Cast in Stone

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• Astor, Nancy
  First woman seated as a Member of Parliament (MP) for Plymouth Sutton from 1919 to 1945. Astor was the daughter of American railroad industrialist Chiswell Langhorne (1843-1919), whose family owned enslaved people and plantations in Lynchburg, Virginia prior to the American Civil War. Langhorne briefly fought in the Confederate Army and later worked in tobacco auctioneering during the war. Astor's mother Nancy Witcher Keene (1848-1903) also came from a slave-owning family. Born in 1879, fourteen years after the end of the war and the abolition of slavery, Nancy spent her teenage years in an environment firmly shaped by the legacies of American slavery at the “Mirador” family home in Virginia in the 1890s. The Langhornes were one of many white American families whose domestic life rested upon the bedrock of white supremacy. According to her biographer Christopher Sykes, all of the Langhorne’s servants at Mirador were black and many had been formerly enslaved. While Nancy romantically reminisced about these black servants being “part of the family”, there were clear racial and class tensions within this family environment, with Sykes noting a number of conflicts between her father Chiswell and the family’s domestic workforce. A controversial figure both during her life and in historical memory, Astor has also attracted critical scrutiny for her antisemitism and alleged sympathies with Nazi Germany.
• Baker, Bryant
  British-born American sculptor active in the twentieth century.
• Baldwin, James
  American writer and civil rights activist in the twentieth century, widely renowned for his literary works which spoke, although not exclusively, to the experience of Black Americans and queer people both within the United States and beyond.
• Barnard, George Grey
  American sculptor in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
• Douglass, Frederick
  American abolitionist, suffragist, writer, and statesman. Born into slavery, Douglass became one of the most important abolitionists and civil rights leaders of the nineteenth century. He made a number of visits to the British Isles during his life, visiting England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. The website 'Frederick Douglass in Britain and Ireland' maps where Douglass and other transatlantic abolitionists gave speeches.
• Epstein, Jacob
  American-born British sculptor active in the twentieth century
• Harryhausen, Ray
  American-British animator and special effects creator in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Harryhausen produced the statue of David Livingstone in Blantyre alongside Irish artist Gareth Knowles.
• Lee, William
  Enslaved African American who was owned by and worked for George Washington in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As Washington's personal manservant during the American Revolutionary War, William Lee was a prominent figure who appears in several contemporary paintings alongside Washington. His wife was Margaret Thomas Lee, a free Black woman and domestic who also worked for Washington. William Lee was freed outright by Washington's will in 1799 and died at Mount Vernon in 1810.
• Lewis, Edmonia
  American sculptor of mixed African-American and Native American (Mississauga Ojibwe) heritage in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Lewis worked for many years in Rome and lived in Paris and London in her later life. She is buried in St. Mary's Catholic Cemetery in Kensal Green. Although the majority of her works are currently located in the United States, there are two pieces by Lewis in the United Kingdom: a bust of Christ at Mount Stuart in Scotland and a bust of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool.
• Lincoln, Abraham
  President of the United States (1861-1865)
• Partridge, William Ordway
  American sculptor in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
• Powers, Hiram
  American neoclassical sculptor in the nineteenth century, most well known for his marble sculpture The Greek Slave. Some of his notable imperial works include busts of slave-owners and American Presidents George Washington and Andrew Jackson, as well as a bust of the Scottish shipbuilder John Elder.
• Saint-Gaudens, Augustus
  American sculptor in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
• Stanley, Henry Morton
  Welsh-American explorer, journalist, soldier, colonial administrator, author and politician. During the American Civil War (1861-1865), Stanley briefly fought for the Confederate States Army but was later recruited to fight for the Union after being taken captive as a prisoner of war. Between 1867 and 1890, Stanley was involved in a number of colonial expeditions and conflicts in Africa. As an agent of King Leopold II of Belgium from 1879 to 1884, Stanley was a key figure in the Belgian colonisation of the Congo Basin.
• Washington, George
  American slave-owner, Founding Father, military officer, and politician who served as the first president of the United States from 1789 to 1797.
• Witherspoon, John
  Scottish-American slave-owner, clergyman, theologian and Founding Father of the United States in the eighteenth century.