Slavery Museum Plans Cause Flap in Virginia

Just beyond the Shoney’s billboard, where the rumble of Interstate 95 meets the roar of the Rappahannock River, the canopy of poplar, oak and birch trees opens into a teardrop-shaped clearing.

With wild turkeys and the occasional deer foraging in the winter wheat, it’s a 35-acre sylvan oasis in a concrete-and-asphalt desert.

“To me,” says Chris Hornung, an engineer with the developer, Silver Companies, “it’s a very dignified spot.”

But is it dignified enough for a museum about one of the longest, darkest chapters in American history?

The developer donated the $18-million parcel for the National Slavery Museum.

In a few years, the museum will occupy a corner of Celebrate Virginia, a planned 2,100-acre complex of offices, restaurants, hotels and shops. Across the river, possibly connected by a cable car, would be three championship golf courses.

Some people here say the plans put an unseemly emphasis on tourism over historical reverence, and they’re worried the slavery museum will end up being nothing more than the complex’s “anchor tenant.”

“Basically, what they’re doing is pimping black people,” says Brenda Sloan, a black woman and special collections curator at Mary Washington College in town. “I mean, slavery was about taking advantage of black people--white people taking advantage of black people for their own financial gain.

“And it seems like to me we have forgotten the history. We’re getting ready to repeat this.”

People have been pushing for a national museum that would address slavery for decades, with no results. Now, all of a sudden, there may be three.

In December, Congress agreed to fund a presidential committee to plan for a black heritage museum in Washington. And Charleston, S.C., the port through which nearly half of the black slaves entered the country, is well on its way to realizing plans for its Museum of the Passage.

Former Virginia Gov. Douglas Wilder, the grandson of slaves, has led efforts to build a slavery museum for nearly a decade, looking at sites in Richmond, Hampton and even Jamestown, where the first African slaves landed in North America. He backs the Fredericksburg plan.

Fredericksburg, a growing city of about 21,000 between Richmond and Washington, positively oozes with history. Home to George Washington’s mother, the city boasts more “original” 18th- and 19th-century buildings than any other Virginia city.

It’s a place where druggists aren’t druggists, but apothecaries, and where it’s not unusual to dig up a Civil War Minie ball along with your crocus bulbs.

A granite block at the corner William and Charles Streets, in front of the old Planter’s Hotel, doubled as a place for patrons to disembark their carriages--and to auction their slaves.

But some have suggested the city, while historic, lacks an overwhelming connection to slavery that would make it a worthy site for the estimated $200-million slavery museum.

Carter Hudgins, a Mary Washington history professor who worked on the Charleston museum project, says there’s no place in the country that has not been shaped in some way by slavery. So the notion of one place being more deserving than another is irrelevant.

Besides, deserving has little to do with it, he says.

“Whether it’s pro football teams or, in this case, a museum, it’s who raises their hands first and is most aggressive.”

But some of the loudest critics are those who might be expected to be the biggest cheerleaders.

Fredericksburg Mayor Bill Beck sits by a wood fire in his antique shop, which occupies an 1831 row building a couple of doors from the downtown visitor’s center. On the wall above his cash register is a poster showing George Washington with a pair of Mickey Mouse ears and the caption: “All attempts to modernize our historic attractions have, thankfully, failed.”

It’s a reference to Walt Disney’s ill-fated attempts a decade or so ago to build a historical theme park amid the region’s hallowed Civil War battlefields.

Beck, who is white, points to the neon-encrusted Central Park mall that the Silver Companies developed along I-95 and has little confidence the slavery museum’s surroundings will look much different.

“It’s the most difficult issue in American history,” says Beck. “And it needs to be handled in the best possible way we can.”

Some around town have taken to calling the museum “the interchange,” implying that Silver thought including slavery in the development mix would help its case for a new $500-million I-95 cloverleaf to serve Celebrate Virginia. Silver officials deny that and say showcasing the area’s culture is an important goal of the development.

Wilder dismisses opponents as a vocal minority who are against any development--especially when it isn’t downtown.

“There isn’t any controversy,” he says. “The overwhelming majority of the people in Fredericksburg want it.”

Michael Neiditch, chief consultant on the museum and a former executive with the Holocaust Museum in Washington, says he is acutely aware of the peril of appearing to turn slavery into a commodity.

The museum board has already decided that it will not “create a market” for slave items by purchasing artifacts to display. “Don’t expect us to go to EBay to buy something,” Neiditch says.

Silver has increased the size of its land donation to provide a larger buffer zone around the museum. Neiditch has been assured that visitors will not see the commercial development that surrounds them.

“We’ve thought a great deal about the visitor family who will leave the museum and the possibility of their desire to talk about what they’ve just seen, to be somewhere in a space where they can think through what they’ve just experienced,” Neiditch says.

But Sloan, at Mary Washington, wonders whether any number of trees or shrubs would be enough to insulate the museum.

“That sounds good,” she says. “But we’re still talking about the fact that the slavery museum is going to be in a commercial amusement complex. . . . There was nothing amusing about slavery.”

Having the museum in Fredericksburg could be an economic boon to the area. Silver estimates Celebrate Virginia will generate an estimated $22.6 million annually in state tax revenues and $171.3 million in annual wages.

Wilder has said he expects as many as 2 million people to visit the museum annually.

In Charleston too tourist dollars are one consideration in planning.

“The Museum of the Passage extends the duration of family visits to Charleston,” a proposal reads. “If such a thing can be quantified, the visitors’ enjoyment of the city is multiplied by the impact of the museum.”

Karen Chandler, director of the Avery Institute for African American History at the College of Charleston, says any museum about slavery is “a very interesting marketing challenge.”

“These days you have to think about a market,” Chandler says from her office in a restored Freedman’s school. “You’d be foolish not to. . . . At the same time, I think it represents an opportunity to have people who would normally come just to have fun have the possibility of being educated at the same time.”

Lawrence Davies, a former Fredericksburg mayor and supporter of Wilder’s effort, says the museum would make the city a destination for tourists.

“History is a part of what this area’s all about,” says Davies, who is black and a minister.

But not all history is equivalent, especially when linked to entertainment and commerce.

When Disney asked Howard University’s Russell Adams for advice on whether its proposed history park should include a slavery component, he concluded it would be “too close to the hamburgers.”

Adams, chairman of the university’s African American Studies department, says, “You don’t have somebody eating cotton candy, watch an auction, have a Coke and then watch another auction or whipping.”

Fath Davis Ruffins, a Smithsonian Institution historian who is collecting artifacts for Cincinnati’s proposed Underground Railroad Museum, says people are extra sensitive when it comes to remembering slavery.

Still, in these days of uncertain government support, Ruffins says anyone who believes a museum about slavery or anything else can be opened and maintained without corporate involvement is deluded.

“Cultural institutions aren’t free,” she says. “Somebody has to pay for them--one way or the other.”