“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. [Read more…] about New York City Monuments of Black Americans: A History and Guide