NEW YORK -- A bronze statue depicting women’s rights pioneers Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony was unveiled in Central Park on Wednesday, becoming the 167-year-old park’s first monument honoring historical heroines, as opposed to fictional female characters like Alice in Wonderland and Shakespeare’s Juliet. The commission from Monumental Women, a nonprofit that formed in 2014 to raise funds for a suffragist statue in Central Park, originally included just Stanton and Anthony, two white leaders of the fight for women's equality. Truth, a Black woman who escaped slavery and went on to campaign for abolition as well as women's rights, was a late addition. She added, “We rethink the past to reshape the future.”Thirteen-year-old Jaya Shri, whose Girl Scout troop donated cookie proceeds to help pay for the monument, posed in front of it later with two friends. “I think it will inspire a lot of little girls to go out and do what they want to do," she said.

Source: ABC News August 26, 2020 18:54 UTC