Sarah Lewis Instagram – Monuments. One of the reasons we care so much about monuments is because they control narratives. America’s racial divide is built on fictions. We know this. To support these fictions, you need the messaging, narrative power of culture, of monuments.
One of the first to see this was Freeman Henry Morris Murray, one of the first Black clerks to work in the federal administration for Woodrow Wilson. In 1916, he created the first book about the collective glut of monuments erected to honor the Confederacy and to legitimize the regimes that transformed out of slavery. He is an unsung hero of the civil rights movement, nearly forgotten today.
Today, there’s great work being done about the power of monuments to make narrative change by Monument Lab, for example, supported by the Mellon Foundation. Through their audit of nearly 50,000 monuments in the United States, we learn a great deal. For example, the first monument dedicated to a person of color on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., was in 2011 to Martin Luther King Jr.
We also learn that there are more monuments to mermaids than to congresswomen, by a ratio of 22 to 2.
In this work we’re really saluting the person who saw the narrative power of monuments before anyone else. Freeman Henry Morris Murray. | Posted on 02/May/2025 18:29:09
