05/22/2026
Selma Burke sculpted the face that ended up on every American dime. When she asked the federal government to investigate the man who took credit for it, the FBI investigated her instead. The Mint put another man's initials on the coin.
They put a Black woman under suspicion for asking why.
She walked into the White House with a roll of brown butcher paper under her arm and a piece of charcoal in her hand. The date was February 22, 1944, and the man she was about to sketch was the president of the United States.
Selma Burke was forty-three years old that morning. Her back still throbbed from a Brooklyn Navy Yard truck she had wrecked the alignment of and her body inside.
The butcher paper was her decision. Photographs had not been enough.
She had spent weeks before the appointment going through every newspaper and library archive she could find. Every clipping showed Franklin Roosevelt straight on or in three-quarter view, almost never in true profile.
So she had written the White House asking for a live sitting. She told it later in her own plain words.
"I called the president and told him that I had a Ford car and could drive to Washington to sketch him."
The answer that came back astonished her. The administration agreed.
She had come a long way to be the woman driving a Ford to Washington in February of 1944. She was born on the last day of 1900 in Mooresville, North Carolina, the seventh of ten children of an African Methodist Episcopal minister who worked the railroads on the side to feed them all.
She was six years old when she found out who she was. The clay was in the riverbed behind her family's house, and her small hands went into it and came out holding a shape she had made.
"It was there in 1907 that I discovered me," she said later. The clay would also accept the imprint of a coin pressed into it, hold the impression cleanly, and that detail would matter forty years on in ways no one in the riverbed could have guessed.
Her mother wanted something practical. Black girls who could do something practical did not starve, so Selma trained as a nurse at St. Agnes Hospital in Raleigh first.
Nursing carried her to New York in the 1920s, where she landed a job tending a wealthy heiress of the Otis Elevator fortune. The heiress, in turn, carried her into the rooms where the Harlem Renaissance was happening.
She studied at Sarah Lawrence and Columbia. She won a fifteen-hundred-dollar Julius Rosenwald Award in 1935 and sailed to Paris, where she sculpted under Aristide Maillol and brought her work to Henri Matisse for criticism.
She came home before the N***s closed Europe. By 1940 she had founded the Selma Burke School of Sculpture in Greenwich Village, and a year after that she held a master's degree in fine arts from Columbia.
Then the war came, and she did something most of her peers did not. She enlisted in the Navy as one of the first Black women to sign up, because in her opinion "artists should get out of their studios."
They put her behind the wheel of a truck at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The truck threw her back, and she was recovering in a hospital bed when word came that she had won a national competition to sculpt President Roosevelt for the new Recorder of Deeds Building in Washington.
So now she was at the White House on George Washington's birthday in 1944, wearing a hat piled high with fruit. One of her brothers had been aghast that she would meet a president dressed like Carmen Miranda.
Roosevelt loved the hat. The forty-five minutes she had been allotted stretched past an hour as the two of them talked about their childhoods, hers in the North Carolina red clay, his at Hyde Park.
She unrolled the brown butcher paper across a surface in the room and weighed it down. The charcoal moved in her hand the way the riverbed clay had moved through her fingers in 1907.
She made seven studies before she got one she could use. She said later that she had been "so imbued with the greatness of the man that my first seven studies of him were so idealized they were not good."
Then she did the thing few Black women in 1944 America were positioned to do. She asked the president of the United States to hold still.
"Mr. President, could you hold your head like this?" she said.
He held it like that. The charcoal kept moving across the butcher paper, and a profile that would one day live in every pocket in America was being born on a sheet meant to wrap meat.
He invited her back the next day for a second sitting. A third was on the calendar when Roosevelt died at Warm Springs on April 12, 1945.
Burke turned the butcher-paper sketches into a bronze relief plaque, three and a half feet by two and a half feet, the weight of a small child. Above his face she placed his Four Freedoms, freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear.
Before the plaque could be installed at the Recorder of Deeds Building, the former first lady came to her home in New York to see it. Eleanor Roosevelt looked at the face her husband would leave behind on a federal wall and said it made him look too young.
Burke did not back down in her own living room. She told Eleanor Roosevelt, "I have not done it for today, but for tomorrow and tomorrow."
Then she said the line that was really her whole argument. "Five hundred years from now America and all the world will want to look on our president, not as he was the last few months before he died, but as we saw him for most of the time he was with us, strong, so full of life, and with that wonderful look of going forward."
Eleanor let it stand. On September 24, 1945, the plaque was unveiled in Washington by President Harry Truman, with the cloth lifted by Frederick Weaver, great-grandson of Frederick Douglass and the first African American to hold the office of Recorder of Deeds.
Four months later, on January 30, 1946, the United States Mint released a new dime. The release was timed to what would have been Roosevelt's sixty-fourth birthday.
Selma Burke looked at the coin in her hand. The profile was hers.
The hair had been moved slightly and the forehead lowered, which she recognized at once as a quiet nod to Eleanor's earlier complaint about how young the original looked. Past those small adjustments, the head on the dime was a near mirror image of the head she had drawn on butcher paper at the White House.
There were two letters near the base of Roosevelt's neck. J. S.
They were the initials of John R. Sinnock, the U.S. Mint's chief engraver. They were not her initials.
The Mint said Sinnock had built the dime profile from old photographs and a Roosevelt medal he had designed in 1936. Burke said he had built it from her plaque.
She tried to get the credit corrected through the proper channels. She would say later that when she demanded an investigation into Sinnock, the FBI investigated her instead.
She kept fighting for nearly fifty years. In 1994, the year before she died, she told an interviewer the words that summed up half a century of pushing against a wall.
"I am so mad at that man. This has happened to so many Black people."
"I have never stopped fighting this man and have never had anyone who cared enough to give me the credit. Everybody knows I did it."
The fight did not stop her from working. She opened the Selma Burke Art School in New York in 1946 and the Selma Burke Art Center in Pittsburgh in 1968, where she taught children to come close and touch the sculpture with both hands.
In 1979, President Jimmy Carter handed her a Women's Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award in a small Oval Office ceremony. In 1990, the Bush administration formally recognized her as the artist behind the profile on the dime, forty-six years after the butcher paper had come out of her bag at the White House.
She was eighty years old when she finished her last monumental work in 1980, a nine-foot bronze of Martin Luther King, Jr., for Marshall Park in Charlotte, North Carolina. She had carried herself back to her home state to set a Black man on a pedestal in the South.
She died on August 29, 1995, at a hospice in Newtown, Pennsylvania, at ninety-four. Her obituaries in the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Seattle Times opened, in their very first sentences, by calling her the sculptor who created the profile of FDR used on the dime.
There are roughly two billion Roosevelt dimes minted every year, and the bronze plaque still hangs on the wall of the Recorder of Deeds Building in Washington where it was set in 1945. Somewhere, somebody is reaching into a pocket right now for change.
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NOTE: This post is shared for historical and educational awareness about Selma Burke, the FDR dime, and Black women's authorship in American art, not to glorify violence, hate, or harm.
