In honor of Black History Month, High Point University has commissioned sculptures of Harriet Tubman and Thurgood Marshall to be the newest additions to a long list of inspirational leaders featured on HPU’s campus. These sculptures will join prominent people such as Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, George Washington Carver, Amelia Earhart, John Coltrane, Maya Angelou, Gandhi, Sir Isaac Newton and more.
HIGH POINT, N.C., Jan. 29, 2021 – In honor of Black History Month, High Point University has commissioned sculptures of Harriet Tubman and Thurgood Marshall to be the newest additions to a long list of inspirational leaders featured on HPU’s campus.
Tubman and Marshall will join 30 sculptures across campus, including those of Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, George Washington Carver, John Coltrane, Maya Angelou, Gandhi, Amelia Earhart, Sir Isaac Newton and more. These sculptures surround students with influential people who inspired the world and accomplished great things in their lives.
“At High Point University, we want to surround our students with heroes, models and mentors,” says HPU President Dr. Nido Qubein. “While we do that with faculty and staff in the classroom and throughout our campus, our sculptures of historically significant figures provide another element of education and modeling of values. Both Harriet Tubman and Thurgood Marshall lived extraordinary lives of significance, modeling personal initiative, resilience, leadership and service. Our students will benefit from their ‘presence’ on our campus.”
Tubman was born into slavery circa 1822 and grew to be an American abolitionist and political activist. She escaped slavery and made more than a dozen missions to rescue approximately 70 enslaved people, including family and friends, using safe houses known as the Underground Railroad. During the American Civil War, she served as an armed scout and spy for the Union Army. Later in her life, she was an activist in the movement for women’s suffrage.
Marshall was born in the early 1900s and was descended from enslaved people on both sides of his family. He was a graduate of Howard University School of Law and later established a private legal practice in Baltimore before founding the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. He was an American lawyer and civil rights activist who served as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1967 until 1991.
The sculptures are expected to arrive on campus this summer.