Black women stand as living monument after protesters toppled ‘racist’ SF bronze statue

Dozens of Black women have gathered in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park last week to honor Juneteenth and create an art installation comprised of living “statues” to take the place of ones that once stood there. 

At issue was a monument to Francis Scott Key, author of the Star Spangled Banner, whose bronze statue once stood in the park. 

Overlooking the Music Concourse, an empty white stone pedestal once held a seated, life-sized bronze of Key. Finished in 1887, the memorial crowned the grounds before Black Lives Matter protesters removed its statue on the night of Juneteenth in 2020.

The full text of the national anthem remains visible on the marble and travertine base. The third verse contains racist language. Below, a newer plaque explained “Monumental Reckoning,” the art installation that temporarily replaced Key, along with the artist’s reason. A vandal had scrawled through the newer plaque with permanent marker.

In June 2021, Bay Area artist Dana King installed a temporary artwork of 350 four-foot metal statues on the site. On Wednesday, she gathered Black women to take the place of her former statue installation. 

First: A crowd listens as artist Dana King discusses her piece, ‘Monumental Reckoning,’ an art installation for Juneteenth. Last: Executive Director of San Francisco’s Human Rights Commission, Sheryl Evans Davis, speaks to a Juneteenth crowd gathered at the former site of Golden Gate Park’s Francis Scott Key memorial, which became the ‘Monumental Reckoning’ art installation in San Francisco, Calif., on June 19, 2024. (Anna Leah/Bay City News)

King said that the British government offered freedom to enslaved people in exchange for military service. She explained that the national anthem’s contentious third verse celebrates American independence ending that practice with, “No refuge could save the hireling and slave / From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave.” 

The metal statues King created — with bodies made of coils and flat, oval-shaped faces — stood as homage to Black Americans’ ancestors. They encircled the now-empty pedestal. The number represented the Africans who were taken on the São João Bautista, the ship that began chattel slavery trade in the future United States. King said 20 people survived to be sold in Virginia.

King reflected on the origin of the installation, when Mark Allan Davis of the arts organization Illuminate asked her to put something in Golden Gate Park where the statue of the slaveholder Key had once reclined.

Her initial thoughts were negative. 

“I’d take a wrecking ball and…” she said she remembered thinking, to the joy of the crowd. 

Then King became serious, remembering that when asked, how she first wanted to turn him down. 

“This is hateful and I can’t put my art in there,” she said she thought. “I create Black bodies out of bronze.”

But she decided to create something, her “Monumental Reckoning” installation.

The 64-year-old’s temporary installation came down in January after two years, longer than originally planned. 

Ultimately, King wants to see the original base and its text about Key removed, she said. 

“As long as that plinth still stands here in this park, it needs to be surrounded by monumental reckoning,” she said.

King spoke Wednesday as Black women put on green, black and red wristbands. They had come this Juneteenth to stand where King’s statues had faced the empty plinth. 

“The energy that we will provide is stronger than the metal,” she said. “It goes back generations and it goes forward generations. I know that we’re survivors. I know our strength, our perseverance. And it’s all going to be on display, based on the women that will stand around that plinth today.”

On the holiday celebrating emancipation in the United States, King said she chose women because slavery “was terror. It was horror. It was dehumanizing, but I think for women it was exponentially worse. We were just bought and sold for our ability to continue to create human beings for chattel slavery.”

When the crowd was seated, she explained that Key’s statue was not only removed for inflammatory words in our national anthem’s third verse. She told them that as district attorney in Washington, D.C., Key advocated for laws that repressed Black people. That he helped return escaped enslaved people back into bondage.

Protesters toppled and vandalized Key’s statue in 2020, along with memorials honoring former president Ulysses S. Grant and Junipero Serra, who established and oversaw a number of Spanish missions. 

City workers had removed San Francisco’s Christopher Columbus statue the day before, following Mayor London Breed’s direction. In 2018, the city uninstalled a work called “Early Days,” depicting an inaccurately dressed Indigenous man subordinate to a white man. 

Before the international mass protests and racial reckoning of 2020, 57-year-old Fairfield resident Nikki Beasley didn’t think much about monuments. An affordable housing organizer, her work led her to see trends in inequality that the George Floyd demonstrations crystalized. 

She returned to her native San Francisco to participate in King’s piece. 

“Knowing what I know now, there’s just a lot more significance to what you see and what you don’t see,” she said, “The feeling of intent, of trying to be acknowledged feels good, but then it’s just so sad when those voices of acknowledgment gets defamed. Like, we’re not allowed to be present or have purpose in the city which we help to build.”

She referred to the vandalism of the plaque on the Key plinth. Someone had written “LIES” through the text in permanent marker and changed the title to “MONUMENTAL IDIOTS.”

“Let’s talk about idiots,” exclaimed Phil Ginsburg, the general manager for the city’s Recreation and Park Department, at Wednesday’s event. “Idiots, who — whether it’s a park or a school, or a street or somebody’s home — who are gonna spew obnoxiousness and hate.”

Ginsberg co-chairs the Monuments and Memorials Advisory Committee, an initiative begun by the mayor after 2020. It aims to survey existing monuments and memorials, moving the city’s public art toward fairness as new art is planned.

The New Monuments Task Force — a group of artists, scholars and cultural workers — found that 53 men were represented in monuments that make up the San Francisco Civic Art Collection. Their report counted one Black man and three white women honored in metal and stone. Their findings did not include other ethnic or gender groups.

The city has not announced what it plans to erect on Key’s plinth in Golden Gate Park. 

Bridging history and growth

On Wednesday, musicians and flag-bearers led a procession past spraying fountains toward the stone pedestal at the center of so much conversation. 

Joron Coleman stood with his daughters – Vievon, 13, and Zylah, 15. The trio share open, freckled faces.

Coleman, 54, said he doesn’t see a lot of San Francisco’s African-American community. It was especially important to him to bring his girls to understand their history but see that they can change the future.

“The monuments themselves don’t dictate too much of my spirit — I understand the history behind it,” he said, “You look past them — we as humans are growing, parks are growing, I’m more clued into that growth as opposed to what monuments mean.”

Around the plinth, almost 50 women stood in the grass. Songs, speeches and laughter rose into the air.

Where King’s fabricated pieces had stood, women took one another’s hands. Some had silver hair or wore gold rings, but they weren’t made of metal. King’s first installation consisted of 350 isolated pieces, united by proximity. On Juneteenth, they made one horseshoe to memorialize their shared history.