in Wisconsin, Virginia, Mississippi, and Oregon, praising Black people for their accomplishments and how they’ve helped shape American history.

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Historians have noticed what the Tillet sisters are seeing and said the country is in an upward trend of creating new monuments honoring the achievements of Black Americans.

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In Madison, Wisconsin, officials unveiled the statue of Velvalea “Vel” Phillips, created by Radcliffe Bailey, in July on capitol grounds. Phillips achieved many firsts as a Black woman in the state. {snip}

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In Rutland, Vermont, a stone statue sits in the city’s downtown area of Ernie and Willa Royal. Ernie is credited for being the state’s first Black restaurant owner and the first Black board member of the National Restaurant Association. The statue has stood there since May. The interactive life-sized sculpture features Willa arranging flowers at a table and Ernie working with younger staffers in the restaurant.

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In Buffalo, the African American Veterans Monument, honoring Black servicemembers, sits at the Buffalo and Erie County Naval and Military Park. The monument has 12 cylindrical pillars that illuminate at night and represent the 12 wars and peacetime between them. Robin Hodges, chief of operations for the monument, said the project started in 2012 with a group of about five Black residents who wanted to honor those servicemembers.

Ronal Bassham, a board member of the monument, said it is needed because the country’s history has been “whitewashed over for 300 years.” All of the servicemembers in the monument, Hodges said, served during times of war and peace. The memorial opened in 2022 after New York State Majority Leader Crystal Peoples-Stokes, D-Buffalo, helped secure land for the structure.

In San Francisco, poet Maya Angelou will be immortalized at the city’s main library by artist Lava Thomas. Angelou was known for her autobiography “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” and the anthology “And Still I Rise.” Thomas said that creating Angelou’s sculpture is powerful to her as a Black woman; Angelou has been a “shero” to her since Angelou’s autobiography.

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Future monuments are going to be more involved and likely created with intentions to be moved elsewhere, Salamishah and Scheherazade Tillet said. They see the current rising number of Black monuments trickling down to other racial and ethnic groups to better represent not only the country in general but also the atrocities and achievements of the past. And then, there are memorials to just regular people.

“The people who are being presented are just reflective of America as it’s always been,” Salamishah Tillet said.

The changes will soon affect how people view history, von Daacke said, and reshape the public memory of the country’s or a place’s past.

“We’re at a moment where people, in making these choices, are demonstrating that their interest in history is maybe better informed than it used to be, and certainly much broader and more complicated,” von Daacke said. “The monuments, which are responding to these very particular events over the past couple decades and speaking to a moment, are at least couched in at this moment, a more honest and complete history than we would have had 20 years ago, 100 years ago.”