ICONICFive local artists reimagine American symbols
that started right here in Philly.
Millions of people flock to Philadelphia each year to stand where the Declaration of Independence was signed, to climb the narrow winding stairs of Betsy Ross’ house, and to lay eyes on a bell that hasn’t rung in more than 150 years.
If we only wanted to learn historical facts, we could stay home. But we come because these places offer the chance to encounter America’s origins, to see and hear and feel America’s story beginning.
“Being present at the creation — that’s why people come here,” said Randall Miller, a professor emeritus of history at St. Joseph’s University.
Many of the symbols we rely on to tell the American story — the cowboy hat, for example, and the flag — were crafted in Philadelphia, before ricocheting across the nation and around the world. These are the icons that helped to burnish a specific version of America, one that projected unity and prized whiteness.
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At the turn of the century, Kensington factory workers churned out Stetson hats, which the company marketed as props in a larger story of white people’s God-given right to conquer the Indigenous people who inhabited the land. After the Civil War, the Liberty Bell toured the nation, becoming a symbol of a national reconciliation that glossed over the still-raw wounds of slavery.
In Philadelphia, we helped to create these founding myths. We have the chance to rewrite them here, too.
In the spirit of again being present at creation, The Inquirer asked five Philadelphia-based Black and Latino artists to reinterpret a collection of American icons that got their start in the city. One artist scrubbed red, white, and blue from the Betsy Ross flag; another illustrated the joyful Black history of the sousaphone.
Here’s their contribution to telling the American story.
reimagined by Mikel Elam
Afrofuturist artist Mikel Elam remembers when he first glimpsed the Liberty Bell on a fifth-grade field trip and learned that it meant freedom. It was only years later that he understood the bell’s call was not so simple. On the most fundamental level, a slaveholder chose its inscription.
“The Liberty Bell kind of represents, ‘This is liberty, but is it liberty for everyone?’” Elam said.
First commissioned in 1751 by the colonial legislature of Pennsylvania, the bell didn’t play a major role in the American Revolution, but it became important when people remembered the war decades later. Isaac Norris, speaker of the Pennsylvania Assembly, chose the inscription that would come to define its legacy: “Proclaim LIBERTY throughout all the Land unto all the Inhabitants thereof.”
The passage, from Leviticus 25:10, reflected a promise more than a reality. Norris himself owned enslaved people, as did the majority of men elected to Congress in the nation’s first three decades.
The bell often rang to announce public protest meetings, and when the city sheriff publicly read the Declaration of Independence for the first time, the bell summoned locals to hear it.
In the 1830s, abolitionists seized on the bell to mobilize opposition to slavery. Renaming it the Liberty Bell, New York abolitionists wrote in 1835 that so far “the bell has not obeyed the inscription; and its peals have been a mockery, while one sixth of ‘all inhabitants’ are in abject slavery.”
But the bell did not truly reach national status until after the Civil War, said Miller, the historian at St. Joseph’s University.
By then, some parts of the country were ready to move on from the bloodshed and brutality of the war. The Liberty Bell offered a potent way to do that.
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The bell toured the nation, becoming a symbol of the shared history of the Revolutionary War, which the nation had fought as one — not the Civil War, which had ripped the country in two.
“Reconciliation between North and South largely came at the cost of remembering why the South had seceded,” Miller said.
Of course, the paradox of proclaiming freedom in a land where people were enslaved didn’t fade away. The Liberty Bell Center today sits on the site of the President’s House, where enslaved people worked for George Washington; their history is now included in the site’s presentation.
Join The Conversation
Join us for “A More Perfect Union” on Inquirer LIVE on Wednesday, April 13, at 4:15 p.m. for a conversation about the essay. The discussion will feature Contributing Editor Errin Haines of The 19th talks with “Scars and Stripes” writer, historian Martha Jones. They welcome some of the artists whose work is featured to discuss their interpretations of the symbols that were created in Philadelphia. Participate in the Q&A directly following the talk.
Elam wanted to emphasize the people who were living in slavery when Norris and his peers proclaimed liberty for all. In Elam’s reinterpretation, the bell appears on a crochet hoop that gags a Black figure, a reference to the iron muzzle that slave owners used to punish enslaved people. Ropes of bondage ring the piece. There is no looking away.
reimagined by Mz. Icar
In a studio smelling of curry, essential oils, and acrylic paint somewhere in Philadelphia, members of the anonymous art collective Mz. Icar arrange light and color on canvas. The group of primarily Black women discarded individual names to avoid becoming token Black artists in white-led organizations. They’re playful about it: Mz. Icar is “racizm” backwards.
Mz. Icar’s reinterpretation of the sousaphone, that massive tuba with the “oompah” sound, is a futuristic take on drum lines and marching bands at historically Black colleges and universities. The sousaphone also holds the bottom of songs and carries their weight, representing the Black experience in America, Mz. Icar said.
J.W. Pepper, an instrument manufacturing company in Philadelphia, made the first version of the brass horn in the 1890s, naming it the sousaphone in homage to the march composer John Philip Sousa. That was during the “golden age” of the brass band in the United States, according to Marvin McNeill, a Ph.D. candidate at Wesleyan University who studies the history of African American brass bands.
Sousa became a famous composer, first as part of the U.S. Marine Band and then with his own concert band. His “Semper Fidelis” and “The Stars and Stripes Forever” became iconic American themes.
But even as Sousa’s compositions were synonymous with patriotism, he exclusively directed all-white bands, according to McNeill. Black musicians were separately developing their own distinctive brass sound in all-Black units in the military and in community bands.
When the founders of Black colleges and universities issued their charters after the Civil War, some made sure marching bands were part of the new institutions.
By the 1950s, HBCU band leaders began incorporating dance choreography into their marching lines. Their musicians played the popular songs of the day, with tuba keeping the bass line.
“They began to implement some of the soul sounds, and funk and hip-hop, and even to this day, they’re playing some of the tunes that are off the radio. That became very unique to that style,” McNeill said.
In New Orleans, Black brass bands became particularly famous, partly because free Black people formed mutual aid foundations, known as social aid and pleasure clubs, to provide benefits otherwise unavailable to them under segregation. Most of these organizations sponsored bands. Those who paid dues were guaranteed music at their funerals.
Mz. Icar drew on the Black history of the sousaphone and its association with funk music, marching bands, and hip-hop samples. A member representing the group said her father played in a marching band; she hoped her portrayal of the “big old brass necklace” evoked the soul and whimsy of the instrument’s storied history.
“We want to represent it opulently. Like overkill, like extra. Just take it to the next level,” Mz. Icar said. “It already has all those elements as far as the shape, the sound, being able to move the sound around. All those things are so unique and beautiful to the instrument…. We want to take it to the abyss.”
reimagined by Dawn Wilson
John B. Stetson wanted a boundless base of customers for his hats — and for that he looked to the West. No matter that the hats were manufactured by rows of workers in brick factories in industrial Philadelphia. With shrewd storytelling, Stetson sold his creations as hats of the frontier.
In its promotional materials, the Stetson company painted the West as a European man’s playground and the hat as the ideal costume for white-led conquest.
The story of his creation was told in “the vein of Horatio Alger … a rags-to-riches story,” writes Stefan Rabitsch, a scholar working on a cultural history of the cowboy hat.
In a 1965 booklet celebrating a century of Stetson, the story goes like this: Stetson ventured to the Rocky Mountains in poor health during the Civil War; he had a bright idea; he made a rain- and sun-proof hat; he returned to Philadelphia and made his fortune.
The hat was for “all the men” who helped to “settle the vast empire of the West,” the booklet said.
The cowboy as a symbol of American identity emerged around the turn of the 20th century, helped along by Stetson and Teddy Roosevelt, according to Josh Garrett-Davis, a history curator at the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles
At the time, actual cowboys were mostly poor laborers, many of them Black and Latino. Some of the features of “the cowboy,” including a brimmed hat much like the Stetson, came straight from Mexican ranching culture.
But Roosevelt, who grew up in New York City, identified as a cowboy and called his troop in the Spanish-American War the “Rough Riders,” after the cowboy performers in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows. At war as a cowboy, Roosevelt helped to link the idea of the cowboy with white American conquest.
“It became a symbol of a white man,” Garrett-Davis said.
As much as it outfitted the West, the Stetson company was firmly rooted in Philadelphia. By the 1920s, the company employed 5,000 workers on a vast campus in Kensington, according to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. The company, which now makes its felt hats in Texas, offered Americanization classes, along with medical benefits and other amenities, stating proudly in a 1925 booklet the company motto: “Every employee an American citizen who can read, speak, and write the English language.”
Dawn Wilson, who reinterpreted the Stetson hat for this project, has been making hats in Philadelphia for 27 years. She first encountered Stetson-style brims as a child at Tindley Temple United Methodist Church in South Philadelphia, where women arrived in dazzling hats each Sunday. Wilson designed her first hat for a friend celebrating a birthday; Wilson made her a four-piece royal blue sequined velvet suit with a sequined cossack hat to match.
The base of Wilson’s Stetson hat is rabbit wool felt, with embroidered detail on the brim. Wilson said she is drawn to millinery because the art weaves together style and function — her hats protect against rain and snow, cover hair lost to chemotherapy, and infuse beauty into daily life.
reimagined by Nicole Medina
Benjamin Franklin was a new kind of scientist when he began experimenting with electricity in 1745. He wasn’t wealthy or formally educated, and he was fascinated by the everyday science of household work.
By publishing instructions on how to re-create his experiments, he opened up the scientific process to the masses. His writing had a clear message: In the colonies, you didn’t need a degree to discover and invent.
“He became tied to this early patriotism, and this idea that the U.S. could be just as good and innovative as Europe,” said Janine Boldt, an art historian who curated an exhibit on Franklin for the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia last year.
Franklin offered a new, American version of genius: a self-made man who came from nothing; an eccentric man, alone in the storm. The famous painting of Franklin’s 1752 kite and key experiment captures that ideal, of a man who could outshine even the most celebrated European scientists.
Today, scholars are working to bring forth the people and scientific discoveries left out of the frame.
Franklin owned at least eight enslaved people, and historians don’t know exactly what scientific labor they did. In one tantalizing example, Franklin installed a lightning rod in his home and asked his family to help him “catch” the electrical charges from the lightning to store in jars.
“When he says that his family helps him `catch lightning,’ he could be referring to the enslaved people as much as he might be referring to one of his sons,” Boldt said.
Though there’s no documentation that Franklin ever freed the enslaved people he owned, he did change his mind about slavery over the decades and ended up as president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society in 1787.
When Nicole Medina, a Latina illustrator based in Philadelphia, turned to the symbol of the kite and key, she wanted to remove the singular genius inventor from the center of the frame, replacing him with an image of collective action by women of color.
Medina, who grew up in Venezuela and rural Pennsylvania, tends to create colorful illustrations with a sense of adventure. She added icons of resilience and growth to the kite itself, and changed the relationship between the subjects and the key at the center.
“I wanted the action of grabbing on to the kite to feel more energetic, and even aggressive,” Medina said. “Kind of like taking it back.”
reimagined by Kimberly McGlonn
As a first grader growing up in Milwaukee, Kimberly McGlonn recited the Pledge of Allegiance with her class every morning. McGlonn, who grew up in a Black Muslim household, felt social pressure to say the words.
Years later, when she arrived as a freshman at Louisiana State University, Black students were leading a protest against a different flag. The university was selling the Confederate flag in the campus bookstore, in the school colors of purple and gold.
McGlonn drew on those two charged encounters when she redesigned the Betsy Ross flag.
“I wanted to avoid the red, white, and blue,” said McGlonn, who is the founder of the Philly-based sustainable fashion brand Grant BLVD. “When I see those colors, particularly in the presentation of a flag, I don’t feel like it’s talking to me.”
Instead, she crafted a wearable flag, made from a recycled jacket, in gold, silver, and bronze.
She wanted the military-inspired bomber jacket to embody the people on the “front lines” of the fight for racial and climate justice. McGlonn founded Grant BLVD in part so she could hire and train formerly incarcerated people in Philadelphia.
Back when Betsy Ross constructed a flag for George Washington in 1776, flags weren’t draped in patriotic meaning the way they are today, according to Marla Miller, author of Betsy Ross and the Making of America.
Flags were instead tools that ships used to communicate. Ross, a Philadelphia-based upholsterer, was like any other government contractor crafting textiles for Revolutionary War ships. George Washington went into her shop and showed her a design involving six-pointed stars; she recommended a better one with five-pointed stars.
The flag that Ross sewed had 13 stars to represent the 13 colonies. McGlonn wanted the number 13 to be central to her redesign. Instead of referring to the early colonies, her stars refer to the 13th Amendment, which ended slavery but carved out an exception for incarcerated people, a compromise between the North and South.
“I hope it evokes optimism,” said McGlonn, who collaborated with students from Lower Moreland High School to conceive of the design. “I hope it evokes a sense of renewed energy, that the potential of this country is still worth pursuing.”
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Acknowledgement
A More Perfect Union is produced with support from The Lenfest Institute for Journalism, Lisa D. Kabnick and John H. McFadden, Peter and Judy Leone, and Surdna Foundation. Editorial content is created independently of the project’s donors.
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Staff Contributors
- Reporter: Zoe Greenberg
- Contributing Editor: Errin Haines
- Deputy Editor: Ariella Cohen
- Research Director: Brenna Holland
- Managing Editor of Visuals: Danese Kenon
- Design Director: Suzette Moyer
- Creative Director / Developer: Dain Saint
- Project Manager: Ann Hughes
- Digital Editor: Patricia Madej
- Audience: Lauren Aguirre, YaYa Horne
- Copy Editor: Richard Barron
- Artists: Mikel Elam (Liberty Bell), Kimberly McGlonn (flag), Nicole Medina (Ben Franklin), Mzicar (sousaphone), Dawn Wilson (Stetson hat)
- Photographers for Artists: Alejandro A. Alvarez, Jessica Griffin
- Video: Tyger Williams, Raishad Hardnett
- Stylist (Flag): Michael Cook
- Dress (Flag): Aknvas