Selma Burke and the Dime in Your Pocket

Selma Burke was an American sculptor who modeled a bronze relief portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1944 and 1945, and many historians credit her profile as the source for the one on the U.S. dime. The Mint has always credited engraver John Sinnock, and the dispute has never been settled.

Reach into your pocket. If a dime is in there, you are holding a portrait of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in left profile. It has been struck by the billions since 1946. No painting in a museum, no photograph in a textbook, gets handled the way that little coin does. It rides in cup holders and coat linings and cash registers. It is, by a wide margin, the most-touched portrait in American life.

And there is a long-running argument about who made the face on it.

The sculptor

Selma Burke lived from 1900 to 1993, and she built institutions. She founded the Selma Burke School of Sculpture in New York City. Later she founded the Selma Burke Art Center in Pittsburgh. Founding one school is a career. Founding two, in two cities, is a life spent making room for other people to work.

In 1943 she won a competition for a bronze portrait plaque of Roosevelt. The commission was federal, meant for the Recorder of Deeds Building in Washington, DC. A national contest, a sitting president as the subject, and a Black woman sculptor takes it. That fact alone would carry an article.

But the plaque needed a face, and Burke wanted the real one.

February 22, 1944

Here is the part that still lands.

Burke did not wait for permission to filter down through committees. She wrote directly to the White House and asked to draw the president from life. In the middle of a world war. And she got the sitting.

On February 22, 1944, she had 45 minutes with Roosevelt in the White House, sketching him live. This is documented in a Congressional Record tribute (govinfo.gov, CREC-1994-12-20), in the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources account (dncr.nc.gov, 2016), and by coin historians at coinbooks.org (v21n03a13).

Think about what forty-five minutes of a wartime president's attention was worth in February 1944. The Allies had not yet landed at Normandy. Roosevelt was a tired man running a planet's worth of crisis. He gave her the time because she asked, plainly, in writing, and because she had already won the commission that made the request legitimate. That is the whole story of a certain kind of persistence, folded into one afternoon.

1946, and a coin appears

Roosevelt died in April 1945. The country wanted him on a coin fast, and the dime was chosen partly because he had championed the March of Dimes.

In 1946 the new dime went into circulation. On the truncation of the neck sit the initials JS, for John R. Sinnock, the chief engraver of the United States Mint. His name is the one the Mint puts on the design.

That is where the disagreement begins.

The dispute, laid out evenly

Burke's account and her White House sitting

Burke maintained for the rest of her life that Sinnock based his dime on her plaque. She had drawn Roosevelt from life. Her portrait showed the same left-profile orientation. And she was not alone in the claim. The Smithsonian lent its weight to her account, and so did James Roosevelt, the president's own son, who supported the view that his father's dime traced back to Burke's work.

Sinnock's arguments and the Mint's case

The Mint tells it differently, and its case is not thin.

The Mint credits Sinnock alone. It notes that Sinnock had his own separate live sitting with Roosevelt, so he did not need a secondhand likeness to work from. It also points to a Roosevelt medal Sinnock had designed back in 1936, a similar profile that predates Burke's 1943 plaque entirely. If the resemblance runs back to a design Sinnock made years before Burke's commission existed, the argument for borrowing gets harder to make.

So you have two live sittings, two artists who both looked at the same face, a shared left profile that could come from either source or from the plain fact that Roosevelt had one face, and a prior Sinnock medal muddying the timeline. Add supporters of real standing on Burke's side, the Smithsonian and the family. The evidence points in both directions at once, and it keeps pointing there no matter how many times you turn it over. Each side has a fact the other has to explain away. That is exactly what an unresolved dispute looks like from the inside. No source I can point to resolves it. The historians have not closed the case, and I am not going to pretend to close it here. Anyone who tells you flatly that Sinnock copied her, or flatly that he owed her nothing, is choosing a side the record does not hand them.

Why the unsettled version is the better story

It would be tidier to declare a winner. It would also be dishonest.

And the honest version is still remarkable. Strip the dispute down to what nobody contests and you are left with this: a Black woman sculptor, in 1944, drew the president of the United States from life, for a federal commission she won by open competition, in the same few years the most reproduced portrait in American history was being made. At the very least, her work and her eyes were in the room. That is not a footnote.

The fight over credit is not a distraction from Black art history. It is Black art history. Whose name goes on the object, whose sitting counts as the source, whose account the institutions back and whose they quietly set aside, these are the exact questions that follow Black artists through the record. I wrote more about how that machinery of validation works, who gets to certify a legacy and who gets left arguing for their own, in a companion piece on who validates Black art. Burke belongs in that conversation whether or not she designed the dime.

She also belongs in a fuller telling of the era. This piece is part of our Harlem Renaissance visual artists series, and Burke sits squarely among the women of the Harlem Renaissance whose work outlasted the recognition they got in their lifetimes.

Check your pocket

The dime is still out there, in the millions, doing the humblest work a portrait can do. Buying nothing much. Making change.

Next time one turns up in your palm, hold it a second longer. Look at the profile. You are holding a small unresolved question about a sculptor who wrote to the White House and got her forty-five minutes. The answer may never come. The question rides along anyway, coin to coin, pocket to pocket.

If Burke's story pulls at you, the artists of her generation are worth living with on a wall, not just reading about. Our Harlem Renaissance artwork gathers canvas prints from that world, ready for a room you spend real time in.

Sources

• Smithsonian American Art Museum: Selma Burke