University of Virginia plans $6M memorial to honor 5,000 slaves who built the school
Two hundred years ago, Thomas Jefferson came to an abandoned farm to mark out the landscape for the university he planned to create, accompanied by his overseer and 10 slaves.
“From the very first moment” of the University of Virginia, said Kirt von Daacke, a professor and assistant dean, “this is a story where there are often more enslaved people than designers, or professors, or students.”
The bricks that built Jefferson’s vision of a place where students and professors lived and worked and learned together were dug out of clay by enslaved people, shaped by enslaved people, baked in kilns by enslaved people. The stone for the stately steps and architectural details was quarried and carved by enslaved people. And much of the building was done by enslaved people, usually “rented” from nearby slave owners.
Now the university plans to build a large and visible memorial to commemorate the contributions of an estimated 5,000 enslaved people who helped build and maintain the school.
It’s part of a larger ongoing effort by the university — and about 30 other schools — to grapple with painful truths and to tell a more complete story of its past.
It’s an effort that was first pushed by students nearly a decade ago. Now it has approval at the highest levels: On Friday, the board of visitors unanimously endorsed not only the concept of a memorial but the design presented to them. Private fundraising for the estimated $6 million project will begin immediately, and officials hope it will be complete in 2019, when the school celebrates its bicentennial.
The move comes at a time when Charlottesville is at the epicenter of fiery debates over history and racism.
In May, demonstrators wielding torches gathered to protest the removal of a statue honoring Confederate general and Virginia native Robert E. Lee.
A Ku Klux Klan group from neighboring North Carolina plans to hold a rally in Charlottesville in July.
The U-Va. memorial, Mr. von Daacke said, would be a way to intellectually reject white supremacy by adding to the landscape, rather than removing historical monuments.
“It’s a really powerful memorial that, I think, fits with Jefferson’s vision for the university, while changing the story.”
The landscape and buildings of the university were always intended to be an integral part of the learning experience. “This will do that.”
It will be built within the UNESCO world heritage site, visible to people driving by the flagship university as well as to those on campus.
A Boston design firm, Höweler+Yoon, in consultation with members of the Charlottesville and U-Va. communities, designed a circular memorial about 80 feet in diameter, echoing the dimensions of Jefferson’s iconic Rotunda.
The outer wall will be local granite, the same stone used on the terraces of the rotunda, and will rise to about 8 feet at its highest point.
Names of those who worked there as slaves —about a thousand, mostly first names, are known — will be inscribed, with space to add more.