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. Now, it's been melted into bronze slabs and another memorial in town has risen to national prominence.

It's on the UVA 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.

"All these men, women, and children lived with dignity, resisted oppression, and aspired for freedom. For more than four decades, the entire University was a site of enslavement," according to the UVA President's Commission on Slavery. "Now, we’re confronting our past, uncovering new knowledge, and using that knowledge to teach, heal, and shape the future."

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.

"It's honoring the extraordinary and the ordinary or the extraordinary and the everyday," said Salamishah Tillet, a professor of creative writing and Africana studies at Rutgers University-Newark.

Her sister Scheherazade Tillet, a photographer, captured a photo of a girl standing near the pedestal of a now-removed Christopher Columbus statue in Newark, New Jersey. That photo later became a mural Scheherazade described as "reclaiming public space," and was dubbed "Will you be my monument?"

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.

New monuments build a 'cultural renaissance' across America

The new monuments signify more of a democratic process in determining who gets honored, with more opinions invited throughout a community on who should receive a statue, plague or other honor. For instance, at the University of Virginia, University of Virginia American Studies and History Professor Kirt von Daacke said the university had dozens of students, staff and others in the community involved in the creation of the enslaved laborers memorial.

"So the end product is a beautiful work of art that speaks to the lives of the enslaved and honors their histories," he said.

The memorial found its place in a different era of the South, which finds communities - and legislators - more open to statues other than those that honored Confederate officials and the "Lost Cause" movement.

The Lost Cause refers to attempts to present the Civil War in the perspective of Confederates in the best possible terms, according to the Encyclopedia Virginia. It was developed by white Southerners, many former Confederate officials, to romanticize the "Old South" and Confederate war effort, often distorting history in the process, according to the encyclopedia.

Leggs said the monuments sprouting up across the U.S. put the country into a "cultural renaissance" empowering locals to tell stories of their neighbors through art and "memorialization that we will . . . create a new commemorative landscape that centers Blackness at the core of American democracy."

Speaking about the Truth memorial, he said, "I really think this work is about civil rights in some way that preserving this tapestry of our shared culture, pride and heritage as an act of racial justice should be viewed as a civil right."

First Black restaurant owner in Vermont gets a statue

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. She died in 2018 at 95. Michael Johnson, president and CEO of the Boys and Girls Clubs of Dane County, said the statue came out of a conversation with activists requesting he use his influence to build representation at the state capitol.

He visited the office of Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, and saw a photo of Phillips in the room. Evers had hung it up himself. It inspired Johnson to get her memorialized and he raised nearly $350,000 to get a statue built. A board associated with the state capitol grounds allowed an exception for the Phillips statue to sit near the capitol.

"I'm proud of the hundreds of people who contributed towards this statue and the young activists who challenged me, as one of many leaders, to make sure that there was representation in our state capitol," Johnson said.

In Rutland, Vermont, a stone statue sits in the city's downtown area of Erine 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.

Ernie, who died in 1994 at 76, left his estate to support a scholarship for Black students at the Culinary Institute of America. His restaurant, Royal's Hearthside, operated from 1963 to his death.

Steve Costello, who helped fund the sculpture with his wife Jane and other locals, said the idea began as a way to build a trail with sculptures, but not "the typical sculptures the U.S. has produced of a bunch of old white guys like me," he said. The group researched and learned about Ernie and his restaurant.

"The sculpture really, for me, captures exactly who they were and what they were in the community," Costello said. "They were people who drew the community together for big events, for important dinners, for important meals, for the times that you want to remember."

The 'whitewashing' of American history

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

Ronal Basshman, 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, Hodge 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.

Some states pass laws to block removal of monuments

There's still resistance. Opponents say that removing Confederate monuments is tantamount to erasing history, with some Southern states passing laws to stop their removal.

One example is in Fort Smith, Arkansas, where for over a century, a life-size statue of a Confederate soldier has stood atop a towering monument.

The city administrator had considered removing the monument for years. Then the murder of George Floyd ignited a national conversation about Confederate monuments and sparked new calls to take it down. A local construction company even offered to help. 

“This statue is a clear and present ode to the values of the Confederacy that we do not share,” residents wrote in a petition to the city. 

But before local leaders could decide its fate, the Arkansas Legislature revoked their power.

Citing the “vandalism” of monuments, Republican state lawmakers passed a law in 2021 that prevents Fort Smith from removing its monument and supplants local control over dozens of other statues across the state. 

Arkansas is one of many Southern states that have passed historic preservation laws to strip local leaders of the power to take down Confederate monuments in their communities. Bills in former Confederate states such as Texas and Florida were introduced in Republican-controlled legislatures in 2023. Similar bills are appearing in states that were not part of the Confederacy, including New York and Pennsylvania.

Monuments reflect 'complicated, better informed' history

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."

Contributing: Abhinav S. Krishnan, USA TODAY

Contact reporter Krystal Nurse at [email protected]. Follow her on X, formerly Twitter,@KrystalRNurse.