On November 21st, 2022, Nellie Stone Johnson made history again as the first African-American person and the first Minnesotan woman to be honored with a statue at the Minnesota Capitol.
Among those who participated in the unveiling ceremony were Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, labor and community leaders, and Nellie Stone Johnson’s family and relatives.
The life-size sculpture was created by Sculptor Tim Cleary, depicting Stone Johnson holding Farmer-Labor party publications.
Nellie Stone Johnson (1905-2002) was a civil rights activist and a union organizer. She was born to a black farming middle-class family in Dakota County, Minnesota. She started her activism work in her teenage years when she joined the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
In 1922, she moved to Minneapolis to complete her high school education and attended the University of Minnesota, majoring in social and political science. As a student, she worked at the all-male Minneapolis Athletic Club; after their salary cut, she organized the employees into the Minneapolis Hotel and Restaurant Workers union.
It was the beginning of her life journey of activism. The list of her accomplishments and firsts is long. Among them is helping to found the Minnesota Democratic Farmer–Labor Party (DFL), becoming the first black person elected to a Minneapolis citywide office in 1945 when she was elected to the Library Board, establishing state and local Fair Employment Practices departments, which later became the Minneapolis Civil Rights Commission and the state Human Rights Department.
She also worked on establishing the Minneapolis Fair Employment Practices department, the first of its kind in the US. In 1950, Stone Johnson wrote the Minneapolis NAACP initiative that led to the desegregation of the US armed forces. In 1963, Stone Johnson opened a sewing shop in the old downtown Minneapolis and operated it for over 30 years.
Stone Johnson’s statue is one of the first statues of black women in the state capitols.
In 2020, a statue of Harriet Tubman was dedicated at Maryland Capitol. The first black woman bust in the US Capitol was dedicated in 2009 to Sojourner Truth.
In 2013, Rosa Parks’ statue was dedicated; it was the first entire statue of a black person.
In July 2022, the first statue of an African-American was donated to the National Statuary Hall collection; it is the statue of Mary McLeod Bethune, representing the state of Florida.
In 2023, a statue of Daisy Lee Gatson Bates will be added to the collection, representing Arkansas.
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