It's time to embrace a new public works project to build new statues -- not simply to replace the old, but to broaden Americans' consciousness of the crucial and defining role that Americans of diverse backgrounds, particularly African Americans, have played in our history.

Likewise, we should build statues to Ambassador Ralph Bunche, the first African American to win a Nobel Peace Prize back in 1950 -- one should be standing proudly near the United Nations and another in his hometown of Los Angeles.

We should build statues to Hiram Revels, the first African American Senator elected after the Civil War, who took the Mississippi seat formerly occupied by Confederate president Jefferson Davis.

There is also no statue built to honor Ed Brooke, the first African American elected to the Senate since reconstruction as a Republican from Massachusetts in 1966.

We could start making historic amends by building a collective statue to the 25 African American Medal of Honor winners from the Civil War.

We should build a statue to Thomas Morris Chester, a pioneering and supremely talented African American journalist who worked on the front lines of the Civil War, as well as honor Mary Richards Demmings -- often called Mary Elizabeth Bowser -- a legendary but still mysterious figure who served as a Union spy, posing as a slave in the Confederate White House.

We should build more statues honoring great African American writers and thinkers.

We should also build more statues to the men and women who developed the great American art form of jazz, including Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Tito Puente and Sarah Vaughan.

The statue, sculptured by James Earle Fraser, has long been deemed "problematic" because Roosevelt is flanked by two semi-naked men, a Native American and an African, despite the fact that the sculptor intended their inclusion to be a statement about "Roosevelt's friendliness to all races." It does not read that way 80 years later.

In addition, however, new statues should be elevated to the same level in the semi-circle stone plaza that surrounds it in front of the museum: figures like NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson (depicted in the movie Hidden Figures); the famed natural scientist and inventor George Washington Carver; the immigrant and conservationist (and founder of the Sierra Club) John Muir; the legendary anthropologist Margaret Meade (who worked at the museum for decades); the Native American explorer Sacagawea, who guided Lewis and Clark on their journey through the wilderness of the American west; and Matthew Henson, an African American arctic explorer who may have been the first man to reach the North Pole when he traveled alongside US Navy Engineer Robert Peary.