A Gathering at the Crossroads: Memorializing African American Trailblazers and a Lost Neighborhood in Harrisburg

A Gathering at the Crossroads pays tribute to voting rights, Harrisburg’s Old Eighth Ward, and four African American civil rights leaders of the 19th century: Thomas Morris Chester, Jacob T. Compton, William Howard Day, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper.
Photo, PHMC

Twice during the second half of 2020, people gathered at Harrisburg’s Capitol Park to witness the dedication of A Gathering at the Crossroads, a monument commemorating four statewide civil rights crusaders and the African American residents of a now-vanished neighborhood in Harrisburg who contributed to the commonwealth’s entrenched legacy of freedom.

The monument, sculpted by Becky Ault, cofounder of ART Research Enterprises in East Hempfield Township, Lancaster County, encompasses three elements. The first presents four life-sized bronze figures of Thomas Morris Chester, the first African American war correspondent; Jacob T. Compton, a pastor and musician who helped President-Elect Abraham Lincoln evade an assassination attempt; William Howard Day, the first African American school board president and advocate for the 15th Amendment; and Francis Ellen Watkins Harper, a poet and forerunner of female African American advocacy for suffrage and education. The monument’s second feature is a bronze-cast orator’s pedestal including historical images of the city’s “Old Eighth Ward,” a once thriving and diverse community that included 1,100 households and more than 500 businesses northeast of the Pennsylvania Capitol; the names of 100 prominent men and women from the neighborhood are listed on its base and a relief map of the Eighth Ward is on top. The final element is the Irvis Equality Circle, including a cobblestone surface and semicircular walk around.

The monument’s dedication, originally scheduled for June 2020, was both delayed and split into two ceremonies because of the COVID-19 pandemic. With Pennsylvania prohibiting large gatherings and with delays to the work due to stay-at-home orders and funding shortfalls, organizers of the event rescheduled ceremonies for August 26, when the orator’s pedestal and statues to Day and Harper were dedicated, and November 16, when the figures of Chester and Compton were unveiled.

The subtext of A Gathering at the Crossroads is a tribute to the struggle for voting rights, coinciding with the nation’s celebration of the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage with the 19th Amendment and the 150th anniversary of Black male suffrage through the 15th Amendment. The monument inspires discussion over how the country extended freedoms to all, regardless of race or gender, and challenges visitors to think about the enduring history of voter suppression through 1920.

Harrisburg’s lost historic Eighth Ward, a predominantly African American neighborhood east of the Capitol, is memorialized on a bronzed orator’s pedestal with the names of 100 prominent African American residents.
Photo, PHMC

For all its pomp and nuance, A Gathering at the Crossroads was four years in the making. In 2016 Dauphin County native Lenwood Sloan, an artist and facilitator for cultural and heritage programs across the United States, curated the Hawaiian Tourism Department’s seven-day Pan Pacific Hawaii Conference, where Louis D’Amour, executive director of the International Institute of Peace Through Tourism (IIPT), served as the keynote speaker. Sloan was inspired by D’Amour’s address, which introduced the Global Peace Park Project, an endeavor to establish a single network of 2,400 “peace parks” across the world, with 100 common grounds in each time zone throughout the world by November 11, 2020.

As he bid D’Amour farewell, Sloan was compelled to develop a peace park in Pennsylvania. “I informed [D’Amour] that I had just retired for the third time and didn’t have the institutional resources or gravitas to launch such a project,” recalled Sloan. But after several correspondences over email with D’Amour, Sloan became determined to participate in the global movement.

Sloan then solicited the assistance of independent consultants Jeb Stuart and Kelly Summerford, two City of Harrisburg reformers who have served in legislative and residential capacities, to host a series of roundtable discussions during the spring and summer of 2017 at Harrisburg University. The meetings resulted in the formation of an alliance of 24 organizational and institutional partners. The Harrisburg Peace Promenade Commonwealth Monument Project was formally launched aboard the Pride of the Susquehanna Riverboat on October 1, 2017.

The project seemed all but finished in 2018 when the team, which had grown to include 40 civic organizations and 260 citizens, turned 6 acres of Harrisburg’s stunning Riverfront Park into one of D’Amour’s IIPT Global Peace Parks. “Peace like a river” became the group’s theme as eight monuments were curated along the bank of the Susquehanna River. The peace promenade then turned stewardship of each monument over to adjoining neighborhoods.

When the project concluded in August 2018, Sloan’s group expressed disappointment that of all the monuments, plaques and honorifics along the riverbank, there was not a single piece of art dedicated to African Americans and only one that commemorated women. Sloan began petitioning the City of Harrisburg that month “for a site along the river and the support to establish Harrisburg’s first monument to African Americans and newest monument to women.”

The Harrisburg Peace Promenade’s “history detectives” subcommittee advanced an initiative to erect a new monument that could “respond to the concurrence of the anniversaries of the 15th and 19th amendments.” While Sloan’s team petitioned Pennsylvania’s Department of General Services, Senate Resolution 158, recognizing the historical importance of the 15th Amendment and encouraging the establishment of a monument upon the grounds of the Pennsylvania State Capitol Complex, passed in the Senate, while House Resolution 415, sharing similar language, was adopted unanimously in the House of Representatives.

It was eventually decided to place a monument on the South Lawn of Capitol Park next to the Speaker K. Leroy Irvis Office Building, named after the first African American speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives and of any state legislature since Reconstruction. “The placement of the monument upon the Irvis lawn is an act of reparation as well as a place-making initiative,” said Sloan.

The ribbon cutting and first dedication for A Gathering at the Crossroads on August 26, 2020.
Courtesy Lenwood Sloan / Photo, Ruby Doub

Once the Harrisburg Peace Promenade received the consent of the General Assembly, Sloan’s team commenced discussion over the design of the monument and its greater meaning. Discourse shifted from one blueprint that suggested two statues located in separate places (one for an African American man and one for an African American woman) to a single tableau that would feature four life-sized bronze figures of equal rights and suffrage pioneers standing around an iconic orator’s pedestal. Eventually, Sloan’s team determined the second proposal was more cost effective and meaningful to the impact of African American men and women in Pennsylvania.

Of the four exemplars featured in the monument, Thomas Morris Chester (1834–92) was born in Harrisburg. His family operated a restaurant that served as a safe house on the Underground Railroad. He attended schools in Pittsburgh and in Monrovia, Liberia, in West Africa before enrolling at Thetford Academy in Vermont, where he graduated in 1856. He then returned to Monrovia to teach and write for the Star of Liberia. When the American Civil War erupted in 1861, Chester returned to Harrisburg. He eventually helped to recruit Pennsylvanians into the United States Colored Troops (USCT). During the Battle of Gettysburg, he led two companies of Black troops in the defense of Harrisburg. By August 1864 he found employment working as a journalist for the Philadelphia Press, becoming the first African American war correspondent for a major newspaper. After the Civil War, Chester assumed the duty as grand marshall of the November 14, 1865, Grand Review of United States Colored Troops, the only parade honoring African American Civil War soldiers. Upon his death in 1892, Chester was buried in Lincoln Cemetery, a Black burial ground in Penbrook.

Also interred at Lincoln Cemetery, William Howard Day (1825–1900) was born free in New York City and settled permanently in Harrisburg in 1871. Adopted by white abolitionists from Northampton, Massachusetts, at the age of 12, Day became the third African American to graduate from Oberlin College in 1847. By 1852 he had become the president of the Ohio State Anti-Slavery Society. In that role, he directed Underground Railroad operations from his printing office in Cleveland and later Chatham, Ontario. He served as the keynote speaker at the USCT Grand Review on November 14, 1865. His work as a paid lecturer for the National Equal Rights League after the Civil War often brought Day into Pennsylvania to speak on behalf of suffrage rights for Black men and women. His early days as a sojourner in the Keystone State were spent in Harrisburg and Philadelphia. In fact, Day stood at the side of Octavius V. Catto (1839–71), who was shot and killed by a racist white ruffian angered that the two men were assisting newly enfranchised African American male voters at the polls on October 10, 1871. In addition to working as a political organizer for the Republican Party, Day was a six-term member of the Harrisburg School Board of Managers. His work in the equal rights league movement put him at the forefront of the effort to desegregate Pennsylvania’s public schools, which occurred by court order in 1881 and was reinforced by state legislation in 1882. He served as president of the school board for half a term in 1890 and two full terms in 1891 and 1892.

The figures of the four civil rights activists memorialized are, clockwise from top left, William Howard Day, Thomas Morris Chester, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Jacob T. Compton.
Photos, PHMC

Jacob T. Compton (1836–1905) was born enslaved in Williamsport, Maryland, and later fled from bondage. In 1855 he settled in Harrisburg, where he resided until his death. On February 22, 1861, working as U.S. Senator Simon Cameron’s personal carriage driver, he successfully escorted President-Elect Abraham Lincoln to “a special train bound for Philadelphia, then Baltimore, and ultimately to Washington” amid an assassination attempt, according to an article in the September 7, 1905, edition of the Harrisburg Daily Independent. During the Civil War, Compton became a sergeant in Company D, 24th Infantry, USCT. After the war, he led Pennsylvania’s best-known musical group, the Excelsior Band, which often performed at civil rights events throughout the commonwealth. He also directed the choirs of the AME and the AME Zion churches in Harrisburg’s Old Eighth Ward.

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825–1911) was born free in Baltimore in 1825 and was an antislavery writer and poet. She was only 21 when she published her first book of poetry, Forest Leaves. Around 1845, she obtained a teaching position in Baltimore. From there, she accepted a job at Wilberforce University in Ohio, where she taught domestic science and was the school’s first female educator. Harper then moved to York, Pennsylvania, where she witnessed activities of the Underground Railroad that launched her involvement in antislavery causes. She accordingly moved to Philadelphia to assist William Still in his Underground Railroad operation. From 1856 to 1859 Harper traveled throughout New England and Canada speaking for several state and local antislavery societies while providing letters for The Liberator and other antislavery newspapers about her meetings with Underground Railroad passengers. After returning to Pennsylvania, she on one occasion stood her ground as a conductor attempted to remove her from a trolley. After the Civil War, Harper worked on behalf of the Equal Rights Association, speaking mostly about education, jobs and suffrage. Long before it became a point of contention in the first and second feminist waves of the 20th century, Harper explained that Black women in the 1860s faced an intersectional problem of overcoming both sexism and racism; therefore, she claimed the fight for suffrage must include African American women.

Not until March 1, 2019, did the Harrisburg Peace Promenade’s Commonwealth Monument Project receive tentative approval for the location next to the Irvis Office Building. A month later, The Foundation for Enhancing Communities (TFEC), a philanthropic organization that has supported community endeavors since 1920, became the fiscal agent for the project. TFEC, Sloan said, “gave us both the gravitas and the ability to seek public funding.”

By the end of the year, A Gathering at the Crossroads became a reality. To all involved, the proximity of the monument to Harrisburg’s historic Old Eighth Ward is significant. The neighborhood vanished with expansion of Capitol Park beginning in 1912 and acts of eminent domain driven by City Beautification initiatives. Although the Old Eighth Ward was once the epicenter of Harrisburg’s African American population during the 19th century, and where most of the city’s Underground Railroad operations resided during the decades leading up to the Civil War, there are, according to researchers, no surviving “tangible reminders” that African Americans contributed to Harrisburg’s legacy of freedom and justice. This is why the monument is important to the community in the capital city.

The COVID-19 pandemic significantly disrupted the celebratory events that had been planned, so Sloan organized two separate unveiling events. The first occurred on August 26, 2020, when the full life-size bronze figures for Day, representing the 15th Amendment, and Harper, representing the 19th Amendment, along with the pedestal, were installed. Gov. Tom Wolf and other state, county and city officials spoke at the ceremony. The memorial’s installation reached completion on November 16, when the figures of Compton, symbolizing the contribution of the agents of the Underground Railroad, and Chester, representing soldiers of the USCT, were placed on the tableau.

Lenwood Sloan pours libations at the monument during the November 16 dedication.
Courtesy Lenwood Sloan / Photo, Ruby Doub

In April 2021 the Toni Morrison Society will honor the monument with a bench placement through its Bench by the Road Project, an initiative dating back to 2006 that
pays tribute to “significant moments, individuals, and locations” preserving African/African American diasporic experiences.

Supervising a monument project that entails fundraising and procuring government permission is no easy task; this is why the November 16 event was Sloan’s capstone for a lifetime of work on projects that reflect America’s contemporary values. A Gathering at the Crossroads exhibits the promise of an inclusionary democracy. And yet, at the culminating event, which paid tribute to every legislator and government official involved with passing resolutions and procuring placement for the monument, Sloan ended by echoing the rousing words of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper expressed through bronze: “There is still work to do.”

Todd M. Mealy, Ph.D., resides in Lancaster County where he teaches at Penn Manor High School. He is the author of six books and is a frequent contributor to Pennsylvania Heritage. His previous articles include “Without Fear and Without Reproach: Octavius V. Catto and the First Civil Rights Movement in Pennsylvania” (Winter 2021), “Indomitable: Ora Washington, Philadelphia’s Ultimate Sports Trailblazer” (Winter 2020), and “Breaking the Color Line: The Trial That Led to the End of Legal Segregation in Pennsylvania’s Schools” (Summer 2016).