Although 24 years have passed since the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, New York City’s dedicated families and communities that lost loved ones on that fateful day continue to honor their legacies.
“Part of our duty as a memorial museum is to commemorate and honor the 2,983 people that were killed on 9/11 and in the 1993 bombing,” said Dylan Williams, the 9/11 Memorial & Museum Curatorial Assistant. “All these people had rich lives with their own kind of hopes and dreams and aspirations, things that they were working on, things that they were doing, things that they would look forward to. And so we use artifacts that were donated to us to tell that story.”
The 12 Black Firefighters Lost but Not Forgotten
There were 343 New York City Fire Department (FDNY) firefighters who died on 9/11 with 12 of them being Black firefighters. Their names were as follows: Gerard Baptiste, Capt. Vernon Cherry, Tarel Coleman, Andre Fletcher, Keith Glascoe, Ronnie Henderson, William Henry, Karl Henri Joseph, Keithroy Maynard, Vernon Richard, Shawn Powell, and Leon Smith Jr.
“Within the walls of the firehouse, we each have a responsibility to ourselves to protect each other because of one common denominator, life. I worked ten years in Brownsville, East New York, and Bedford-Stuyvesant, and all brother firefighters know that death in fires does not discriminate,” wrote Cherry, in a letter found in his locker before the tragedy. The letter was donated by his family to the 9/11 Memorial & Museum and highlighted in its brief documentary from last year…