A working model for the Rosa Parks statue sits in front of the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery on Oct. 11, 2023. The final version will stand at about 15 feet tall. (Alander Rocha/Alabama Reflector)
Statues of civil rights activist Rosa Parks and disability rights activist Helen Keller are scheduled to be dedicated on the grounds of the Alabama State Capitol in late October.
Members of the Alabama Women’s Tribute Statue Commission on Wednesday discussed a planned unveiling at the Capitol grounds on October 24, with a guest list of 214 that will include “individuals, families, stakeholders, and partner organizations. The ceremony will be held in the Capitol Auditorium, with Gov. Kay Ivey providing the opening remarks, before the unveiling of the statues.
“(I) want to say how excited I am as we meet. That means that we are one meeting shorter than we would have been before October 24 and the unveiling. So I want to say thank you. Thank you. Thank you to all who’ve played a major role in bringing us up to this point,” said commission chair Rep. Laura Hall, D-Huntsville, who sponsored the legislation that led to the creation of the statues.
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The commission is overseeing the installation of statues of Keller and Parks on the grounds of the Capitol, the first monuments on the Capitol grounds to depict Alabama women.
The statue of Parks should be placed on the Alabama State Capitol steps, near the main entrance of the building, facing those coming up the stairs to the Capitol. The Keller statue will be to the left of the back entrance, facing the current Statehouse. That building is expected to be demolished after a new statehouse is completed and is expected to be replaced by green space.
A significant portion of the meeting focused on the plaques for each statue. The finalized language for the Rosa Parks plaque is in production. For the Helen Keller plaque, discussions centered on ensuring a Braille translation on the plaque accurately reflects the approved text.
Steve Murray, director of the Alabama Department of Archives and History, pointed out a minor punctuation change to currently reflect the translation to Braille and improve the flow of the Keller plaque text. The text the commission approved for the plaque separates two sentences with a comma, but the two sentences are separated by a comma in the Braille translation, creating a run-on sentence.
“If this is the text that they converted to Braille and understand the time constraints, there’s nothing wrong with proceeding this way. It doesn’t quite match what came out of the Commission’s approval process along the way, but it is, it’s very close to it,” Murray said.
Jennifer Oldenburg, deafblind project coordinator with the Alabama Institute for Deaf and Blind (AIDB), said that she’ll likely be able to expedite the change to prevent delaying the unveiling ceremony.
“I might be able to swing that,” Oldenburg said
Keith Owens, president of MBA Engineers, preparing the sites where the statues will be installed,, said that construction on the statue sites for both the Parks and Keller statues is ahead of schedule and anticipated to be complete within the next 30 days, with concrete work complete and currently curing.
“It is a little bit ahead of the printed schedule, but it’s roughly in the time frame when we thought it was going to be about 45 days,” Owens said to the commission.
Chase Tourney, a representative from Clark Memorials working on the plaques, said that Parks’ plaque has been ordered, and he is working to finalize the plaque for Keller to include the discussed changes.
“(The updated Braille plaque is) the one thing we need to expedite as fast as we possibly can, just to make sure we get it ordered,” Turney said.
Jay Warren, Oregon-based sculptor designing the Keller statue, did not provide an update on the statue’s progress at the meeting, but in July 2024, he said the statue was nearing completion. Georgia-based artist Julia Knight, responsible for designing the Parks statue, said in May 2024 that the statue was complete.
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Author: Alander Rocha