[For the rest of this week, I’ll be providing updates on a few topics from my hometown of Charlottesville about which I’ve blogged previously. Leading up to a special weekend tribute to an influential Cville figure I got to see again earlier this summer!]
Two core things
I love about a new University of Virginia memorial.
In one
of the posts in my annual Virginia/Cville series six years ago (but who’s
counting?!), I wrote about the in-progress
efforts to uncover and commemorate a forgotten burial ground for enslaved
workers. Check out that post if you would, and then come on back for more.
Welcome back! As
far as I can tell those efforts
remain in-progress at that particular site (although they definitely are
ongoing, thanks to the work of awesome folks like Kirt von Daacke), but that’s at least
in part because in the meantime the university has completed
and dedicated a memorial to
those enslaved laborers elsewhere on the Grounds. And indeed, one of the
things I really love about that memorial, which I had the chance to visit with
the boys and my Mom when we were down in Cville in June, is precisely is
location, just down the hill from the Rotunda and Thomas Jefferson’s original
Lawn. After all, there would be no such places without the work of the enslaved
laborers memorialized, and going forward it will be very difficult for any
tourist, visitor, prospective student and family, etc. to walk through the
Grounds without seeing this memorial. The memorial’s design, the way it is dug
into and (I would argue) deeply rooted in the ground of those Grounds, means
that such walkers can be almost upon it before they see its full, deeply moving
scale, but that too feels fitting to me for the lives and histories it
commemorates.
Those aspects of
location and design would make this memorial one of my favorites regardless of
the content, but I very much love the balance presented by the latter as well. The
main outer wall of the memorial features the names of (or, in the many cases
where names are tragically unknown, other identifiers for) all of the enslaved
laborers historians have been able to locate. It would have been easy and understandable
for the memorial to stop there, or perhaps to feature one plaque at the
entrance with contextual information. But instead, along the wall of its inner
fountain the memorial presents an extended chronology of those laborers and
numerous historical contexts for their lives and work (in language that
consistently engages with the harshest and most horrific realities of
enslavement, racism, white supremacy, and more). Commemoration and education
are not identical purposes, and of course too much information can take away
from the emotion and potency of a memorial; but I believe this one achieves a
perfect balance, commemorating these too-long overlooked figures and lives
while also providing visitors with a great deal of vital detail about them and
their (and our) world. I love this memorial, and I look forward to visiting it
on many more Cville trips.
Last update
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Favorite memorials or public art you’d highlight?
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