A Monumental Journey honors the courage and legacy of African-American lawyers who founded the National Bar Association in Des Moines in 1925 after Black American attorneys had long sought to address discrimination in their profession and after the Iowa Colored Bar Association convened in 1924. These pioneering efforts were directed by Iowa lawyers S. Joe Brown, Charles P. Howard, James B. Morris, Gertrude E. Durden Rush, and George Henry Woodson, joined by George Cornelius Adams, Jesse Nathaniel Baker, Wendell E. Green, William H. Haynes, and Cornelius Francis Stradford from Chicago, Illinois, and Charles H. Calloway and L. Amasa Knox from Kansas City, Missouri. All of these founders led this and other efforts to advance justice, uphold the honor of the legal profession, and protect the civil and political rights of all American citizens. Inspired by the talking drums of traditional African cultures, the work uses black earthen bricks associated with African builders and recalls the labor of Americans of African descent who constructed much of the historical architecture of the United States, many of whom were victims of racism. Its off-center upper drum creates a precarious tension suggesting the struggle to maintain balance and equilibrium, and it expresses that the quest for equality and perfect balance is not yet achieved while carrying forward the founders’ legacy of a monumental journey toward human dignity and justice for the disenfranchised and politically oppressed people of the world.