“New York City got its first monument of a real Black American in 1946 when the Hall of Fame for Great Americans in the Bronx dedicated a bronze bust to Booker T. Washington,” David Felsen writes in the introduction to New York City Monuments of Black Americans: A History and Guide (History Press, 2025). “Behind every first is a story of triumph over adversity and exclusion.”
A 2021 study of the nation’s monuments found that 50% of the top 50 most memorialized people enslaved other people and that only 10% of the top 50 most memorialized people are Black/Indigenous. Just six percent of the Top 50 nationwide are women. It wasn’t until 2007, that the city dedicated its first monument to a Black woman, Harriet Tubman.
“At this time, when the media and academics were paying so much attention to problematic Confederate monuments and the white men on them, it seemed too little attention was being paid to the representation of Black people in monuments,” writes Felsen.
“As a history teacher living in New York City, I began to wonder how many monuments of Black Americans there were in the city. Who was the first Black American honored, and when did it happen? Who were the artists, activists and civic leaders behind these monuments? Why did they get made? And what could they teach us about New York history, Black history, art history and American history?”
According to Felsen, the first Black American represented on a monument in New York City is “a nameless, shoeless former slave help[ing] a Union widow to find her husband’s grave in the South” at the base of the 1876 Civil War Soldiers’ Monument in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery.
Felsen’s new guide identifies and tells the stories of 30 statues and monuments of Black Americans in the city. It includes maps, and photos and a detailed history of each. This is a refreshing take on a subject that has been on many American minds recently.
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Read more about Black History in New York State.
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