The statue is an allegorical portrait of Mary Thomas, known as Queen Mary, an enslaved woman who worked on a sugar cane planation in the Danish West Indies (now Saint Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands). She led the largest labor revolt in Danish colonial…
In 1730, the colonial government of Bermuda executed Sarah Bassett, an enslaved woman, for allegedly attempting to poison her granddaughter’s enslavers. In Spirit of Freedom, she is depicted as a slender female figure bound tightly with ropes, her…
The memorial shows three women facing outward, the leaders of the "Fireburn" Uprising in 1878, the largest labor revolt in Danish colonial history. Dressed in floor-length dresses and aprons, each figure carries objects related to their resistance.…