Monday’s Monument: Peace: Eastlake Park Civil Rights Monument, Phoenix, Arizona
The Eastlake Park Civil Rights Memorial, titled Peace, was created in 1997 to reflect the history of the civil rights movement in the United States and Arizona. The memorial comprises a small concrete amphitheater covered by an arched steel canopy modeled after the...
Monday’s Monument: Statue of Margaret Cruickshank, Waimate, New Zealand
Located in a small rural town this statue honors the life of Margaret Cruickshank, a local doctor who died in the influenza pandemic of 1918. At its unveiling on July 25, 1923, it was the first monument erected in New Zealand to a woman other than Queen Victoria....
Monday’s Monument: Monument des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen, Paris, France
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen is the founding document of the French republic. A product of the 1789 French Revolution, it reflected a radically new view of human rights. The Monument to the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the...
Since May 2015, every Monday morning I have been posting a little essay about a peace or social justice monument. For more than a decade, ever since the peaceCENTER was contracted by a national peace & human rights group to develop a workshop exploring strategies for creating memorials about acts of violence and injustice that did not glorify the bloodshed, we have pondered the relationship between the landscape and civic memory.
“I would rather take care of the stomachs of the living
than the glory of the departed in the form of monuments.”
Alfred Nobel
As we showcase these monuments we hope you will join us in this exploration. For now, we’re concentrating on publicly accessible outdoor works. Some are grassroots and homespun; others, more complicated in their funding and execution. They all have a story to tell and we can learn from all of them.
Monday’s Monument: Continuing the Conversation, Atlanta, Georgia
The bronze and granite sculpture installation depicts Rosa Parks at 42 years old, the age when her actions inspired the 1955 Montgomery, Alabama Bus Boycott, and at 92 years old, the age she died. The two Rosas sit across from one another, with an empty seat between...
Monday’s Monument: Benito Juárez Statue, San Antonio, Texas
La Villita was a Native American settlement and then a collection of jacales, for the Spanish soldiers stationed nearby at the Alamo). After a flood in 1819 washed away most of the huts, more substantial adobe houses replaced them. La Villita deteriorated into...
Monday’s Monument: Brown v. Board of Education Monument, Dover, Delaware
This monument pays homage to court cases involving segregation that made their way through Delaware courts in the 1950’s, before the landmark Brown v. Board of Education U.S. Supreme Court decision. It was dedicated on May 17, 2024, the 70th anniversary of the Brown...
Monday’s Monument: Bracero Monument, Los Angeles, California
The Bracero Monument, unveiled in October 2019, was created by artist Dan Medina as part of a streetscape and pedestrian improvement project that also highlights Native American, African American and immigrant cultures from many L.A. communities. A bronze migrant...
Monday’s Monument: Sebastian-Lotzer-Denkmal, Horb, Germany
Sebastian Lotzer was the author of the 'Zwölf Artikel' (Twelve Articles) in 1525, which have been called the first written description of human rights in Europe. Sebastian Lotzer was a Participant in the German Peasants' War (Deutscher Bauernkrieg), a widespread...
Monday’s Monument: Rothschild Francis Statue, Charlotte Amalie, U.S. Virgin Islands
The inscription on the base of the statue says “Persecuted (Martyr) Banished / Territorial medal of honor / 1986 / How Long Oh Justice! How Long?” Rothschild Francis was born in 1891 in Saint Thomas of the Virgin Islands while they were under the control of...
Monday’s Monument: Bacalhôa Buddha Eden, Bombarral, Portugal
In 2001, wealthy Portuguese investor and art patron José Berardo was shocked by the Taliban government’s destruction of the Giant Buddhas in Banyan, Afghanistan. In response to the demolition of these masterpieces of the late Gandhara period, Berardo initiated the...
Monday’s Monument: La Colombe de la Paix, Kinshasa, Democratic Republic Of The Congo
The Dove of Peace was sculpted by Christophe Meko Bisengo to honor South African leader Nelson Mandela’s struggle for peace. It was unveiled in August 1991. The monument was originally in Mandela Square but was moved to the crossroads between Kisangani Avenue and...
Monday’s Monument: Memorial To Heroic Self Sacrifice, London, England
Located in Postman's Park, just north of St. Paul’s Cathedral, the memorial contains 54 plaques, each dedicated to an ‘ordinary’ person who gave their life in an attempt to save someone else. Artist George Frederic Watts devised the memorial in 1887, originally...
Monday’s Monument: Taken Not Given, Melbourne, Australia
Taken Not Given is a reminder of a Parliamentary apology, and a public recognition of the hurt caused by forced adoptions. The sculpture is by Melbourne-based artist Anne Ross. It was commissioned by the Victorian Parliament after its apology for forced adoption...
Monday’s Monument: Peace Circle, Grapevine, Texas
“Peace Circle” depicts a meeting of Republic of Texas President Sam Houston and ten American Indian chiefs/ captains from the Delaware, Chickasaw, Waco, Tawakoni, Keechi, Caddo, Anadarko, Ioni, Biloxi and Cherokee Nations on the Grape Vine Prairie in 1843. The Peace...
Monday’s Monument: Dignity of Earth and Sky, Chamberlain, South Dakota
Dignity of Earth and Sky is a sculpture on a bluff overlooking the Missouri River near Chamberlain, South Dakota. The 50-foot (15.24 meter) high stainless steel statue by South Dakota artist laureate Dale Claude Lamphere depicts an Indigenous...
Monday’s Monument: Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation, Paris, France
Dedicated on 12 April 1962 by General de Gaulle, then President of the Republic of France, the Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation is a memorial to the 200,000 people deported from Vichy France. The site is located on the Île de la Cité behind Notre Dame as an...
Twelve Responses to Tragedy, London, England
Twelve Responses to Tragedy, or the Yalta Memorial, is located in the Yalta Memorial Garden on Cromwell Road adjacent to the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington. It commemorates people displaced as a result of the Yalta...
Monday’s Monument: Rosa Parks Monument, Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama
On Dec. 1, 2020, exactly 65 years after Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus, the city and Air Force leadership unveiled a monument to her memory on Maxwell AFB. Rosa Parks worked as a seamstress at Maxwell's on-base hotel in 1941. Her husband,...
Monday’s Monument: “Pull the Plug, Ring the Change”, Hyde, England
On the 14th of August 1848 a band of Chartists, armed with guns , pistols, swords and pikes marched through Hyde at midnight, determined to effect a stoppage of the mills for a month by drawing the plugs from the boilers, thus bringing the machinery of the owners to a...
Monday’s Monument: Statue of Henrietta Lacks, Roanoke, VA
Cells harvested from the body of Henrietta Lacks before her death from cervical cancer in 1951 have been essential to major medical breakthroughs for more than 70 years — and the use of those cells without her family’s knowledge brought scrutiny to issues of bioethics...
Monday’s Monument: Elijah P. Lovejoy Monument, Alton, Illinois
The Elijah P. Lovejoy Monument is a memorial to this advocate of free speech and the abolition of slavery. Lovejoy ran a newspaper called the St Louis Observer in Missouri, a slave state, when slavery advocates attacked and destroyed his presses three times. He moved...
Monday’s Monument: Samantha Smith Statue, Augusta, Maine
As a 10-year-old girl, Samantha Smith sat at her kitchen table and wrote a letter to then Soviet Premier Yuri Andropov, telling him of her worries about Russia waging war against the United States. She became an international celebrity when Andropov answered her...
Monday’s Monument: Brown Dog Statue, Battersea, London, England
In 1903 a brown dog was subjected over the course of several months to repeated live surgeries—described by witnesses to as having been conducted without anesthetizing the dog—in a laboratory and before students in a lecture hall of a London medical school. All this...
Monday’s Monument: Matthew Shepard Memorial Bench, Laramie, WY
There are no memorials marking the murder of Matthew Shephard besides this small plaque on a bench on the University of Wyoming campus, where he was a student. It was installed in 2008. Shephard's murder, shortly after midnight on October 7, 1998, spawned an activist...
Monday’s Monument: Acts of Intolerance, Springfield, Ilinois
On August 16, 2024, President Biden designated a national monument at the site of the deadly 1908 race riot in Springfield, Ill., a tragedy that led to the creation of the NAACP. "This site weaves together two important threads in our Nation’s story: the hateful...
Monday’s Monument: Mask of Sorrow, Magadan, Russia
This Mask of Sorrow, in Russian Маска скорби, was designed to commemorate the people in the Gulag prison camps in the Kolyma region of the Soviet Union who lost their lives under harsh conditions during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Ernest Neizvestny (whose parents...
Monday’s Monument: Bremer Loch, Bremen, Germany
The Bremer Loch is a wishing well located in Bremen, Germany, in the city's market square. When coins are dropped in, it triggers a photoelectric cell that makes animal sounds representing Bremen's Town Musicians, a famous fairy tale. The inscription in the local...
MONUMENT (n.)
late 13c., “a sepulchre,” from Old French monument “grave, tomb, monument,” and directly from Latin monumentum “a monument, memorial structure, statue; votive offering; tomb; memorial record,” literally “something that reminds,” from monere “to admonish, warn, advice,” from PIE *moneyo-, suffixed (causative) form of root *men- (1) “to think.” Sense of “structure or edifice to commemorate a notable person, action, or event” first attested c. 1600.
Ten Questions to Ask at a Historic Site
In his book Lies Across America, Professor James Loewen posed these ten questions to ask at a historic site.
1. When did this location become a historic site? (When was the marker or monument put up? Or the house interpreted?) How did that time differ from ours? From the time of the event or person interpreted?
2. Who sponsored it? representing which participant groups’s point of view? What was their position in the social structure when the event occurred? When the site went “up”?
3. What were the sponsor’s motives? What were their ideological needs and social purposes? What were their values?
4. What is the intended audience for the site? What values were they trying to leave for us, today? What does the site ask us to go and do or think about?
5. Did the sponsors have government support? At what level? Who was ruling the government at the time? What ideological arguments were used to get the government acquiescence?
6. Who is left out? What points of view go largely unheard? How would the story differ if a different group told it? Another political party? Race? Sex? Class? Religious group?
7. Are there problematic (insulting, degrading) words or symbols that would not be used today, or by other groups?
8. How is the site used today? Do traditional rituals continue to connect today’s public to it? Or is it ignored? Why?
9. Is the presentation accurate? What actually happened? What historical sources tell of the event, people, or period commemorated at this site?
10. How does the site fit in with others that treat the same era? Or subject? What other people lived ad events happened then but are not commemorated? Why?
Want to learn more about monuments? Check out my bookshelf.
Ready to Kill
by Carl Sandburg (Chicago Poems, 1916)
TEN minutes now I have been looking at this.
I have gone by here before and wondered about it.
This is a bronze memorial of a famous general
Riding horseback with a flag and a sword and a revolver on him.
I want to smash the whole thing into a pile of junk to be hauled away to the scrap yard.
I put it straight to you,
After the farmer, the miner, the shop man, the factory hand, the fireman and the teamster,
Have all been remembered with bronze memorials,
Shaping them on the job of getting all of us
Something to eat and something to wear,
When they stack a few silhouettes
Against the sky
Here in the park,
And show the real huskies that are doing the work of the world, and feeding people instead of butchering them,
Then maybe I will stand here
And look easy at this general of the army holding a flag in the air,
And riding like hell on horseback
Ready to kill anybody that gets in his way,
Ready to run the red blood and slush the bowels of men all over the sweet new grass of the prairie.
Want more poems? Check out my monumental poetry section.