Ed Dwight

Ed Dwight has lived several lives, and any one of them would fill a biography.

He was born in Kansas City, Kansas, on September 9, 1933, the son of a Negro Leagues second baseman who played for the Kansas City Monarchs. As a boy he was pulled two ways at once — toward airplanes and toward art. He earned a degree in aeronautical engineering, cum laude, from Arizona State University in 1957, and flew jets for the United States Air Force.

Then, in 1961, at the direction of President John F. Kennedy, he became the first African American to enter the Air Force training pipeline that fed NASA's astronaut corps. The story drew the eyes of the world. Dwight landed on the covers of Ebony, Jet, and Sepia — the face of a country that was, on paper, opening space to everyone.

He completed the elite Aerospace Research Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base and advanced in the program. But when NASA named its third group of astronauts in October 1963, his name was not on the list. He resigned from the Air Force in 1966 as a captain, saying racial politics had pushed him out. He turned, in time, to the chisel.

Dwight did not take up sculpture as a hobby. After years in business — IBM, then real estate — he earned a Master of Fine Arts in sculpture from the University of Denver in 1977, in his forties, building a whole new career on the far side of the one that NASA had ended.

Almost everything he made afterward was Black American history rendered in bronze — the people and stories that monuments had long left out. The Underground Railroad. A 50-piece series on the Black pioneers of the American West. More than 70 bronzes tracing the arc of jazz. By his own count the tally now runs past 128 public memorials and more than 18,000 gallery pieces.

That mission is exactly why the U.S. Mint came calling. In 1998 the Mint struck a silver dollar honoring the Black Revolutionary War Patriots, and Dwight designed its reverse — the "tails" side. He was the second Black artist whose design the Mint ever struck. (The first was Isaac Scott Hathaway, who sculpted the Booker T. Washington half dollar in 1946.) A Mint engraver, Thomas D. Rogers, translated Dwight's relief — the raised-and-recessed sculpting that gives a coin its picture — into the steel dies that stamped it; his initials, TDR, sit on the coin. John Mercanti designed the obverse: a portrait of Crispus Attucks, the dockworker and freed slave generally counted as the first man killed in the 1770 Boston Massacre.

Dwight's reverse was not a generic emblem. It was a detail lifted straight from a far larger work he had designed — the bronze for a planned Black Patriots Memorial in Washington, D.C. — showing a Black Revolutionary-era family. It put the people who supported the fight, not only the men who died in it, onto legal-tender money.

Here is the quiet tragedy folded into this little disc of silver.

Congress authorized the Black Revolutionary War Patriots Memorial in 1986, but barred federal money for it — the foundation behind it had to raise every dollar itself. Dwight was its sculptor. Over five years the Commission of Fine Arts sent his design back again and again, until the granite monument had been whittled down to something one account called "too small and pinched" to draw the donations it needed.

The 1998 silver dollar was meant to be the rescue. Every coin carried a $10 surcharge earmarked for the foundation's building fund. But the coin undersold badly — about 112,000 of the 500,000 the law allowed. The endowment never came. The foundation ran out of money and dissolved when its authorization expired in 2005.

So the memorial was never built. A successor effort — the National Liberty Memorial — won a spot near the National Mall in 2014, but as of today no monument stands there either. For now, this coin is the closest Dwight's vision of those patriots has ever come to standing in stone. It is, in a real sense, the only place that family was ever cast.