06/01/2026
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The face on the dime in your pocket was sculpted by a Black woman, and her name is not on it. Selma Burke shaped that profile of Franklin Roosevelt and got a phone call in the dark telling her a Mint engraver had walked off with her drawings.
His initials went on the coin instead of hers. You have been spending her work your whole life.
There is a dime somewhere near you right now.
Maybe in a pocket, maybe in a drawer, maybe in the cupholder of your car. Pick it up and turn it to the side with the face on it.
That profile of President Franklin Roosevelt has been pressed onto tens of billions of coins since 1946. It is one of the most reproduced images in all of American history.
The woman who shaped that face found out what had become of her work the way too many Black artists of her time found out things. By telephone, in the middle of the night.
Her name was Selma Burke.
She was born on the last day of 1900, in Mooresville, North Carolina, the seventh of ten children. Her father was an A.M.E. Zion minister, and in that house there was no money set aside for a child who wanted to make art.
But there was clay. It sat in the bank of the creek behind the house, and by the time Selma was five she was pulling it out by the handful and shaping it into little animals.
She carried the memory of that clay her whole life.
"One day, I was mixing the clay and I saw the imprint of my hands," she told the New York Post in 1945. "I found that I could make something, something that I alone had created."
That is a small girl learning her hands could leave a mark the world had never seen. She was five years old, and she was already sure of it.
The town of Mooresville had a public library when Selma was a girl, and Black children were not allowed through its doors.
Years later, after her name had started to carry weight, she made the town an offer. She would give them a sculpted bust of a local white doctor, on one condition, that the library open to Black children.
The town took the deal. By then Selma Burke had already learned something hard and useful, that her art could pry open doors her voice alone never could.
Her mother did not believe that art would ever feed anyone. She pushed her daughter toward a nurse's training instead.
Selma went. She studied at St. Agnes and became the first Black registered nurse in Mecklenburg County.
But hands that have found clay do not forget it.
Selma moved north, first to Philadelphia and then to New York City. She nursed patients for a paycheck and sculpted for herself in whatever hours were left over.
New York in those years meant the Harlem Renaissance, and Selma walked straight into the heart of it. She married the poet Claude McKay for a time, taught alongside the sculptor Augusta Savage at the Harlem Community Art Center, and did a stretch of work for the New Deal's Federal Art Project.
She kept reaching. She studied under Henri Matisse and Aristide Maillol in Europe, then came home and earned a master's degree in fine art from Columbia University.
Then the war came, and Selma Burke enlisted.
She became one of the first African American women to serve in the United States Navy.
She was assigned to the Brooklyn Navy Yard. It was there, while she was recovering from a back injury, that a notice reached her about a national competition.
The federal government wanted a bronze relief portrait of President Roosevelt for a new building in Washington, the Recorder of Deeds building. Artists from across the country sent in their work.
Selma Burke won.
The commission came with a rule attached. She was to work from photographs of the president, the way an artist in her position was expected to make do.
Selma read that instruction and quietly decided it would not do. A photograph could not tell her how a man held his shoulders, or where the strength sat in his face.
So she did something that, by every rule of who she was and when she lived, should not have worked. She wrote directly to the White House and asked the President of the United States to sit for her in person.
The answer came back yes.
In February 1944, a Black woman from a small North Carolina town walked into the White House to study the president at close range. Nearly two decades before the marches and the sit-ins, Franklin Roosevelt held still so that Selma Burke could sketch him.
She did not shrink herself for the occasion. She arrived in a hat piled high with fruit, the flamboyant kind that Carmen Miranda wore across movie screens.
One of her own brothers had looked at that hat, then at her, and asked if she truly meant to meet the president dressed like that. She wore it anyway.
Roosevelt loved the hat.
The sitting that was meant to be short ran well past an hour, the president and the sculptor still talking long after the day's schedule said they should have finished.
Over two days that February, Selma sketched a man who was, in plain fact, exhausted and ill and close to the end of his life. That is not the man she pressed into the bronze.
She gave the plaque a younger Roosevelt, upright and broad and strong. When Eleanor Roosevelt saw the finished design, she felt Selma had made her husband look far too young.
Selma would not move a single line of it.
"I made it for tomorrow and tomorrow," she said. "I don't want people to feel something about a wrinkled old man."
"I want to give the feeling of a strong Roman gladiator that we could feel was strong and would lead our country."
Roosevelt never saw it completed. He died in April 1945, months before the bronze was finished.
That September, the plaque was unveiled at the Recorder of Deeds building, with the four freedoms from his famous wartime speech set across the top. The new president, Harry Truman, stood beside Selma Burke next to her work.
Then came the phone call.
It was still 1945, and the call came late, at the kind of hour when a ringing telephone almost always means something has gone wrong. On the line was Ruth Wilson, a secretary at the Recorder of Deeds office where the plaque now hung.
Wilson had something Selma needed to know. John Sinnock, the chief engraver of the United States Mint, had come by to study the Roosevelt plaque, and he had left carrying at least one of Selma's drawings.
The next year, in 1946, the Mint released a new dime. The old winged design that had ridden the coin since 1916 was gone, and in its place sat Roosevelt in profile.
Look closely at the base of that profile and you will find two tiny letters. They are "JS," the initials of John Sinnock, the man the Mint officially credits with the portrait.
Not "SB."
And here is the coldest part, colder than any single phone call in the dark. Even if every soul in Washington had agreed the dime was Selma Burke's work, the rules left nowhere to write her name.
Only employees of the U.S. Mint can be officially credited with creating the nation's currency.
Selma Burke did not work for the Mint, and so the system simply had no line where a woman like her could be named.
In 1977, an art curator named Norman Pendergraft rode a bus out to Selma Burke's farm in the hills of Pennsylvania. She was in her late seventies by then, still sculpting, still glad to tell a visitor her stories.
Pendergraft remembered her as soft-spoken and kind, a woman who smiled all the way through her tales and had nothing bitter to say about anyone she had known. Until the dime came up.
When the dime came up, the smile left her face. She told him, flatly and with no room left for argument, that the image was hers.
Years later, in a 1994 interview, she was just as plain about Sinnock.
"I'm so mad at that man," she said. "This has happened to so many black people."
She kept saying it, in one form or another, until the end of her life.
"Everybody knows I did it."
To be honest about the record, it does not fully close the case. Roosevelt's own son believed the dime carried Selma's work, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum says her sculpture inspired the coin.
The Mint has always stood by Sinnock, who said he drew on many sources. Sinnock himself died in 1947, only a year after the dime appeared, and no document has ever surfaced to settle the question for certain.
What is not in dispute is everything around it. A Black woman in 1944 got a sitting president to hold still for her, made a portrait an entire nation would carry in its pockets, and then watched another artist's initials go onto it in place of her own.
Selma Burke did not let that be the end of her story.
She still had decades of work waiting in her hands.
She founded art schools, one in New York and later the Selma Burke Art Center in Pittsburgh. For years she put clay and tools in front of inner-city children who had never once been handed either, the way someone had once let a five-year-old reach into a creek.
She called what she wanted to be "a people's sculptor." In 1979, President Jimmy Carter honored her for her contribution to American art.
In 1980, at the age of eighty, she finished her last monumental piece, an eight-foot bronze statue of Martin Luther King Jr. that still stands in a Charlotte park.
She once gathered her whole life into a single sentence. "I really live and move in the atmosphere in which I am creating."
Selma Burke died in 1995, at the age of ninety-four.
The Recorder of Deeds building where her Roosevelt plaque was unveiled has been shut since 2008. The windows are dirty, the doors are locked, and no one can say for sure whether her bronze still hangs on the wall inside.
That plaque may be sealed away in an empty building in Washington. But the face she shaped was never locked up anywhere.
It is in your pocket. It is in your car, in the bottom of your bag, in the jar of loose change on your kitchen counter.
Pick the dime back up and look at it one more time. A girl who scooped clay from a North Carolina creek put that face into the world, and it now moves through millions of hands every single day, almost none of them knowing the name of the woman whose work they are holding.
You know it now.
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