The crater from the wrecking ball stood hollow in the center of the home at 2335 Arapahoe Street in the summer of 1983. Concerned community members scrambled to pause the imminent demolition to the home of Dr. Justina Ford, Colorado’s first African American woman to become a licensed physician. 

More than a century before, Ford overcame the setbacks and complexities of the two strikes against her—her race and her gender—by opening a home medical practice in the heart of Denver’s Five Points neighborhood. Known as the Harlem of the West, this thriving African American neighborhood in downtown Denver dates back to the late 19th century. An economic and cultural center for the community, Five Points was filled with entrepreneurs, artists, musicians, and licensed educators, lawyers, and doctors. 

As part of the African American professional class, Ford intentionally used her knowledge and skills to meet the needs of African Americans, who experienced health disparities due to limited access to health care and financial resources to pay for medical services. By the time of her death in 1952, “the Lady Doctor,” as she was widely known, had delivered more than 7,000 babies. 

It was two of those “Ford babies,” Moses and Elizabeth Valdez, father and daughter, who catalyzed the memorial movement to save her home and practice nearly a century after it was built in 1890. 

After years of organizing and advocacy, in February 1984, the two-story house was removed from its foundation and transported 13 blocks on an oversize platform to 3091 California Street in downtown Denver. Since that time, it has remained the official site of the Black American West Museum. In this way, Ford, one of the most renowned medical professionals in Colorado’s history, has remained a beloved beacon of the African American community, in life and death.

The successful campaign to preserve and restore Ford’s home exists as part of a larger narrative of the evolution of African American women’s memorialization, or the process of commemoration. Its origins in the United States date back to the early 19th century, when free Black communities in the North organized festivals and parades to celebrate emancipation, promote abolitionism, and disseminate Black history. They used these public venues to also herald the contributions of Black women through commemorative oratory, trumpeting their legacies through speeches. 

After the Civil War, public festivals and parades spread to the South. African American clubwomen began creating named memorials—public memorials attached to a person’s legacy—for women like Phillis Wheatley. At the dawn of the clubwomen’s era, the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) was instrumental in establishing a nationwide infrastructure for named memorialization to expand in the 1890s, all while Jim Crow laws increasingly restricted the parameters of Black citizenship. At the same time, white organizations like the Daughters of the Confederacy began to erect public monuments that supported false narratives of the Civil War and conveyed dehumanizing myths about enslaved Black people. 

With limited to no control of the public landscape domain, African American communities employed named memorials as strategic resistance against the erasure and caricature that existed among white public history memorials, race pseudoscience, and published historical narratives. In the absence of statues, monuments, and museums, African American women sparked the era of named memorials, which spread across the United States and manifested in domestic and Pan-African organizations, public libraries, public housing, and even commercial ventures.

As the ruling power of Jim Crow laws began to lessen in the 1960s, the prominence of named memorials ebbed as the ability to erect traditional public history sites, such as museums and statues, increased. Integration decreased the visibility of named memorials as constituencies of public buildings and African American neighborhoods began to change.

In the midst of the civil rights, Black Power, and Black Studies movements, African American communities had more access and negotiating power with local and national bureaucracies to influence the public history landscape. They advocated to save buildings and create new spaces to celebrate Black heritage and culture, ushering in a new era of African American traditional memorials. Though urban renewal at times galvanized memorializers to save meaningful cultural places, it irrevocably restructured African American communities. 

Still, by developing public and private partnerships, a new generation of memorializers, African American preservationists, and public historians and organizations resisted erasure of their communities from the physical landscape when they established the first traditional public history sites.

In the 21st century, memorializers’ ability to create and sustain traditional memorials has only increased, with web-based technologies and social media platforms expanding memorials for African American women even further. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter/X posts, along with Google Doodles and digital humanities projects, have become integral to how Black history is disseminated to public audiences. The internet has provided a new public history terrain shaped by memorializers of all backgrounds. Community advocacy for more visible multicultural representation has broadened the scope of museums, statues, and historical markers in locales across the United States.

Despite all the national and regional representation, significant underrepresentation of African American women memorials still remains. With the addition of the Harriet Tubman National Historic Park in 2009, there are now three African American women represented in units of the National Park Service—less than 1% of all designations.

The silence of underrepresentation and unseen memorials has been countered by the national movement of African American public memory crafters to resist erasure and cultivate historical narratives that can withstand generations. Operating with unprecedented savvy, African American memorializers have been at the forefront of establishing a national public history landscape. The civil rights, Black Power, and Black Studies movements created a political and social landscape for African American communities to establish public history sites using public federal and state funding.

The legacies of Black women continue to be celebrated in named and traditional memorials, by generations of memorializers and public memory crafters, through a continuum of commemoration manifested in a vibrant public history landscape throughout the United States.

This excerpt, adapted from Black Women Legacies: Public History Sites Seen and Unseen by Alexandria Russell (University of Illinois Press, 2024), appears by permission of the publisher.