Photo: Selma Burke and the image for the Roosevelt Dime.
At this moment, you may be walking around with artwork in your pocket or purse. And it all came from a woman in Iredell County. Got a dime?
If you do, you have in your possession the work of Selma Burke, the African American artist who sculpted the image of Franklin Roosevelt that is on the front of the ten-cent piece. Her bas relief creation was adopted for use on the dime the year after FDR’s passing and has be there ever since.
Selma Burke was born in Mooresville on the last day of the year 1900. At age six, she knew she was destined to become a sculptor when she got the feel of squeezing clay through her fingers, saying “It was there in 1907 that I discovered me.”
Her mother scolded her to seek a career more practical than a sculptor so she got a degree in nursing and moved to Harlem to work for a “wealthy heiress.” While there, her employer became her patron, so Selma began to study art and became part of the Harlem Renaissance. She studied throughout Europe before returning to New York to found the Selma Burke School of Sculpture, the same year her rendition of Roosevelt went on the dime.
Other subjects were also a part of her work, including images of Duke Ellington, John Brown and a nine-foot tall statue of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. that can be seen in Charlotte’s Marshall Park today. If you want to see something closer, go to her hometown. In Mooresville, she learned that African American children were banned from the public library. She offered to donate her sculpture of a local doctor if the library would desegregate. Mooresville town officials took the offer.
The creation of a work of FDR came because Selma Burke had the initiative to go ask. According to one account, she went to the White House and asked to see the president. “She dressed very carefully and wore a fine hat. But the president was so friendly that in no time at all she had taken off her hat and shoes and was crawling around the room to get views of his head from all angles,” wrote one biographer. Roosevelt sat twice for the artist and was scheduled for a third. Unfortunately, he passed away before another setting could take place.
When Selma Burke showed her work to Eleanor Roosevelt, the president’s widow had reservations. Afraid that the rendering showed the late leader as a younger man, Ms. Burke countered by saying, “This profile is not for today, but for tomorrow and all time.” The comment won over Mrs. Roosevelt. Eventually, the image was used for the dime as a tribute to the longest serving chief executive in the nation’s history, the one who brought the United States through both the Great Depression and World War II.
An exhibit on Selma Burke is part of the Statesville Historical Collection, at the old Woolworth Building, 117 South Center Street in Statesville. The site is filled with more images of Iredell County that you will be able to see, but the journey is a worthwhile trip back into earlier days, like those of Selma Burke.
