Years in the Making: Mamaroneck Dedicates Memorial to the Enslaved

by Marina Kiriakou -

On Juneteenth — June 19, 2026 — nearly 200 people gathered on the hill in front of the Mamaroneck Town Center for the formal dedication of the Memorial to the Enslaved Africans of Larchmont and Mamaroneck, which honors the more than 200 men, women, and children enslaved in Mamaroneck Township between 1661 and 1822.  The crowd was multigenerational, visibly moved, and full of hard-won pride.  There was joy, and something weightier: a communal reckoning, the kind a community carries when it decides not to look away.  That the dedication fell on Juneteenth, the federal holiday commemorating the end of American slavery, felt exactly right.

A History Hidden in Plain Sight

Mamaroneck was home to more enslaved people than any other Sound Shore town during that era.  Their labor was foundational to the community, yet their names and stories were largely absent from the official record.  The names that endured belonged to the enslavers:  Richbell, Delancey, Monroe, Palmer.  These are family names that still mark local streets and landmarks today.

The research that made the memorial possible began around 2000, when Ned Benton, a John Jay College professor and REALM founding member, began studying local enslavement and publishing annual journal articles.  When the Town made historic records available online, researchers began finding names, and with names came lives.  What they also found was uncomfortable:  leading citizens, and even clergy, had been enslavers.  The comfortable narrative that the North were simply "the good guys" did not survive contact with the historical record.

REALM (Recognizing Enslaved Africans of Larchmont Mamaroneck) was formed by local residents committed to bringing this history into public consciousness.  In 2019, the Mamaroneck Town Board endorsed the project and sited the memorial on a prominent hill in front of Town Center, overlooking the harbor.  The organizers held to clear standards: permanent, prominent, and beautiful.  A place for peaceful reflection and education.  The project drew support from the Mamaroneck Historical Society, Arts Westchester, the League of Women Voters, Senator Shelley Meyer, Assemblyman Steve Otis, and many others who believed a community that celebrates its history must not hide from all of it.

The Artists Who Listened

The artist team was selected through a competitive process.  Coordinator Judith Weber worked alongside architects Mariví Perdomo Caba and Jorge L. Ventura Ovalles, with additional engineering from Gregory Caccioppoli.  Construction was carried out by Bellantoni Landscaping, led by Luca Trotta, Sergio Juarez, and Paul Mazzola.  At the memorial's emotional center are two ceramic artists:  Sarah Coble, a figurative sculptor, and Sana Musasama, whose work engages abstraction and the living aftermath of colonization.  Both worked closely with REALM, the Mamaroneck Historical Society, and the Town Board over many months, absorbing the community's history through repeated consultation.  The result is a beautifully curved structure on the rise above the harbor, its ceramic artwork covering both sides — figures toiling in servitude and living their lives on one face, fleeing toward freedom on the other — within sight of the very shoreline where some of these lives unfolded.

Artists Sana Musasama and Sarah Coble

 Broken Truths: The Language of the Tiles

Sana Musasama spoke to guests about the fragmented tiles, offering compelling explanations of artistic intention:

Many of the tiles were originally larger.  They were deliberately broken during the making.  "The transatlantic trade was, systemically, the breaking up of families," Sana explained, “the separating of mother and father, sons, uncles, relatives, dismantling of language, of religion, of culture."  People were separated on ships so they could not speak, could not plan, could not resist together.  "In togetherness you have power.  As individuals, you don't."

The fragmented tiles are, in her words, "broken stories" and "broken truths" and "fragmented earth of beaten-down soil."  The brown clay represents the African continent; other colors represent the many ethnic groups colonized.  The ground of the monument is a map of a shattered homeland.

Rising from that fractured surface are sculpted hands.  They signal "Stop!" and echo protest.  They also reference the reality of people taught to raise their hands slowly when stopped by police.  And they speak to enslaved people whose worth was reduced entirely to physical labor: "If you didn't have hands and a strong body, you were useless.  You weren't a brain, you weren't a human.  You were a machine."  Sana's own hands are present here too.  After an accident left her unable to work for two years, her hands "became monuments" to her.  When she could sculpt again, all she could make were hands.  They stand in this memorial for resistance, witnessing, and survival.

Ginny, Billy, and the Stories in Stone

Where Sana's work reaches toward abstraction, Sarah Coble's figures make the story specific and human.

Sarah was drawn especially to the account of Ginny and Billy, recorded in a written narrative left by the Quaker Mott family.  Ginny had been kidnapped as a girl in Africa; she described herself as having been "warm, free, happy" before she was taken.  She later married Billy, who was born on Long Island.  Together they had ten children and helped raise the Mott family's children.  When the Motts freed the people they had enslaved, Ginny and Billy remained. Billy was known as "Banjo Billy" — he made board banjos, smoked a pipe, and fished the rocks right by this site.  He worked at the nearby creamery.  

In her figurative tiles, Sarah wanted Ginny "to be showing the weight" of enslavement, of displacement, of a life bent but unbroken.  She embedded music, nature, and religion into the work, honoring the full lives Ginny and Billy lived within and beyond their bondage.  On the other face of the monument, the running figures of two men who escaped enslavement and fled toward water.  They are deliberately muscular.  "We were strong," Sana said. They look back as they run, watching for who is chasing them, a gesture that speaks to every person ever forced to flee.

A Reckoning, and a Beginning

The dedication felt like both an ending and a beginning.  Years of research, advocacy, collaboration, and artmaking had arrived at the Town Center on that Friday morning.   Judy Silberstein, a founding member of REALM, invoked the importance of not allowing history to be erased; others named the political moment explicitly and framed the dedication as an act of refusal:  this community will not look away.

And yet the tone was not only somber.  The crowd joined in celebrating that they were real people who lived here, labored here, and whose names were recovered through decades of patient, intentional work.

The memorial now stands in permanent, public view on a hill above the harbor, visible to the whole community.  It is, REALM says, a recognition "for today and for the future that slavery existed here,” and an affirmation that the individuals so wronged matter, now and into the future.

To learn more about REALM, the Enslavement Trail, and more, go to the Mamaroneck Historical Society’s website at https://www.mamaroneckhistoricalsociety.org/realm.