About the data
Kanisha Dabreo, Emancipation Day Memorial: Fah Who Dis? AstroBlack Joy, August 1, 2024. Brampton, Ontario. Photograph: City of Brampton.
Currently, the digital repository includes 134 commemorative works from West Africa, the Caribbean, Mexico, Brazil, Europe, and the United States. I started collecting data for Contemporary Monuments to the Slave Past in 2018. I began with a general survey of the World Wide Web to discover monuments across the United States. Grace Yasumura was essential to creating the original dataset and establishing the digital repository. We realized quickly that the database needed to be global and made the decision to include commemorative works from nations directly involved in the slave trade and slavery as well as colonies that were the site of the importation of enslaved Africans.
During fall 2024 - spring 2025, Nélari Figueroa Torres researched and documented six additional memorials dedicated to Harriet Tubman. She also researched commemorative works in the United States that were not in the digital repository. Yui Suzuki provided all of the editing support for the project including developmental editing, data cleaning, copy editing, and general project management. The project advanced significantly with their dedicated work.
Recently, we added ten U.S. monuments to the database; seventeen additional U.S. commemorative works will be added in the coming weeks. We also realized that a flurry of monument building occurred on various Caribbean islands in the late 1990s-2000s that commemorate resistance and the abolition of slavery: a total of sixty. I am in the process of editing all of this data, and will post it in spring 2026. I also continue to research commemorative works from Madagascar, Réunion, the Seychelles, and Mauritius.
Omeka metadata
In creating this site, I thought carefully about how I wanted to define metadata, which is based on Dublin Core--a metadata standard vocabulary used on Omeka. I decided to map Omeka's Dublin Core metadata onto the TMS categories used by the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC). TMS is a web-based collections management system used by many museums. The NMAAHC categories allowed me to adopt specific language around descriptions, typologies, and subject matter categories. Below is a list and descriptions of the most used metadata categories on Contemporary Monuments to the Slave Past.
Title: The title is the name given to a commemorative work. Some works are also known by secondary or popular titles. We have listed these secondary or popular titles under the metadata category "Alternative Title."
Subject: Subject metadata are based on the Library of Congress subject headings and the National Museum of African American History and Culture's TMS subject headings.
Description: All commemorative works have a description written by one of Contemporary Monuments to the Slave Past's team members.
Creator: The creator is considered the artist, sculptor, designer, and/or architect of the commemorative work.
Source: Source indicates the sources for the images included on the site. See rights statement for use of images on Contemporary Monuments to the Slave Past.
Date: All dates for commemorative works are the dedication or unveiling dates, not the creation dates.
Contributor: Contributors include city and state governments, funders (private and public), significant individuals, monument committee members, landscape designers, architectural firms, and engineer firms, where known.
Rights: Rights indicate the owners of the commemorative works to the best of our knowledge as well as contact addresses.
Format: The format category indicates the format of the image in the digital repository. All images are in JPEG format.
Language: English is the predominant language used on the site.
Type: Type describes the type of commemorative work. "Visual--Arts Sculpture" represents most monuments and memorials in the database.
Coverage: Coverage indicates the physical locations of the commemorative works. All monuments are also geolocated with latitude and longitudinal data within individual records and on the map.
Has Part: We have documented all inscriptions on and signage at monuments/memorials. Some commemorative works have extensive external information, others have little to none.
Extent: We have provided the measurements of commemorative works when known. Measurements are in inches and centimeters.
Bibliographic Citation: We have included at least one bibliographic reference for each commemorative work.
Rights Holder: The rights holder for the content and images on Contemporary Monuments to the Slave Past is Renée Ater.
Tags
I have created fifty-five tags and tagged all of the commemorative works in the digital repository. Monuments are tagged with materials tags (ie. granite, bronze, wood), object tags (ie. boat, shackles, trees, Bible), and form tags (ie. figurative, abstract, allegory). Tags for commemorative works are listed on the "Browse Monuments" page and within individual monument records.
Updated March 5, 2026