Underground Railroad monument in Windsor celebrates 20th anniversary. Here's the man who built it

A City of Windsor monument that honours the flight of enslaved Black people seeking freedom in Canada is celebrating its 20th anniversary.

The Tower of Freedom Underground Railroad Monument, sculpted by Ed Dwight, was donated to the City of Windsorin 2001. The monument in Windsor is one half of the sculpture, with the other half sitting across the river in Detroit's Hart Plaza.

Dwight, who was born in Kansas City in 1933, said he always had a talent for art, but it wasn't what he initially pursued.

At 17 years old, Dwight said his dad told him he was going to school for engineering and not art.

"I asked him, 'what do [engineers]do?' and he said, 'they make money, that's all you need to know,'" Dwight said.

But instead, he signed up for pilot training and in 1953, he joined the U.S. Air Force. He served as a military fighter pilot and got a degree in Aeronautical Engineering.

In 1961, Dwight said he was chosen by American president John F. Kennedy to enter training and was pegged tobecome the first Black Astronaut.

"Once that announcement was made my picture was plastered all over magazine covers in newspapers all over the world, and I was flooded with 1,500 letters a day and fan mail and and all the stuff pouring in and the media was all over me," he recalled.

WATCH: Meet Ed Dwight. The man behind the sculpture

Meet the man behind Windsor's Underground Railroad sculpture

4 years ago

Duration 2:58

Ed Dwight was almost United States' first Black astronaut. It ultimately did not come to fruition but his exit from the world of space exploration led him back to his childhood love of art.

Though he completed the training, he wouldn't ever actually make it into space as Kennedy was soon assassinated and his successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson, ended up choosing someone else.

"President Johnson had to make a decision as whether I was going to be his black astronaut or whether he was on his own and to through his advice and counsel from his mentors ... he needed a taller, Blacker candidate than me," said Dwight.

"I was Catholic,which meant I didn't go to a Black church and it went through all of these iterations that said that I could not be President Johnson's astronaut guy."

Years later, he left the military and found his way back to art.

The start of his career was when Colorado's first Black lieutenant governor asked him to make a sculpture of him, Dwight said.

And that was the first of many, with Dwight now having completed more than 100 memorial sculptures since then that commemorate the contributions of Black people across the U.S.

The Detroit-Windsor sculpture is one detailing the final stage of the Underground Railroad and the emotional journey that many took to finally reach freedom.

The half that sits in Detroit shows six slaves waiting to be brought to Canada, while Windsor's installation shows a young girl looking back across the river at America, showing her desire to return to U.S. after the abolition of slavery. There's also a young woman holding a baby whois being welcomed to her new life.

"I became a storyteller more than I became a sculptor," he said. "I found that the importance of the memorials that I did had to do more with the story than the art. The art was just a vehicle to tell that story ...I could take a human being and I could put agony on their face, I could do it through their clothes. I can do it through their body language."