This is a timely book. By documenting Black monuments in Washington, D.C., Gooding forces readers to move beyond the Confederate monument debate and grapple with the role and place of Black monuments across time and space in the nation's most public landscape.

Hilary N. Green, James B. Duke Professor of Africana Studies at Davidson College, USA, and author of Unforgettable Sacrifice: How Black Communities Remembered the Civil War (2025).

Frank Gooding Jr.'s richly-illustrated study contributes a unique perspective on Black art in Washington, DC.. In offering a multi-pronged tabulation of criteria like visibility, public accessibility, and affirmation of Black identity, combined with scrutiny of sociopolitical-historical context of specific art works in museums, universities, streets, and other DC spaces, Gooding Jr. identifies fundamental absences as core meanings of Black representation in the District's sculptural forms. He contends that troubling attempts to obscure realities about slavery are pervasive, from the earliest years of the neoclassical federal capital on into the present day, even though sculptural expressions of Black pride, if not Black power, have become a noteworthy presence. The book is lively and conversational in style even while delivering hard-hitting and analytically rigorous interpretations of numerous statues. It is revisionist statue history that reminds us what the administration of the 47th president of the United States doesn't want us to see.

Michele Bogart, Professor Emeritus of Art History, Stony Brook University, USA