BOOK REVIEW

New York City Monuments of Black Americans-New Guidebook Offers Surprises and Wrenching Stories

By Phyllis Eckhaus

Don’t bother looking — there are no monuments to Black Americans in Greenwich Village.

By author David Felsen’s count, there are just 30 such statues or plaques in publicly accessible places in the entirety of New York City, out of a total of about 200. Sixteen are real historical figures, and five of those are women. About ten are like those old Highlights find-the-hidden-picture puzzle — not themselves focal points, but obscured within larger works.

Felsen’s just-published guidebook, New York City Monuments of Black Americans, offers brief, thoughtful, and informative essays on each of the 30 monuments, along with useful maps and engaging photos.

The book is organized in chronological order by monument date, so you can choose to absorb this cumulative history as one of slow and embattled progress. Or you can read it as a painful account of a still-impoverished public legacy.

Making the invisible visible
A recent monument is Elizabeth Catlett’s 2007 work honoring Ralph Ellison, the author of the groundbreaking classic, The Invisible Man. It’s in Riverside Park — a 15-foot tall black rectangle made of bronze, with the cut-out silhouette of a striding Black man, the “big hole” making the Invisible Man — the Black man no one sees — finally visible.

This is arguably a metaphor for Felsen’s own guidebook, making visible what’s missing and unseen. His meticulous research reveals stunning details that illuminate his narrative.

The earliest monument, part of the Civil War Soldiers Monument in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, was erected in 1876. One has to search to find the tiny fictional Black figure featured on a plaque; a barefoot former slave helping a white widow find her husband’s grave.

When the memorial was unveiled, speakers talked at length about Union soldiers’ great sacrifice to preserve the Union. Felsen makes the telling point that no speaker acknowledged the role the Civil War played in the emancipation of slaves — surely because New York City, tied to the slave and cotton trades, retained strong Confederate sympathies. He quotes a Tammany Hall Democrat running for New York state office years after the Civil War, in 1871, proclaiming “No suffrage nor negro equality! White men’s government for white men! White men shall rule America!”

Two of Felsen’s 30 are memorials to Brooklyn Height’s once-famed white abolitionist preacher Henry Ward Beecher (younger brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose bestselling anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin was second only to the Bible in sales). Both Brooklyn Heights memorials feature, off to the side, young Black women. Felsen tells us that in the Cadman Plaza memorial, the young woman beside the pedestal and below Beecher’s feet most likely represents Rose Ward, set free via one of Beecher’s “reverse slave auctions,” where Beecher would raise money from the pulpit for the enslaved person’s freedom.

The second Beecher memorial, in front of his still-extant Plymouth Church on Orange Street, is by Gutzom Borglum, who also sculpted Mount Rushmore. And again there are young Black women off to the side, beneath Beecher’s feet. When the memorial was dedicated in 1914, no one spoke of them. But Felsen’s wrenching account of sisters Mary and Emily Edmondson will stick with me forever, like a scar.

The Edmondson sisters, born into slavery in Maryland, as teens in 1848 sought to escape, boarding the schooner Pearl on its failed journey from Washington, D.C. to New Jersey and freedom. There were 79 enslaved people on board, the largest recorded attempted escape of enslaved people in U.S. history, and their capture triggered three days of D.C. riots targeting abolitionists and the free Black community.

Recaptured Emily and Mary were sold to New Orleans slave traders. Because the pair were young and light skinned they were publicly displayed and advertised as sex slaves for the prime price of $1,200 each or about $50,000 today. Only a yellow fever epidemic stalled their sale. The two were shipped for safekeeping to a slave jail in Alexandria, Virginia — and their father Paul, a free Black man, used the time to travel north to implore abolitionist New Yorkers for help. Beecher raised the funds to free the sisters, their harrowing story reportedly among the inspirations for Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Spotlighting Black Americans
Not so long ago, to be Black (and/or female) and to draw public attention to oneself was also potentially to attract danger, so the scarcity of conspicuous Black monuments in New York City aligns neatly with the historic restrictions on Black Americans in public life.

But there’s progress. The most recent memorials typically place noted Black Americans front and center, among them civil rights icon Rev. Martin Luther King (1970, Esplanade Garden Apartments, Harlem); baseball great Jackie Robinson (1981, Jackie Robinson Recreation Center, Harlem); Challenger astronaut Dr. Ronald E. McNair (1994, McNair Park on Brooklyn’s Eastern Parkway); jazz legend Duke Ellington (1997, Duke Ellington Circle, Central Park); Underground Railroad conductor Harriet Tubman (2008, West 122nd Street, Harlem); abolitionist orator and author Frederick Douglass (2011, Central Park North and Frederick Douglass Boulevard); and tennis champion Althea Gibson (2019, Flushing Meadows-Corona Park).

Public monuments and the controversies they spark forcefully remind us of just how subjective and fraught our history narratives are. Felsen recommends you bring his book on excursions to visit monuments throughout the city. That’s a great starting point — but personally, I recommend you “plumb” his book, bibliography, and the internet to conjure up the richest possible picture of Black history in New York City, so much more than the skimpy statuary that surrounds us. And maybe nag Mayor Mamdani to put up more and better statues.