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Photo of model courtesy Jay Warren
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Photo of model courtesy Jay Warren
Sculptor Jay Warren lives in Oregon now, but as a son of the South, he feels a strong connection to the civil rights movement. He has worked on projects honoring Medgar Evers, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks.
“I was in sixth grade when they desegregated the schools,” he says. Though he recalls people in his rural Mississippi Delta community getting along, he was aware of racist behavior.
“So to do something to be against that means a lot to me,” says Warren, who in early February was finalizing a contract to create a monument to emancipation and freedom on Brown’s Island, to be installed in 2019, the 400th anniversary of when Africans were first brought to the New World. “I want young children to learn from it, when they see it, to be drawn toward it and to ask their parents or ask people around them what it’s all about.”
To be located on the south side of the Fifth Street pedestrian bridge, the bronze memorial will be composed of two 12-foot figures: a newly freed man and a woman holding a baby and a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation. The base of the pedestal will bear the names of eight Virginians — four who lived between 1619 and 1865 and fought for freedom, and four who lived from 1866 to 1970 and strove for equality. The $800,000 estimated cost will be paid through private donations.
The Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Commission, authorized by the General Assembly to create the monument, is accepting nominations for the honorees through March 31. The commission has received at least 30 nominations so far through public hearings and online submissions. At a hearing in December, Benjamin Ross, historian at Richmond’s Sixth Mount Zion Church, made a case for the Rev. John Jasper, a former slave who founded the church in an old Confederate horse stable on Brown’s Island and became a celebrated preacher best known for his sermon "The Sun Do Move."
For more information, visit mlkcommission.dls.virginia.gov.
