Bronze voices meet at A Gathering at the Crossroads, the African American monument on the southern end of the Pennsylvania State Capitol Complex. Officially dedicated in 2020, it commemorates the 100 and 150-year anniversaries of the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments, celebrating the power of the vote and the historic African American community in Harrisburg and across the Commonwealth between 1850 and 1920. The monument sits on the southwest side of Capitol Park, on the northern side of T. Morris Chester Way, the stretch of Walnut Street between Commonwealth Avenue and Front Street.
Cast in bronze, the group features four life-size statues of historically significant African American activists: Thomas Morris Chester, Jacob T. Comptom, William Howard Day, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. They are posed in the midst of conversation about the recent passage of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, the law that gave African American men the right to vote. The orators gather around a bronze pedestal that includes a three-dimensional aerial rendering of the streets nearby.
Chester, Comptom, Day and Harper lean toward one another mid-sentence, and beneath them the bronze map shows the very streets you walked to reach them.