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Battery Park City Library welcomes local author David Felsen to discuss his new book New York City Monuments of Black Americans: A History and Guide. He will be in conversation with John T. Reddick.
New York City is blessed with an incredible array of public sculptures.
One overlooked aspect of this collection is its monuments of Black Americans, each
with its own remarkable story. The first appearance of a Black person in a city
monument came in the Civil War Soldiers’ Monument in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood
Cemetery in 1876, but this was a nameless symbolic figure. It wasn’t until 1945 that
Booker T. Washington became the first identifiable Black American honored in a New
York City monument. In 2007, the city dedicated its first monument to a Black woman,
Harriet Tubman. Behind every first is a story of triumph over adversity and exclusion.
Local author David Felsen reveals the stories behind thirty inspiring monuments that
have endured, as well as how they found their place in the city’s history.
David Felsen is an Emmy Award Winning producer who teaches American history to eleventh graders at Avenues: The World School in New York City. He has an MA in American history from the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and a bachelor’s degree in history from Haverford College. Before becoming a history teacher, David produced television documentaries for HBO, PBS and History, among others. He lives in Brooklyn near Prospect Park with his wife, his son, and dog and cat.
John T. Reddick is an architectural preservationist, historian, and Harlem resident. Currently, he’s engaged as the Director of Community Engagement Projects for the Central Park Conservancy and serves as a board member of Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. His knowledge of Harlem’s culture and architecture have served to advance several public art and open space projects in that community, which include the Ralph Ellison Memorial, Harriet Tubman Square and the Frederick Douglass Memorial and Circle, as well as New York’s LGBT Memorial and Monument in Hudson River Park. At present, under a grant from the Mellon Foundation, Reddick is engaged with the Conservancy in advancing public discussion around the history of Seneca Village, as a foundation toward public commemoration of that predominantly African American pre-park community. Reddick received his Bachelor of Science in Architecture from Ohio State University and a Master of Architecture from Yale University.
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