AMonumental Journey, the Kerry James Marshall sculpture that was unveiled on 12 July in Des Moines, Iowa, is a behemoth. Standing 30ft tall, it comprises two tapered cylindrical volumes, minimalist abstractions of west African talking drums rendered in black manganese brick. They’ve been stacked askew, one on top of the other, and encircled with an inscription of 12 names. They’re the lawyers who, in 1925, founded the National Bar Association, the oldest and largest network of African American attorneys and judges in the country.
“This monument, the stature of it, the sense of strength and vitality and the legacy it’s built on is very humbling,” says the NBA president, Juan Thomas. It commemorates 12 attorneys, including Gertrude E Durden Rush, the second woman to ever practice law in Iowa, who had lived through a time when being “an African American lawyer was a very lonely place”: there were fewer than 1,000 of them nationwide, with zero black members of Congress and a growing Ku Klux Klan that would peak that year at 50,000 members. At the height of the Jim Crow era, having been denied membership to the American Bar Association, they decided to organize their own.
Working adjacent to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the NBA became a vehicle for civil rights advocacy through legal action. Its members, now numbering more than 65,000 across North America, Latin America and Africa, provided counsel to people and other organizations of color. Their efforts helped to block John J Parker, a known opponent to black voting rights, from a seat at the supreme court. They stayed executions, they opened black businesses, and they built a network of support that had previously not existed.
For more read The Guardian
