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PHOTOGRAPH BY KRIS GRAVES, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
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By Debra Adams Simmons, Executive Editor, HISTORY
Last year, a statue commemorating suffragists Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, was unveiled in Central Park, 100 years after women got the right to vote. The Women's Rights Pioneers Monument (pictured above) was the first in the park based on an actual woman, and not a mermaid or ancient goddess. We already knew that women and people of color are underrepresented in public monuments. But did we know there are only three women represented among the 50 most common memorial statues—and only five are Black or Indigenous?
The Philadelphia-based Monument Lab surveyed nearly 50,000 monuments in the first comprehensive U.S. study. It’s part of an effort by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to assess and redirect who is commemorated in public spaces and how history gets remembered.
The report comes at a pivotal moment in the national reckoning about symbols of power in the American landscape. During the social unrest of 2020, dozens of monuments were toppled. Yet, the monument audit confirmed that 99.4 percent of American monuments remain securely on their plinths, Andrew Lawler writes for Nat Geo. (Below, a temporary monument to a Black woman in New Orleans where a memorial to Jefferson Davis once stood.)
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