On Tuesday, June 9, 2015, the Frederick Douglass Monument, will have graced the City of Rochester for 116 years. This is the nation’s first statue erected to honor an African American. Presently situated in the Highland Park Bowl, the monument was unveiled at St. Paul Street and Central Avenue in downtown Rochester, New York.
On June 9, 1899 with the dedication of the monument, John W. Thompson, a young local African American church and Masonic leader, learned from experience that one man can influence history by following his dream.
The story had begun four-and-a-half years earlier at a meeting of Eureka Lodge 36, Free and Accepted Masons, Prince Hall, held in November 1894. That evening, Thompson, a waiter at the Powers Hotel, had submitted a proposal for erecting a unique monument in Rochester to memorialize “African American” soldiers and sailors who had died during the Civil War. Members of Eureka Lodge enthusiastically embraced the proposal and established the Civil War Veteran Monument Committee to direct the project.
When Thompson was appointed committee chairman, he had no idea of the trials to come over the next several years. He would see his initial proposal modified several times and abandoned by some of its strongest supporters. But, eventually, his idea became a reality in the nation’s first memorial dedicated in honor of an African American citizen.
The Lincoln monument in Washington Square Park had been unveiled in 1892, to commemorate fallen heroes of the Civil War. President Benjamin Harrison and Frederick Douglass, U.S. Ambassador to Haiti, were central figures at that unveiling.
However, Thompson argued that the Lincoln monument did not represent all soldiers and sailors who participated in the Civil War. “I have visited the monument in Washington Square and made an examination of the bronze figures,” he said. But the features of the military figures in the monument “represent the American white soldiers and sailors, one Irish soldier and one the German, while the
Afro-American is not represented within the features.”
Thompson realized that his project needed the endorsement of a prominent figure connected with Rochester. During the late 1800’s Rochester was best known, throughout the nation and the world, as the former home of Frederick Douglass. Thompson wrote to Douglass, who was then living in Washington, D.C., and within a few weeks Douglass responded:
“I am more than pleased with the patriotic purpose to erect in Rochester a monument in honor of the colored soldier who, under great discouragements, at the moment of the national peril, volunteered to go to the front and fight for their country. [Even] when assured in advance that neither by our own government nor that of the Confederates would they be accorded the equal rights of peace or of war, the colored soldier fought all the same. I shall be proud if I shall live to see the proposed monument erected in the city of Rochester, where the best years of my life were spent in the service of our ¬people – and which
to this day seems like my home.”
to this day seems like my home.”
