Monumental Absence

Augusta Savage intended to build monuments. In the 1930s and early 1940s, the Harlem-based sculptor envisioned memorials to Jean Baptiste Point DuSable, the vaudeville star Florence Mills, the World War I service of the “Harlem Hellfighters,” and the writer and civil rights leader James Weldon Johnson. None of these proposed works was erected, and they have not been included in scholarship examining Savage’s work and career. This essay considers Savage’s thwarted efforts as critical reminders that material absence does not connote a lack of vision, intention, or labor. I argue that Savage’s unbuilt monuments reveal her ambition to intervene in the Whiteness and maleness of the American memorial landscape and claim monuments as sites where Black lives and concerns can be represented. Engaging critical approaches to archival absence and the power of monuments, I explore the space these unbuilt monuments would have taken up in the world.