Starting a museum involves a laundry list of inherent challenges: raising money, securing a location, debating what the displays will include and exclude. But what if the museum-to-be has no artifacts? (Read the entire article)
 
 

A compilation of posts to the slavery list serv. (Read the entire article)

FREDERICKSBURG - The National Slavery Museum is scheduled to open in February 2007, but former Gov. L. Douglas Wilder hopes to have part of 
the site open sooner.  "We would like to see some dirt moved really soon," Wilder said at a community meeting, without giving details. Wilder, the driving force behind the museum, previously anticipated completing part of the project this year. (Read the entire article)

    Imagine slavery, and you'll likely picture black workers stooped over rows of cotton in the South.  Yet lawyers who recently filed a federal lawsuit seeking corporate reparations for slavery named three companies far removed from farming, two of them based in New England. (Read the entire article)

W hen visitors walk through a brand-new $9 million pavilion that will house one of the nation's most enduring icons of freedom (the Liberty bell) , they will be treading above the very spot where the first president kept his slaves. (Read the entire article)

The Magnolia Hill Plantation in Natchez, Miss., advertises its former slave quarters as Wealthy's cottage, "which is our poolside suite and can accommodate 4-6 guests."  (Read the entire article)

MONTROSS Descendants of a plantation slave family thanked God and history yesterday for who they are and
their complicated legacy, which includes the manor house that was the birthplace of Confederate General
Robert E. Lee. (Read the entire article)

In bondage to historical false memory: America has no need to consider reparations for slavery: the civil war settled its moral and financial obligations. (Read the entire article)

     As it marks its 300th anniversary, Yale University is celebrating what it calls its "long history of activism in the face of slavery" - the abolitionist faculty members who befriended the slaves on the ship Amistadin 1839, and today, the world's first center for the study of slavery.
     But in a research paper published today, three Yale scholars say the university is ignoring a less honorable side of its history. (Read the entire article).

   ... But while slavery serves as an entry point for a dialogue on race, it is not an easy one. For slavery carries with it deep anger, resentment, indignation and bitterness for some, embarrassment, humiliation and shame for others. The complications can be seen in the introduction of slavery into what had been a lily-white representation of Colonial Williamsburg— by staging a slave auction. ( Read the entire article )

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In Williamsburg, the Painful Reality of Slavery

.... a gripping program unveiled here a few months ago, called Enslaving  Virginia, weaves the shameful history of human bondage into the fabric of  storytelling at Williamsburg, underscoring a Revolution fought for the liberty of some, but not all. This edgy new representation of Colonial life casts costumed actors as slave leaders and slave owners while paying tourists find themselves in the roles of slaves.  (Read the entire article) 

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Articles on the Controversy Over The Lee Portrait on Richmond's Canal Walk

Preparations for the grand opening had gone along more or less without incident until Wednesday, when the Richmond Times-Dispatch ran a front-page photo of a huge portrait of Robert E. Lee along the city's flood wall, the backdrop for the Canal Walk. 
... When city councilman Sa'ad El-Amin saw the picture, he hit the roof. To El-Amin, who is black, Lee was a symbol of the fight to preserve slavery. (Read the articles) 

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Reaping What Was Sown On the Old Plantation
     ... Betty Hertzog hadn't been thinking about slavery when she agreed to go along with her rich friends' plans to turn part of her beloved Magnolia into a national park. She had been thinking about her family's land, and her struggle to hold onto it... 
     ...A little more than a year ago, though, she started to feel uneasy about the Park Service's plans. A new ranger,  black woman named Carla Cowles, had begun scratching around the old slave cabins. 
Slavery was pretty much all Ms. Cowles was thinking about when she came to Cane River.... 
(Read the entire article) 

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School Reconsiders  Slavery Lesson
   For six years, Amy Fowler has tied her students' hands and ankles and lined them up side-by-side on the floor at John Adams Middle School to teach them about  slavery. 
That will change.  (Read the entire article) 

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Payments to descendants would  heal wounds  of slavery, KC man says
Eugene Frison sees something  missing in his mostly black neighborhood north of downtown. Few economic opportunities, scant political power, not enough harmony with white residents. 
He has a solution.  Frison, 74, says reparations for the descendants of slaves would allow black Americans to catch up to the economic head start of whites. Reparations also would bury resentment and guilt left over from slavery, he said. (Read the entire article)