A Statue for Sojourner Truth

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The New York Sun

Let us offer our modest support to Brent Staples of the Times in his bid to have included in Central Park statues of African American heroines of the women’s suffrage movement. The Times issued on Wednesday a column by Mr. Staples on this head. He reckons the park’s new memorial to the suffrage movement, coming soon, would be inadequate were it limited to Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.

We agree. We are a long and ardent fan of the public statuary recognizing American heroes. We have long been against taking down statues of controversial figures. Instead, we favor a concerted effort to plenish our public spaces with the figures who have so far been overlooked or excluded in the artistic record. Mr. Staples marks a classic opportunity, which could inspire great statues.

There are in our city, of course, scores of public statues of women — such as Audrey Munson, famed artists’ muse. We carried a column about Munson three years ago. Though she inspired breathtaking art (at least 15 statues in New York City), she is usually depicted as an allegorical figure — “Civic Fame,” say, above Manhattan’s Municipal Building, the goddess “Pomona,” in Grand Army Plaza, or “Memory,” at Straus Park.

It’s astounding, though, that among the hundreds of statues in the city, according to Kriston Capps at Citylabs.com, there are only five of actual, non-allegorical women. They are Joan of Arc, Eleanor Roosevelt, Golda Meir, Gertrude Stein, and Harriet Tubman. Even discounting for the more restricted role accorded women in earlier times, it’s a shockingly inadequate representation.

Mr. Staples’ column illuminates the opportunity. The memorial to the women’s suffrage movement being readied for Central Park was itself designed to correct the lack of statues of women. Yet, Mr. Staples notes, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony defaulted on race (they opposed the 14th and 15th Amendments) — even while the suffrage movement included leaders who were African American women.

Among those mentioned by Mr. Staples are Sarah Smith Tompkins Garnet, the city’s first African American woman school principal; educator and activist Frances “Fannie” Barrier Williams; Ida B. Wells, the fiery journalist who campaigned against lynching and also for women’s suffrage; and suffragists Mary Church Terrell and Nellie Griswold Francis. They are all deserving candidates for statues here.

The top figure on Mr. Staples’ list would, at least in our view, have to be Sojourner Truth. She was born into bondage at Ulster County, New York. As a girl, she witnessed the first love of her life, a neighboring slave named Robert, get irrecoverably beaten by his owner for trying to visit her. He was bound and dragged away. She never saw him again. “One bites one’s hand when reading her story,” we wrote.

Sojourner Truth took her name in 1843, when she was emerging as a giant in the struggle for abolition — and also as she was converting as a Methodist. She became a symbol of, among other things, the alliance between Christianity and abolition. She used her prestige to campaign for universal suffrage, extending the vote to women and African Americans. She’d make a memorable statue.

It would be a mistake not to correct the absence of black suffragists in the suffragists’ monument being readied for Central Park. This is marked not only by Mr. Staples but also by Susan Ware in the Washington Post. Let it mark but a beginning in honoring in bronze the towering African American heroes — men and women — who belong in our premier parks. Let, we say, the sculpting begin.


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