Arkansas's Heroes: The New Little Rock Monument to the Black Union Soldiers History Tried to Forget

Monuments & Memory

In the spring of 1864, Black soldiers who had already surrendered were shot where they lay. The men who survived turned three words into a battle cry that carried them through the rest of the war: Remember Poison Spring.

More than 160 years later, Little Rock has finally given those men something permanent to stand on.

On Wednesday, June 3, 2026, the Central Arkansas Library System unveiled “Arkansas's Heroes,” a six-foot bronze soldier installed in the library square at the main Central Arkansas Library in downtown Little Rock. It honors every African American man from Arkansas who put on a Union uniform during the Civil War. This is one of the very few monuments anywhere in the US dedicated to the regiments of the United States Colored Troops.

A monument more than 160 years in the making

The dedication was no quiet ribbon-cutting. It followed an hour-long panel titled “Legacies and Lunch,” during which the sculptor sat alongside Ronnie A. Nichols, a historian, author, artist, and cultural preservationist who has been researching Black Civil War soldiers for more than 45 years. Nichols is not a detached scholar here. He is a descendant of a soldier who served in the 57th United States Colored Infantry, one of the regiments raised on Arkansas soil.

His framing of why the day mattered was simple. History, he said, “at times it forgets, at times it remembers.” This sculpture was a deliberate act of remembering.

The sculptor: a self-taught artist who outlasted the art world's heavyweights

“Arkansas's Heroes” was created by Vinnie Bagwell, a Yonkers, New York sculptor who is, remarkably, completely self-taught. She began sculpting in 1993 with no formal training and went on to become one of the most important public monument artists in the country. Her first commission, “The First Lady of Jazz,” a bronze of Ella Fitzgerald in Yonkers, is recognized as the first public artwork of a contemporary African American woman ever commissioned by a US municipality.

If her name sounds familiar, there is a reason. In 2019, New York City needed an artist to replace the Central Park statue of J. Marion Sims, the nineteenth-century gynecologist who built his reputation by experimenting on enslaved Black women without anesthesia. The four finalists were Bagwell and three of the biggest names in contemporary art: Kehinde Wiley, Simone Leigh, and Wangechi Mutu. A panel narrowly voted for Leigh. Then Leigh withdrew her own winning proposal in recognition of how strongly the community had rallied behind Bagwell's design, an eighteen-foot winged figure called “Victory Beyond Sims.” The self-taught local artist got the commission.

That is the person Arkansas brought in, and she does not treat a monument as a pretty object.

This is not decoration, this is a declaration.

Vinnie Bagwell, at the unveiling

Bagwell carved “Arkansas's Heroes” in roughly six weeks, though the larger project began back in 2024. She described her process as a kind of forced clarity. In those weeks, she had to decide on the single most important message Little Rock could convey about itself through this story, then do a deep dive into Arkansas history, then Civil War history, and finally cast it in bronze.

How to read the statue

Bagwell works in bas-relief, a technique that lets a sculptor carve a three-dimensional narrative onto a nearly flat surface. It is storytelling in metal. On “Arkansas's Heroes,” the soldier himself is only the headline. The fine print is carved into him, and it rewards anyone willing to walk up close.

Over the soldier's heart sits an incised Gye Nyame, an Adinkra symbol from West Africa that speaks to the omnipotence of God. The library's interpretive display connected it to the eventual national motto, “In God We Trust.”

The jacket also carries braille that translates as “unlearn hate,” a message Bagwell chose to push viewers to confront prejudice directly rather than admire from a distance.

The piece also holds the silhouette of a shackled hand with a broken chain, set beside a single date: May 22, 1863. That date is the hinge of the entire story. It is the day the US War Department created the Bureau of Colored Troops, the moment formerly enslaved men were officially allowed to take up arms for their own freedom.

The Arkansas men it honors

Most of the country knows the 54th Massachusetts from the film “Glory.” Almost nobody knows what happened in Arkansas, and the numbers are staggering.

Official records credit 5,526 men of African descent from Arkansas with serving in the Union army. Some historians put the real figure thousands higher once you count the artillery, cavalry, and infantry that passed through the state. President Lincoln later credited Black soldiers broadly with helping turn the tide of the war, calling them “the sable arm.”

The cradle of it all was Helena, in Phillips County. As enslaved people escaped toward Union lines in eastern Arkansas, sprawling refugee camps formed, and the men in them enlisted. Six Black volunteer regiments were organized in Helena starting in April 1863. From 1864 until the war ended, Black soldiers manned every battery and fortification defending Helena.

The regiments raised in the state were later folded into the United States Colored Troops as the 46th, 54th, 56th, 57th, 112th, and 113th, among others.

These were not men kept safely behind the lines. At Wallace's Ferry in July 1864, companies of the 56th USCT held against a larger Confederate force. When asked afterward whether his Black troops would fight, Union Brigadier General Napoleon Buford gave an answer that still lands:

Will they fight? Ask the enemy.

Brig. Gen. Napoleon Buford

Remember Poison Spring

The hardest chapter took place about 10 miles northwest of Camden. On April 18, 1864, a Union foraging column that included the 1st Kansas Colored Infantry, a regiment recruited in part from Arkansas freedmen, was ambushed at Poison Spring. The men held off two assaults before a third broke the line. As they retreated, Confederate forces turned on the wounded and the captured. Both Union and Confederate accounts agree that many Black soldiers were killed after the fighting had stopped.

Colonel James Williams reported that his wounded men “were murdered on the spot.” The 1st Kansas lost roughly half its strength.

It is remembered as one of the worst massacres in Arkansas history. It also lit a fire. “Remember Poison Spring” became a rallying cry, and twelve days later at Jenkins' Ferry, men of the 2nd Kansas Colored Infantry carried that memory into battle. The brutality of Poison Spring did not break Black enlistment in Arkansas. It deepened it.

What they built after the war

The uniform was never the end of the story, and this is the thread Nichols was most determined that visitors take home. Coming out of slavery, these men put on the uniform of the US Army, performed in battle, and then, he stressed, became leaders in their communities once the war was over.

Across the South, USCT veterans became teachers, preachers, landowning farmers, and businessmen. They built churches, schools, and the first free Black communities in places that had recently held them as property. The bronze soldier in Little Rock represents thousands of men whose most lasting battles were fought not on a field but in the decades that followed, building lives and institutions from nothing.

Why a bronze soldier still matters

Public monuments decide whose story gets to be permanent. For more than a century and a half, the men who freed themselves and then fought to free others in Arkansas were a footnote in their own state's history. A six-foot bronze soldier standing in the heart of Little Rock changes that. Children will walk past him. People will read “unlearn hate” in braille and ask what it means. Someone will look up Poison Spring for the first time.

Bagwell put the whole point into one line at the unveiling, and it is the right place to end. “This is not Black history,” she said. “This is American history.”