University of Virginia Plaque Honoring Enslaved Laborers (2007)
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Memorial Object
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Plaque/Marker
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Free and Enslaved Laborers
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University of Virginia Plaque Honoring Enslaved Laborers (2007)
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In 2007, as the state of Virginia prepared to launch a year-long celebration of 400 years of Virginia history, the General Assembly issued a statement of "profound regret" for slavery. The University of Virginia Board of Visitors issued a similar statement weeks later. The Board at that time rededicated itself and the University to the “principles of equal opportunity and to the principle that human freedom and learning are and must be inextricably linked in this commonwealth and in this republic.” Later that same year, the university installed the plaque to honor that Board resolution.
The plaque is approximately fifteen inches wide and several feet long. It is located in the Southwest Corner of the Rotunda's cryptoporticus, the covered but open air walkway running East-West under the Rotunda's south steps, where it serves as an archway threshold.
The plaque is very important at UVA, more for what has transpired after it was installed than for the plaque itself. In the two years after the plaque was installed, students organized, claiming the plaque represented inadequate recognition of the University’s complex history with slavery. Students felt that the plaque only recognized enslaved people secondarily and were likewise disappointed by its size and location.
Student Council’s Diversity Initiatives Committee sought feedback about possible feelings on a revised memorial. Receiving sufficient interest in the project, the Committee formed the group Memorial for Enslaved Laborers (MEL) in 2009. In 2010-11, MEL held a competition for designs of an imagined memorial . The goal was to encourage the UVA community to consider calling for much more significant memorialization than the 2007 plaque. MEL chose three winners, hoping that the competition would increase community knowledge about the university's history and that the students’ designs might inspire future institutional memorialization.
Around the same time, a group of alumni similarly began advocating for diversifying portraiture, honorifics, memorials, and plaques on Grounds. They endowed and formed the IDEA (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access) Fund in 2012 and began grant-funding new projects that fit with their mission.
In 2013, those efforts spurred President Teresa Sullivan to create the UVA President's Commission on Slavery and the University (PCSU), the first institutional project fully researching slavery at the university and advocating for newly visible interpretation and memorialization (that effort resulted in the 2021 dedication of a large memorial to the enslaved).
The 2007 plaque that started it all, however, is not easily spotted. as it is in the ground in an underground walkway, with small text running perpendicular to the direction of the walkway. The statement only acknowledges enslaved people as contributors to the University's construction from 1817 to 1826 and commingles them with much smaller number of free wage contractors and artisans involved in construction.
As a result of several years of ferment stemming from objections to that 2007 plaque that culminated in the very public work of the PCSU, the Board of Visitors approved construction of a new memorial. The university selected design firm Höweler and Yoon to continue community engagement regarding the memorial’s design. In 2017, the Board approved the resulting design.
This plaque, though in some ways a failure as a significant acknowledgement of nearly a half century human bondage at UVA, nonetheless started a decade of acknowledgement and atonement.
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The matte black, rectangular plaque is installed in ground in the cryptoporticus, an underground walkway on the south side of the Rotunda (under the Rotunda steps). The text is written in all caps in a traditional, formal font, and engraved in intaglio style into the slate.
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“In honor of the several hundred women and men, both free and enslaved, whose labor between 1817 and 1826 helped to realize Thomas Jefferson’s design for the University of Virginia.”
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University of Virginia Board of Visitors passed the resolution acknowledging the university’s connection to slavery and authorized the installation of the plaque.
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February 2007
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University of Virginia
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