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 Empty plinths have stirred
debate over who and what should replace the
toppled statues. Black sculptors and historians
hope the aftermath will give communities around
the country a chance to honor often-forgotten
African-American trailblazers.
"Space is power. When a Black body in bronze is
placed publicly, that story is magnified because
of the powerful space," said sculptor Dana King
of Oakland, California.
"It allows children to look up into the faces of
these sculptures and say, 'Who are you? And why
are you standing before me?'" said King, who is
set to unveil in September her public sculpture
of William Lanson, a formerly enslaved Black man
who worked to extend New Haven's Long Wharf,
making the Connecticut port competitive with
nearby New York.
Of the more than 5,000 public outdoor sculptures
registered in the Smithsonian American Art
Museum's Art Inventories Catalog, less than a
quarter of the roughly 700 works in the
"Ethnic-African American" category were made by
Black sculptors.
Similarly, fewer than half of the 75 U.S. works
included in "Contemporary Monuments to the Slave
Past," a website run by University of Maryland
Professor Renee Ater, were created by Black
sculptors.
"Part of the reason I went into figurative
sculpture was to create works of art that
represented people who look like me and look
like a lot of New Yorkers who I see but I didn't
see represented," said sculptor Branly Cadet.
Black sculptors bring a perspective that a white
artist cannot, added Cadet, whose public statues
highlight figures including New York Congressman
Adam Clayton Powell Jr., who fought for pay
equity, and star athlete Jackie Robinson, who
broke Major League Baseball's color barrier.
"Statues and monuments reflect who and what we
value as a nation," University of Pittsburgh
historian Keisha Blain said. "Building a
racism-free society requires making an active
choice."
PUSHING PAST BARRIERS
Winning public art commissions is a lengthy,
competitive and often controversial process
decided by elected officials and influenced by
powerbrokers ranging from real estate developers
to political clubs.
It took more than a decade of delays and debates
for Savannah, Georgia, whose population is 50
percent Black, to unveil in 2002 its first
statue acknowledging its history as a major
slave port.
Disputes raged over the memorial's graphic
inscription about slave ship horrors, as well as
about the selected sculptor - a white professor
from the prestigious Savannah College of Art and
Design.
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 Cadet's insight into
African-American history helped him win a
commission for a memorial outside Philadelphia's
City Hall honoring Octavius Catto, unveiled in
2017 as the first public monument to an
African-American individual in a city where the
population is more than 40 percent Black.
Catto had an array of accomplishments, but Cadet
was struck by Catto's push to de-segregate
horse-drawn trolley cars and to ratify the 15th
Amendment to let Black men vote.
"As an African American, I thought it was
critical to highlight those two aspects of his
existence," said Cadet, 54.
The killing of George Floyd, a Black man who
died in Minneapolis in May after a white police
officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine
minutes, has added momentum to a years-long
movement to remove Confederate monuments and
other U.S. public statues that critics say
promote white supremacy and racial violence.
Nationwide, nearly 800 Confederate monuments
stand at county courthouses, town squares, state
capitols and other public spaces, including 34
memorials dedicated after 2000, according to the
Southern Poverty Law Center.
Since June 2015, when white supremacist and
Confederate flag enthusiast Dylan Roof gunned
down a Bible study group at a Black church in
Charleston, South Carolina, killing nine people,
48 Confederate monuments have been removed, some
under public protest, the Law Center said.
Pittsburgh's Blain says that while removing
symbols of oppression is vital, memorializing
Black lives in public is an important first step
in the struggle to build a racism-free society,
which ultimately requires concrete changes to
laws and public policy.
Some, including sculptor King, say it would be
far more meaningful to let the resounding
absence of statues in the wake of the protests
catch the public's attention.
"All that space should be left alone for a
while," said King.
"We should sit with the raw sense of discomfort
from the space left over from those torn down
monuments, and the energy they left behind."
(Reporting by Barbara Goldberg in New York;
Editing by Aurora Ellis)
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