Romare Bearden

Charlotte, NC

In the summer of 1898, the Spanish-American War carried American soldiers to the hills outside Santiago de Cuba, where the fighting on July 1 around San Juan Heights became the war's defining land battle. William Ewen Shipp, a North Carolina–born West Point graduate serving as a first lieutenant with the 10th Cavalry—one of the celebrated regiments of Black 'Buffalo Soldiers' led by white officers—was killed that day as his men pressed the assault. This monument in his home city of Charlotte gathers his short life into a single elegant image, calling him 'the very straightest plant' amongst a grove.

Charlotte, NC

This monument honors Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968), the Baptist minister from Atlanta who became the moral voice of the American civil rights movement. Through nonviolent protest — the Montgomery bus boycott, the March on Washington, the Selma marches — he pressed the nation to live up to its founding promise of freedom and equality for all. He was assassinated in Memphis in 1968, but the legal and moral victories he helped win reshaped American life. Charlotte, like cities across the country, chose to keep his memory in public view.

Fort Mill, SC

Erected in the 1890s in Fort Mill's Confederate Park, this is one of the earliest and most striking monuments in the South to commemorate enslaved African Americans — though it does so through the lens of the 'Lost Cause,' framing the enslaved as loyal servants of the Confederate war effort. In reality, the roughly four million people held in bondage experienced slavery as coerced labor, family separation, and violence, and many thousands escaped to Union lines or took up arms for their own freedom. The monument's language of 'faithful' devotion reflects the memory its white patrons wished to preserve in the decades after Reconstruction, not the lived experience of the people it claims to honor.

Concord, NC

Warren Clay Coleman (1849–1904), born into slavery, rose to become a prosperous Concord merchant and entrepreneur. In 1897 he founded what is recognized as the nation's first textile mill owned and operated by African Americans, running it until his death in 1904. The mill building stands about 350 yards north.