Description
Landscapes of Slavery and Segregation
An Exhibition Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the National Endowment for the Humanities
Charlottesville, Va., September 14-17, 2016
To preserve and interpret historical landscapes associated with slavery and segregation is to dwell in paradoxes. Place and displacement. Pride and prejudice. Memory and erasure. Central Virginia is home to many such landscapes -some painstakingly marked and preserved, others forgotten, obscured, or sadly neglected. Stately plantation homes and ramshackle wooden out-buildings, once the dwellings of masters and slaves, dot the rural Virginia countryside; all but a few associated with great statesmen of the Founding Era welcome visitors. Neat rows of red clay bricks, hand-laid more than 150 years ago by free and enslaved black laborers, line the walkways to the University of Virginia's Academical Village; only recently, in the 1960s, were these paths opened to blacks and women. A small historic marker near the Downtown Mall pays tribute to Charlottesville's Vinegar Hill, a "forgotten neighborhood" of black businesses and homes. Vinegar Hill, as longtime residents know, was demolished by the city in the 1960s to eliminate "blight" and pave the way for downtown commercial redevelopment.
