What Does the Pioneers of 1847 Monument Say about Utahns in 2022?

One hundred twenty-five years ago, twenty thousand people came to the center of Salt Lake City to witness the unveiling of the most impressive public monument that Utah had ever seen, a larger-than-life bronze statue of Brigham Young atop a massive granite plinth. Within a few years, additional bronze figures of an “Indian,” a “trapper,” and a “Pioneer” family completed the Brigham Young Monument, which stood in the center of the intersection of Main and South Temple streets until it was moved eighty-two feet north in 1993 to alleviate traffic obstruction.

I wish I could have been in Utah on Friday to see a new monument unveiled, although I am grateful to have been able to watch the livestream (archived here). Fifteen minutes east of the Brigham Young Monument, going up toward the mouth of Emigration Canyon, at the This is the Place Heritage Park, the Pioneers of 1847 Monument honors the first African American Latter-day Saints to arrive in the Salt Lake Valley, including three enslaved men, Green Flake, Oscar Smith and Hark Wales; and Jane Manning James, a free Black woman who had worked in Joseph Smith’s household.

I argued in a paper at the Mormon History Association last month that the Brigham Young Monument tells us much more about the people who erected it at the end of the nineteenth century than it does about Brigham Young or the settlers who arrived in 1847. For late nineteenth-century Mormons, the monument was a way to reframe Utah settlement as an integral part of building America—instead of as a renegade polygamous theocracy that stood in the way of American progress. The earlier monument’s supporters worked hard to bring together Mormon and non-Mormon constituencies to argue for “Pioneering” as Utah’s foundational character at a time when Utah was only just entering the nation as a fully-recognized state, but they marginalized Indigenous Utahns and Black Latter-day settlers in that narrative, just as they marginalized them in the social order of the state that they were building. The three men who arrived with the advance company on July 22, 1847, were identified on a bronze plaque on the reverse of the Brigham Young Memorial, but their names are included at the very end of a list of all the members of their company, firmly separated from their white peers by a bronze dividing line, bracketed with the label  “colored servants.”

Reduced by the racist perspective of 1897 Utah to a euphemized footnote, Flake, Smith, and Wales, along with James (who arrived two months later in 1847), are the heroes of the 2022 monument. The texts on the new monument celebrate their instrumental role in Utah history without hiding from the reality of slavery and institutionalized racism that they confronted throughout their lives. As Governor Spencer Cox noted at the dedication, the monument directly confronts a fact that many Utahns are oblivious to: despite the rhetoric of the state as a haven of liberty for oppressed people in the nineteenth-century, slavery was practiced there from the very beginning of settlement, legally enshrined in territorial law until abolished by the US Congress in 1862.

The monument’s designers avoided casting their subjects as hapless victims while also taking care not to aggrandize them. Unlike Brigham Young perched atop the plinths of the 1897 monument and, right next door to the new monument, the 1947 This is the Place Monument, Flake, Smith, Wales, and James are set on short granite pedestals where they look down from just above their viewers’ line of sight. Their poses are informal and the figures interact with each other in touchingly ordinary ways—Smith and Wales are depicted with their arms around each other, and James has a child in one arm and another tucked against her side. It’s a humanizing representation that makes the figures seem like real, approachable people, not remote historical icons.

Why a monument to Utah’s first Black settlers in 2022? The driving force behind the monument, filmmaker Mauli Bonner, told the Salt Lake Tribune that he was astonished to find that there wasn’t such a monument while working on the documentary, His Name is Green Flake. The only significant public memorial in Salt Lake Valley is a historical marker near the Millcreek Community Center. The new monument tells the story of Utah’s African American settlers on a much grander scale, in a much more prominent space. At the dedication, Bonner asserted that “we don’t tell the stories of enslavement to cause guilt or shame… we tell these stories because they are true.” And in telling them, he said, these stories “give us the opportunity to draw strength from them.” Cox moving described the pain and disappointment he felt on discovering that his own Mormon ancestors had owned slaves, and expressed his hope that the new monument would help all Utahns, but young people especially, to confront difficult truths about the past in order to create a more just future.

In 2022, the Pioneers of 1847 Monument works to begin correcting an injustice, telling a story that has been too often obscured. While the monument is of especial significance to African American Latter-day Saints and all Black Utahns, it is not just for them—not only because the legacy of early Black settlers helped create the world that all residents of the region now live in, but because reckoning with systemic racism in the past and present is a responsibility we all share. Mauli Bonner expressed his hope that the monument could facilitate a “healing experience” for its viewers, offering a means of addressing historical wrongs, but, ideally, with an attitude of reconciliation and recommitment.

I am excited to see how this new addition will transform Utah’s monumental landscape. The monument fills a critical void and is long overdue. As a historian of the visual culture of Western colonization, I feel that we should be careful about honoring enslaved settlers using the simplistic rhetoric of the heroic “pioneer,” without questioning the intertwined roles of slavery and Indigenous displacement in the project of colonialism. How can we celebrate the positive values that early Black settlers represent without perpetuating a shallow, sanitized picture of settlement? It is important to find ways to honor early settlers of color while still confronting the difficult truths about the impact of settlement on Indigenous People.

Even with that caveat, my study of monuments in American history makes me think that we need to do more than merely celebrate this new monument. Monuments are mirrors, not minds. They don’t store memories—they only reflect back what we see in them. When we’re at our best, we bring deep engagement and careful consideration to our interactions with monuments. We might encounter the Pioneers of 1847 Monument as a space to reflect on how race built the world we live in and how it informs our values in the present. At our worst, monuments are pitiful attempts at atonement, opportunities to let an unthinking, impotent mass of material deal with the memories that are too difficult for us to confront. I’m confident the monument’s supporters would agree that the existence of a monument to Black pioneers does not mean that the struggle that Flake, James, Smith, and Wales fought in is now over.

What does the Pioneers of 1847 Monument tell us about Utahns in 2022? I hope that it does not merely show that we know the importance of performative anti-racism and that we are more willing to invest in images imagining justice than in pursuing actual justice. I hope, instead, that it represents a real shift in values, a sincere and committed recognition that slavery was an abhorrent evil, that racism is destructive to humanity and society alike, and that the legacies of both must still be rooted out from wherever they continue to exist in our contemporary world.