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 recognition of Russia on November 16, 1933, started forces which were to have considerable influence in the attempt to collectivize the United States.”
—Herbert Hoover (1874–1964)
“In a moment when criticism shows a singular dearth of direction every man has to be a law unto himself in matters of theatre, writing, and painting. While the American Mercury and the new Ford continue to spread a thin varnish of Ritz over the whole United States there is a certain virtue in being unfashionable.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“We cannot feel strongly toward the totally unlike because it is unimaginable, unrealizable; nor yet toward the wholly like because it is stale—identity must always be dull company. The power of other natures over us lies in a stimulating difference which causes excitement and opens communication, in ideas similar to our own but not identical, in states of mind attainable but not actual.”
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“I care not by what measure you end the war. If you allow one single germ, one single seed of slavery to remain in the soil of America, whatever may be your object, depend upon it, as true as effect follows cause, that germ will spring up, that noxious weed will thrive, and again stifle the growth, wither the leaves, blast the flowers, and poison the fair fruits of freedom. Slavery and freedom cannot exist together.”
—Ernestine L. Rose (1810–1892)
“When I go into a museum and see the mummies wrapped in their linen bandages, I see that the lives of men began to need reform as long ago as when they walked the earth. I come out into the streets, and meet men who declare that the time is near at hand for the redemption of the race. But as men lived in Thebes, so do they live in Dunstable today.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)