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:
“God knows that any man who would seek the presidency of the United States is a fool for his pains. The burden is all but intolerable, and the things that I have to do are just as much as the human spirit can carry.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“What the United States does best is to understand itself. What it does worst is understand others.”
—Carlos Fuentes (b. 1928)
“Perhaps anxious politicians may prove that only seventeen white men and five negroes were concerned in the late enterprise; but their very anxiety to prove this might suggest to themselves that all is not told. Why do they still dodge the truth? They are so anxious because of a dim consciousness of the fact, which they do not distinctly face, that at least a million of the free inhabitants of the United States would have rejoiced if it had succeeded. They at most only criticise the tactics.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Let him [the President] once win the admiration and confidence of the country, and no other single force can withstand him, no combination of forces will easily overpower him.... If he rightly interpret the national thought and boldly insist upon it, he is irresistible; and the country never feels the zest of action so much as when the President is of such insight and caliber.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“Only let the North exert as much moral influence over the South, as the South has exerted demoralizing influence over the North, and slavery would die amid the flame of Christian remonstrance, and faithful rebuke, and holy indignation.”
—Angelina Grimké (1805–1879)
“Things will not mourn you, people will.”
—Hawaiian saying no. 191, ‘lelo No’Eau, collected, translated, and annotated by Mary Kawena Pukui, Bishop Museum Press, Hawaii (1983)