STANDING FOR JUSTICE
INSIDE SUNDAY EXTRA: Read more about the creation of the Ida B. Wells statue.
When Andrea Lugar was tasked with sculpting Ida B. Wells, she began by researching the civil rights advocate and journalist who fought against racism, segregation and lynching.
Lugar always gets as much information as possible on a character or person that she's sculpting, “because it helps me to understand the spirit of the project and the intent of the work, and that's very important to me,” she said.
She read Wells' autobiography, her other writings, things others had written about Wells. She began to gather photos of Wells, even though not many were available from the late 1800s.
Then, she made a rough sketch: A model made from clay, showing Wells posing with her hand on her hip.
“We came up with — and I say we, because I was talking with others who were behind the backing of the project to be sure we were all on the same page — to come up with one hand on the hip and one hand holding a newspaper,” Lugar said.
Someone suggested putting a pen in Wells' hand, and the pose was decided on.
It seemed to suit Wells, who spent 16 years in Memphis first as a teacher and then as a journalist and civil rights advocate.
“She was an amazing, strong African American woman who came out of slavery and made a contribution to society and is representative of how important it is to speak up for justice and fairness, and she lived her life doing that,” said Gemma Beckley, retired trustee distinguished professor at Rust College.
Two events propelled Wells into the spotlight in Memphis. In one incident, she had a firstclass ladies' car ticket on the train. When she boarded, she wasn't allowed to sit in that compartment and was told to sit in the colored compartment. She sued the railroad and won, although the ruling was eventually overturned in federal court.
The other major event was when her three friends, owners of a Memphis grocery store, were lynched. Wells wrote about the lynching, drawing attention to the injustice. She also began to document lynchings across the South.
That didn't sit well with the white power structure in Memphis, who destroyed her office and forced her to relocate, ultimately to Chicago.
One of the loudest voices speaking out against Wells in Memphis was Edward Ward Carmack, editor of the Memphis Commercial, the predecessor of The Commercial Appeal. He demanded that white citizens retaliate against “the black wench” for her writings against the lynchings.
Wells continued her anti-lynching crusade, speaking across the United States and even visiting Great Britain. Later, she was also involved with woman's suffrage and the creation of the NAACP.
“Throughout her life, she was an amazing leader, and when you give consideration to the fact she was a woman, this was not a time when women were really regarded, and it certainly was unusual for them to step out, stand out and take a stance on something,” Beckley said.
The process of portraying such a woman in a statue took months, first about three months to create the sculpture and then about two to create it in bronze at the Lugar Bronze Foundry in Eads.
The sculpture was built with a steel armature, construction foam held together with bamboo skewers and foam spray, then an oilbased clay in which the details are sculpted.
The details, the trim work, slows down the process as every square inch must be examined.
When the sculpture was complete, it was taken three miles up the road to the foundry, where it went through the lost wax casting process — an intricate process involving multiple steps, including creating a rubber mold, plaster, creating a ceramic shell, melting wax away at almost 1,500 degrees and ultimately filling the space where the wax was with bronze at 2,000 degrees.
Then the ceramic shell was taken off the bronze pieces, which were welded together, making sure all the angles and measurements were correct. The seams were grinded and retextured, the piece was sandblasted, then covered with a patina to color the piece.
The bronze is over 95% copper, the rest silica and some other minerals. The patina brings the statue to a brown with tones of red and black with just a hint of green.
“It gives it a luster that is a little richer,” Lugar said.
The statue was rinsed with water and given a coat of lacquer to seal it. Inside, a steel armature holds it to its concrete base at Beale and Fourth Street.
Creating the statue was a complicated process, not least of which was learning about Wells herself, said Lugar.
“It's got a lot of layers to it. It's not just to reproduce a tactile image of something, but just to learn the depth of it,” Lugar said. “Only when I really get a fuller sense of who they were do I feel like I start to pull out something that's their image.”
Katherine Burgess covers county government and religion. She can be reached at katherine.burgess@commercialappeal.com.