Introduction
Richard Hallier, The Three Rebel Queens of the Virgin Islands, 2005. St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands. Photograph by Linda L. Kung, Wikipedia Commons.
Welcome
For over thirty-five years, various countries, cities, and communities** have commemorated the difficult history of the transatlantic slave trade, chattel slavery, resistance to enslavement, and the abolition of slavery. In the Caribbean, west and east Africa, Europe, and the United States, officials and citizens have selected to permanently recognize the slave past in public spaces. Often in recognition of the abolition of slavery or the discovery of the slave past through archival and archaeological recovery, these monuments and memorials acknowledge that chattel slavery happened.
This impulse to commemorate the enslaved and the slave past is often initiated by nations, local governments, civic organizations, universities, and a surprising number of individuals who want to commemorate Black presence and contribution. More recently, descendant communities, who are wrestling with the meaning of slavery in the contemporary moment, have asserted their right to have a say in the way in which the enslaved are to be represented in the monument landscape.
Alex da Silva, Slavernijmonument, 2013. Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Photograph by Emily Hirsch, 2025.
Contemporary Monuments to the Slave Past (CMSP) is a digital repository of commemorative works related to the history of slavery and enslavement (monuments, memorials, and sites of slavery). It focuses primarily on three-dimensional objects, but also includes some architecture that serves as memorial and museum such as the Mémorial ACTe on the island of Guadeloupe in the Caribbean. The term slave past covers the extended period of chattel slavery from the transatlantic slave trade and the Middle Passage to emancipation.
Currently, the digital repository includes 134 commemorative works from West Africa, Brazil, the Caribbean, Europe, Mexico, and the United States. I started collecting data for Contemporary Monuments to the Slave Past in 2017. I began with a general survey of the World Wide Web to discover monuments across the United States. Quickly realizing that the database needed to be global, I decided 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. 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.
During fall 2024 - spring 2025, we researched and documented six additional memorials dedicated to Harriet Tubman. We also discovered twenty additional commemorative works in the United States as well as a flurry of monument building that occurred on various Caribbean islands in the late 1990s that commemorate resistance and the abolition of slavery. We are in the process of editing this data, and will post it in spring 2026.
Shane Albritton and Norman Lee, From Absence to Presence, Memorial to the Enslaved of Southern Maryland, 2020, St. Mary's College of Maryland. Photograph by Renée Ater, 2021.
Contemporary Monuments to the Slave Past includes a range of information and resources:
- A map of all the monuments in the digital repository.
- Monuments organized around eleven themes. These themes include the abolition of slavery, African American history, Black abolitionists, burial grounds, emancipation, resistance, sites of slavery, the transatlantic slave trade, the Underground Railroad, United States Colored Troops, and universities and slavery. Please note as you explore this section that Omeka only allows a monument to be added to a single collection.
- Helpful terms related to sculpture, commemorative works, and the language of slavery.
- Resources including the National Monument Audit and the community sourced guide, Writing about Slavery? Teaching about Slavery?
- Individual records on each monument in the database.
- A list of the artists included in the database.
- General information about the project.
We encourage you to explore the site to learn about the commemoration of the slave past in the monument landscape. If you are looking for historical markers, visit The Historical Marker Database or check individual state governments for their state historical marker databases.
History of the Project
Meta Warrick Fuller, Emancipation, 1913 (left) and Fern Cunningham, Step on Board: Harriet Tubman Memorial, 1999 (right). Boston, Massachusetts. Photographs by Renée Ater, 2019.
Founded in 2018, this digital project began as an outcrop of my research and writing on the sculptor, Meta Warrick Fuller (1877–1968). In 1913, she created a figural plaster sculpture, Emancipation;, for the National Emancipation Exposition—a fair to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. In 1999 through a collaborative effort between the National Center of Afro-American Artists, the Museum of Afro-American History, and the City of Boston, a full-size bronze cast (on the left) was placed alongside Fern Cunningham's Step on Board memorial to Tubman (on the right) in the Harriet Tubman Park in Boston.
Fuller and Cunningham's sculptures led me to ask what other contemporary monuments to slavery might exist in the public spaces of American cities and towns. I began my research with Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad as she was figured and celebrated in numerous monuments in the Northeast. Invited to write for the exhibition catalog, Tell It With Pride: The 54th Massachusetts Regiment and Augustus Saint-Gaudens' Shaw Memorial (2013), I proceeded to examine recent memorials to United States Colored Troops (USCT), created in honor of Black men's service in the Union Army during the American Civil War. At about the same time as I began researching the USCT, I also became interested in cemeteries dedicated to enslaved and free persons and their transformation into reclaimed sites of mourning and commemoration.
Contrabands and Freedmen Cemetery Memorial, 2015. Alexandria, Virginia. Photograph by Renee Ater, 2018.
Why Slavery and Monuments?
This project came into being amid a growing and expansive conversation about slavery, memory, and commemoration in the early twenty-first century. The 200th anniversary of the abolishment of slavery in 2007 brought the issue of the slave past to the foreground in exhibitions, performances, and monument building in the United Kingdom. The United Nations also participated in ceremonies recognizing the transatlantic slave trade in 2007, calling for the International Day for the Commemoration of the Two-hundredth Anniversary of the Abolition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. In 2008, the United Nations established March 25 as an annual day of commemoration, the "International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade."
As major commemoration efforts got underway, I wrote a short essay for a special issue on sculpture for the journal American Art in 2010. Entitled "Slavery and Its Memory in Public Monuments," I traced the historic difficulties of commemorating slavery in three-dimensional form and argued that the slave past was an "unreconciled and painful part" of US history, an unsettling and unsettled history. Despite the shame often associated with slavery in the United States, contemporary sculptors and designers along with communities were and are wrestling with remembrance and memorialization of slavery through the monument landscape.
As I continued my research, two significant events occurred:
- the United States commemorated the sesquicentennial of the American Civil War, refocusing attention on chattel slavery as an essential reason for the conflict; and
- the United Nations dedicated and unveiled the Permanent Memorial to Honour the Victims of the Slavery and the Transatlantic Trade on its grounds in March 25, 2015. This memorial and the ongoing activities of the UN including annual commemoration activities signified a global conversation about the slave past, history, memory, and monument.
Rodney Leon, "Ark of Return": The Permanent Memorial at the United Nations in Honour of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 2015, United Nations Headquarters, New York, New York. Photograph by Renée Ater, 2022.
As the Federal government removes references to the slavery past, chattel slavery, and the enslaved at historic sites in the United States (including the dismantling of a slavery exhibition at Philadelphia's Independence National Historic Park by the National Park Service on January 22, 2026, and then its court-mandated reinstallation on February 19, 2026), this digital repository provides documentation of the diverse ways that artists and communities are dealing with the hard histories of slavery and choosing to remember and memorialize the slave past.
Renée Ater, updated May 12, 2026
Key
**I use the term "community" broadly to mean the range of people involved in the conceptualization, researching, commissioning, approving, funding, and/or maintaining a commemorative work. Communities include individual citizens, neighborhood associations, arts commissions, arts groups, cultural centers and museums, land developers, government agencies, and town/city, county, state, and/or federal employees.