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. As a boy he was pulled in two directions at once — toward airplanes and toward art. He finished his first oil painting at eight. 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, the Kennedy administration chose him to train as the country's first Black astronaut candidate. He entered the Air Force's elite test-pilot school and rose to within reach of NASA's third astronaut group. He placed eighth on the contender list in late 1963. NASA took seven.

He did not make the cut, and he later spoke openly of the racism he met along the way. "The day the president got killed," Dwight said of Kennedy's assassination, "my life changed." He resigned from the Air Force in 1966 as a captain — and turned, eventually, to the chisel.

Dwight did not pick up sculpture as a hobby. He earned a Master of Fine Arts in sculpture from the University of Denver in 1977, in his forties, after one life had ended and another was beginning.

What followed was a body of work built almost entirely around Black American history — the people and stories that monuments had long left out. He has made memorials to the Underground Railroad, to jazz, to the Black pioneers of the American West, to figures across the long arc from slavery to the presidency. By his own late count the tally runs past 130 memorial sculptures and more than 20,000 gallery pieces.

That mission is exactly why the U.S. Mint came calling. In 1998 the Mint issued a silver dollar honoring the Black Revolutionary War Patriots, and Dwight designed its reverse — the "tails" side. He was, by one account, only the second Black artist to design for the United States Mint. The Mint's own engraver, Thomas D. Rogers, translated Dwight's design into the dies that struck the coin; John Mercanti designed the obverse portrait of Crispus Attucks.

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

There is a quiet ache to that coin. The memorial it was meant to fund was never built — the project collapsed before it broke ground, and the surcharge dollars never raised the statue. So for many people, this little silver disc is the closest the memorial ever got to being real.