Money still lacking for National Slavery Museum
By EARL SWIFT, The Virginian-Pilot

FREDERICKSBURG - The dream was born in June 1992: L. Douglas Wilder was leading a trade and cultural mission to Africa when he found himself standing before the Door of No Return on Senegal's Goree Island, reputedly the point of embarkation for generations of slaves bound for the New World.

Beyond the door stretched the blank, gray immensity of the Atlantic. Beyond the ocean lay home. And Wilder, halfway through his term as the first black elected governor in U.S. history, had an epiphany.

"Isn't it ironic?" he later would recall saying. "My forebears certainly passed through this door or a door like it, somewhere in West Africa, and my grandparents were slaves, and here I am, leading a group of businesspeople back to Africa.

"There's a story here."

He announced the dream a year later, on another trip to Africa: America needed to commemorate its slave past, to ponder this most troubling aspect of the nation's identity. America needed a national slavery museum, and Wilder wanted it in Virginia.

Dream spawned blueprint. The museum would rise from a forest of tulip trees, hickory and sassafras high above the falls of the Rappahannock River, would loom over motorists on the nation's busiest interstate, would glow by night. Its soaring glass atrium would enfold a full-scale slave ship, decks outfitted for the hellish Middle Passage that brought Africans to the antebellum States. Galleries would document the sweat, blood and misery of an institution that flourished here longer than it's been banned.

But 15 years after that day in Senegal, Wilder's story remains untold. The only structure on the museum's donated site is a billboard for Shoney's. Fund raising has yielded just a fraction of the sum needed for construction. Even comic Bill Cosby, a longtime museum backer who last year implored every American to send $8 toward its completion, has failed to generate much interest in the project.

Now, eager for some tangible progress, Wilder and other museum leaders have voted to build in phases, starting with a modest garden that will be dedicated next month.

"I'm getting old," said the former Virginia governor, now 76 and Richmond's mayor. "It's amazing, how long it's been."
Once built, the U.S. National Slavery Museum would be hard to miss. At 290,000 square feet, it would be almost 2-1/2 times the size of downtown Norfolk's Nauticus - big enough for 10 permanent galleries, libraries, a lecture hall and a 450-seat theater. The atrium, a great arcing fin of glass and steel, would tower over the slave ship's masts, which would themselves reach nearly 100 feet from the floor. Architect's drawings show the complex with its own exit off of nearby Interstate 95.

All of that is years off. Reaching the site today requires running a gantlet of big-box stores and chain restaurants at Central Park, a "retail power center" at Exit 130-B, then taking a curving boulevard through freshly graded landscape and just-planted trees - the future home of WorldStreet, a complex of 300-plus stores and condos.

The effort's most public moment came last June 3, when the museum hosted a fundraising gala at Washington's Warner Theatre. The event, starring Cosby and actor-singer-dancer Ben Vereen, drew 1,350 people, each of whom paid $100 to $300 a ticket. It earned a good deal of media coverage, too.

Cosby's well-publicized $8 campaign, unveiled last fall, yielded the "same story," the mayor said: "It generates some money, perhaps enough to keep us in business operating. But you can't build the museum with it."

Cosby himself said as much in a short monologue the museum posted in March at www.eightbucks.org. "We've been trying to get everybody in the United States of America to send in eight dollars," he said. "Everybody didn't. So we're asking again."

Cosby has pledged $1 million, he said, but other wealthy blacks - "persons of color who have been very successful and who, in my judgment, should be interested in seeing American history properly constructed" - have not been adequately tapped. That will change.

Perhaps most vexing, "there's still a psychological rejection of even discussing slavery " and a perception that the museum would hurt more than heal.

"It's not about guilt; it's about history," he countered. "I simply want people to remember. It is for the benefit of those who want to know what America is and what American history is about.

"If we don't do it, we'll continue the myth. We'll continue the 'Gone with the Wind' picture of how it was. And it'll be our fault. And I'm not going to let it be on my plate that I didn't do all I could do."

COURTESY OF USNSM
An artist's rendering of the proposed slavery museum.