Raven Chanticleer, 72; Dancer, Sculptor

Raven Chanticleer, 72, founder and owner of New York’s African American Wax and History Museum, a tiny but impressive space in Harlem filled with two dozen statues of black heroes, died March 31 in New York City of lung cancer.

Born James Watson in Woodruff, S.C., the son of sharecroppers, he invented a colorful name and persona for himself as he studied at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York and became a fashion designer, dancer, sculptor and storyteller.

Inspired by a visit to Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in London, where he was offended to find no African figures, he founded his own wax museum in Harlem in 1989. Chanticleer made his wax figures and designed and stitched their costumes. Among his likenesses are Harriet Tubman, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Magic Johnson, Duke Ellington and Raven Chanticleer.

He included himself, he once said, “just in case something should happen to me, if they didn’t carry out my wishes and my dreams of this wax museum I would come back and haunt ... them.”