Harlem Renaissance Sculptor Selma Burke, Whose Portrait of FDR Inspired the Dime, Was a Member of Delta Sigma Theta

Did you know that celebrated Harlem Renaissance sculptor Selma Burke, whose portrait of President Franklin D. Roosevelt is widely credited as the inspiration for his profile on the U.S. dime, was a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc.? Burke was inducted as an honorary member of the sorority.

Selma Hortense Burke was born on December 31, 1900, in Mooresville, North Carolina, the seventh of ten children of an AME minister. As a girl, she shaped figures from the clay of a nearby riverbed, later saying it was there that she “discovered me.” At her mother’s urging she first trained as a nurse, earning her education at what is now Winston-Salem State University and at St. Agnes nursing school before moving to New York City.

In New York, Burke’s true calling took hold. Drawn into the Harlem Renaissance through her connection to writer Claude McKay, she studied under the great sculptor Augusta Savage, taught through the Works Progress Administration, and won fellowships that took her to Europe to study with masters like Aristide Maillol and Henri Matisse. She went on to earn a Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University in 1941.

Burke’s most famous work came during World War II. After enlisting in the Navy as one of the first African American women to do so, she won a national competition to sculpt a portrait of President Roosevelt. She wrote to the White House requesting a live sitting, and to her surprise the president agreed, meeting with her in early 1944. Her bronze relief was unveiled by President Harry Truman in 1945, and Burke’s rendering is widely regarded as the basis for the Roosevelt dime, which debuted in 1946. Although the U.S. Mint officially credits its chief engraver, John Sinnock, many historians and Burke herself maintained that the design was drawn from her work.

A self-described “people’s sculptor,” Burke created public portraits of figures like Booker T. Washington, Duke Ellington, and Mary McLeod Bethune, founded art schools in New York and Pittsburgh, and completed a statue of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1980. She received the Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award in 1979. Selma Burke died on August 29, 1995, at the age of 94, remembered as an artist whose vision reflected the excellence and service celebrated by Delta Sigma Theta.

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