Then began a yearslong series of community consultations, with students, with Charlottesville citizens, and with descendants of slave laborers. A chapel-like grove of trees deep into the campus had initially been
(The memorial is fully open to the public, though the formal dedication, at which time the water course will be activated, has been postponed indefinitely because of the pandemic.)
There were tussles, too, over what form the memorial would take. Some stakeholders wanted one along traditional lines, with figures and recognizable symbols. But the argument for abstraction — a mode that affords equal representation, through words, for all the people honored now and to come — prevailed. The result is the visual antithesis of the Robert E. Lee statue in Richmond, and its Charlottesville counterpart, which now stands, creating its pernicious karma — America slavery may officially be gone but institutional racism lives on and on — behind protective plastic fencing in its park.
If, from afar, the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers doesn’t announce its theme and purpose, even looks somewhat impersonal and unresolved, that’s all right. With its amphitheater shape, stagelike plot of grass, and soon-evident handmadeness, it feels receptive and usable, a place for things to happen, for performances. (You’re part of one as you bend in close to read the names and stories.) Power is not its language. Closure is not its goal. Active, additive remembrance is. Is this what distinguishes a memorial from a monument? A monument says: I am truth. I am history. Full stop. A memorial says, or can say: I turn grief for the past into change for the present, and I always will.
