The Challenge of Memorializing Slavery in North Carolina

Commemoration of the Atlantic slave trade, slavery, and subsequent emancipation of African Americans has presented a formidable challenge for artists working in three-dimensional form in the United States. Nineteenth-century sculptors such as John Quincy Adams Ward, Edmonia Lewis, and Thomas Ball wrestled with the questions of how best to memorialize slavery and freedom, and how to depict the black body in bronze and marble. ¹ In the early twentieth century, amateur art historian Freeman Henry Morris Murray, in his volume, Emancipation and The Freed in American Sculpture (1916), recognized that the location of sculpture in civic and public spaces spoke to communities about who they were and how they remembered the past. He wrote:

The fact is, nearly all sculptural groups and a considerable number of individual statues, are based on some purpose beyond mere portraiture or illustration. Moreover, these commemorative and “speaking” groups generally stand in the open, at the intersections of the highways and in the most conspicuous places. We cannot be too concerned as to what they say or suggest, or what they leave unsaid. ² ">