The United States National Slavery Museum is a non-profit organization based in Fredericksburg, Virginia, that has been fundraising and campaigning since 2001 to establish a national museum on slavery in America. The museum is intended to have as its primary mission education, re-education, and policy formation regarding slavery in America and its enduring legacy. Former Virginia Governor Douglas Wilder is the museum project's founder.
The project, however, effectively, died in 2008 due to its inability to raise sufficient funds to pay property taxes, let alone begin construction. Then on September 22, 2011, the organization filed for Chapter 11 protection in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Fredericksburg. Earlier in the year its founder, Douglas Wilder, was refusing to respond to or answer any questions from either news reporters or patrons who had donated artifacts.
It was on October 8, 2001, that Wilder had originally announced his intention to build a National Slavery Museum in Fredericksburg, on 38 acres donated by the Silver Company at the Celebrate Virginia Retail and Tourism complex. The site overlooks the Rappahannock River and is located less than one mile from Interstate 95 (the principal North-South artery for the U.S. east coast). Originally projected to open in 2004, the museum was to be part of the state's "Celebrate Virginia" development along the busy I-95 travel corridor between Richmond and Washington DC.
In 2005 the Fredericksburg City Council set a deadline to begin construction by August 1, 2008, in order for the project to retain its special-use permit (allowing the planned building to exceed zoning restrictions on height.) The museum project made its last tax payment on May 15, 2008, and the following day the executive director wrote the City Council to request to delay construction for one year (until August 2009). In June 2008, (then Mayor of Richmond) Douglas Wilder appeared before the City Council to ask for an exemption to pay real-estate taxes (retroactive to 2002), but this request was denied on June 24, 2008, by a vote of 6-1. By the end of the year the project's leased offices in Fredericksburg were reported to be vacant. The local Fredericksburg newspaper reported in February 2009 that the offices had never had much staff beyond Executive Director Vonita Foster and one assistant.
There has been no work at the site since 2007, when a small (one-third acre) Spirit of Freedom Garden was dedicated. In June 2008 L. Douglas Wilder requested that the museum be granted tax exempt status, which was denied. From that time, taxes on the land had not been paid and the property was at risk of being sold at auction by the city of Fredericksburg.
According to a news report in mid-August 2011, the museum property has an assessed value of $7.6 million, and delinquent property taxes for the years 2009, 2010, and 2011 amount to just over $215,000. Virginia tax authorities said the property became eligible to be sold as a tax sale on December 31, 2010. Official notification of the commonwealth's intent to sell the property was planned for late August 2011, but a tax official said it was unlikely "anything would really happen" for six months (until early 2012), and the planned tax sale would be dropped if taxes were paid. But then the organization filed for Chapter 11 protection in September, although it remains unclear if the purpose was reorganization or liquidation.
Famous quotes containing the words united states, united, states, national, slavery and/or museum:
“... the yearly expenses of the existing religious system ... exceed in these United States twenty millions of dollars. Twenty millions! For teaching what? Things unseen and causes unknown!... Twenty millions would more than suffice to make us wise; and alas! do they not more than suffice to make us foolish?”
—Frances Wright (1795–1852)
“United Fruit... United Thieves Company... it’s a monopoly ... if you won’t take their prices they let your limes rot on the wharf; it’s a monopoly. You boys are working for a bunch of thieves, but I know it ain’t your fault.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“An ... important antidote to American democracy is American gerontocracy. The positions of eminence and authority in Congress are allotted in accordance with length of service, regardless of quality. Superficial observers have long criticized the United States for making a fetish of youth. This is unfair. Uniquely among modern organs of public and private administration, its national legislature rewards senility.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)
“Maybe it’s understandable what a history of failures America’s foreign policy has been. We are, after all, a country full of people who came to America to get away from foreigners. Any prolonged examination of the U.S. government reveals foreign policy to be America’s miniature schnauzer—a noisy but small and useless part of the national household.”
—P.J. (Patrick Jake)
“I have always thought that all men should be free; but if any should be slaves it should be first those who desire it for themselves, and secondly those who desire it for others. Whenever [I] hear anyone, arguing for slavery I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“The Museum is not meant either for the wanderer to see by accident or for the pilgrim to see with awe. It is meant for the mere slave of a routine of self-education to stuff himself with every sort of incongruous intellectual food in one indigestible meal.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)