For De'Lon Grant, serving on the Clayton Jackson McGhie Memorial Committee a decade ago was the important thing.
Serving as a model for one of the three men who were lynched in Duluth 90 years ago this year was a bonus.
Still, when he saw his depiction on the sculpture at First Street and Second Avenue East for the first time, "it was kind of surreal," Grant recalled on Friday. "My first reaction was that I couldn't believe that it actually happened, and then that I was a part of (something) immortalized in Duluth. It's kind of amazing to me."
Grant, now 26 and an actor in Boston, was http://legacy.duluthnewstribune.com/admin/index.cfm?page=articles/index&... a Central High School student when he joined the committee that was formed in 2000 to create a permanent memorial so that the lessons learned from the lynching of three black men at that intersection wouldn't be forgotten.
That infamous event occurred on June 15, 1920, and is being commemorated beginning Wednesday with a number of events sponsored by the nonprofit Clayton Jackson McGhie Memorial Inc.
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Grant said someone recommended him for the committee when he was a sophomore or junior. He was eager to get involved because it would fill a hole in his knowledge about his hometown.
"I was really interested in it because I didn't know anything about the lynching or the men or the book that had been written about it," he said. "It was like a whole bunch of information had been opened up to me."
When he was asked to be one of the models, Grant was happy to do that, too. Being a performer, it was "right up my alley," he said. But "the model thing just kind of happened by happenstance. Being part of the committee was something I really wanted to do."
The sculptor, Duluth artist Carla Stetson, used Grant to portray Isaac McGhie. Grant said he didn't think he was chosen because of a direct resemblance but because he was similar in age and of a similar physical type.
Stetson, whose previous works included the Peace Sculpture at Lake Place Park and "Language of Stone" at the Great Lakes Aquarium, worked mostly from a picture of Grant. But he sat for her for one session while she worked on some of the facial details.
After graduating from Central, Grant won a partial scholarship to the University of Michigan, where he studied acting, and after graduating from there he moved to New York to pursue a career. He moved to Boston in 2007 to take a master's program at the Boston Conservatory. Since earning a master's degree last May, he has worked for a nonprofit arts organization during the day and frequently performs in theaters. He still travels often to New York, where he has an agent.
His mother, Denise Lewis, still lives in Duluth, and his two younger sisters are college students in the Twin Cities. "I'm so proud of him," Lewis said of her son on Friday. "I'm just over the top about him."
Grant said he has learned there's segregation even in a major city like Boston. It's significant that Duluth has the monument and the committee and is facing up to "one of the dark moments in our town's history."
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"I feel like it's our job as citizens of today to really make sure we are having conversations about -- I don't want to say race or race relations or any of that kind of stuff, but just to remember that there is a conversation that needs to be had," Grant said. "So that one day we can ... really look back and say, well, we did something to change that or remember it. Because history repeats itself over and over again."
