The Challenge of Memorializing Slavery in North Carolina: The Unsung Founders Memorial and the North Carolina Freedom Monument Project

Commemoration of the slave trade, slavery, and subsequent emancipation of African Americans has presented a formidable challenge for artists working in three-dimensional form in the United States. Nineteenth-century sculptors such as John Quincy Adams Ward, Edmonia Lewis, and Thomas Ball wrestled with the questions of how best to memorialize slavery and freedom, and how to embody the black body in their materials. Writer and amateur art historian Freeman Henry Morris Murray recognized the difficulties of artists “saying something” significant about slavery and emancipation in monuments that "stand in the open, at the intersections of the highways and in the most conspicuous places." Murray raised important questions about the politics of representation, remembrance, and public monuments that still need to be asked today. He was concerned, foremost, with how sculpture shaped the public’s understanding of slavery and of African Americans in the post-Civil War era. Historians James Oliver Horton and Johanna Kardux argue, "For Americans, a people who see their history as a freedom story and themselves as defenders of freedom, the integration of slavery into their national narrative is embarrassing and can be guilt producing and disillusioning. (2004: 52). The anguish of this past encourages us to forget, and yet, slavery is deeply woven into the fabric of who we are as a nation. How, then, does a nation memorialize a past it might rather forget? This paper examines two monuments to the slave past The Unsung Founders Memorial on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the planned North Carolina Freedom Monument Project in Raleigh. I assess the visual forms of the memorials and consider how the university community at Chapel Hill, and the public citizens of Raleigh, have sought to remember slavery in the public spaces of the campus and city.