Berthold Leibinger Lecture

Ambivalent Monuments: Freedom and Slavery in Iconic American Buildings

Some of America’s earliest civic buildings, such as the Virginia Statehouse, designed by Thomas Jefferson in 1785, were constructed by enslaved Black individuals. Jefferson also designed the University of Virginia (1817), which relied upon approximately four thousand enslaved men, women, and children for its construction and maintenance. In this lecture, Mabel O. Wilson discusses the process of writing histories and creating spaces of remembrance based on archival materials that document America’s conflicting paths of dehumanization, violence, resistance, and resilience to chattel slavery.