About the Book

New York City is blessed with an incredible array of public sculptures. One overlooked aspect of this collection is its monuments of Black Americans, each with its own remarkable story. The first appearance of a Black person in a city monument came in the Civil War Soldiers’ Monument in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery in 1876, but this was a nameless symbolic figure. It wasn’t until 1945 that Booker T. Washington became the first identifiable Black American honored in a New York City monument. In 2007, the city dedicated its first monument to a Black woman, Harriet Tubman. Behind every first is a story of triumph over adversity and exclusion. Local author David Felsen reveals the stories behind thirty inspiring monuments that have endured, as well as how they found their place in the city’s history. With foreword by the poet Sonia Sanchez. 
 

Civil War Soldiers' Monument (1876)

Henry Ward Beecher Monument (1891)

Navy Group, Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Arch (1892)

Africa, The Four Continents (1907)

Carl Schurz Memorial (1913)

Henry Ward Beecher Memorial (1914)

Marquis de Lafayette Memorial (1917)

Industries of the British Empire  (1933)

Man, the Provider & Woman, the Mother and Housekeeper (1938)

Exodus and Dance (1941)

Colonel William Hayward Memorial Plaque (1945) 

Booker T. Washington (1946)

Lincoln and Child Monument (1949)

Coast Guard Memorial (1955)

Young George Washington Carver (1955)  

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1970)

George Washington Carver (1977)

Jackie Robinson (1981) 

Reverend Ben Lowry Memorial (1982) 

Ronald McNair Memorial (1994)  

Peter and Willie (1997) 

Duke Ellington Memorial  (1997) 

Soul in Flight, a Memorial to Arthur Ashe (2000) 

Invisible Man: A Memorial to Ralph Ellison (2003)

Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Memorial (2005)

Jackie Robinson and Pee Wee Reese Monument (2005)

Swing Low, Harriet Tubman Memorial (2008) 

Frederick Douglass Memorial (2011)

Althea Gibson (2019)

Sojourner Truth, Women's Rights Pioneers Monument (2020)