Two years after the end of the Civil War and her emancipation from enslavement, Isabella Gibbons, a teacher at the newly created freedmen’s school in Charlottesville, wrote a letter that forcefully rejected the white Southern fantasy about formerly enslaved Black people. “Can we forget the crack of the whip, cowhide, whipping-post, the auction-block, the hand-cuffs, the spaniels, the iron collar, the negro-trader tearing the young child from its mother’s breast as a whelp from the lioness?” Gibbons wrote. “Have we forgotten that by those horrible cruelties, hundreds of our race have been killed? No, we have not, nor ever will.” Her epistle, published in the June 1867 issue of The Freedmen’s Record, a Boston-based monthly, aimed to dispel the idea that enslaved families like Gibbons, her husband, William, and their four children thought of their former masters and mistresses with great affection or even longing.
Today a lenticular image of Gibbons’s eyes, created by the artist Eto Otitigbe (
@etootitigbe ) is carved into an exterior granite arc of the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers (
@uvamemorial ) in Charlottesville. The memorial, which opened in 2020 to honor the estimated 4,000 men, women, and children who built and maintained the University of Virginia from 1817 to 1865, is the result of a more than decade-long effort by members of the collegiate community and local residents. I joined the architectural team in 2016 and worked closely with descendants to determine how best to create a structure that honors the university’s enslaved laborers. We chose Gibbons’s face because she is the only person for whom there is a photo and a recollection of enslavement. A closer look at the memorial landscape of Charlottesville — from the process of building this monument to recent efforts by a conservative group of UVA alumni to erase gains made in highlighting the campus’s Black history — offers an opportunity not only to consider the legacy of this violent racialized dynamic but to also learn how to combat it.
Tap the link in our bio to read Mabel O. Wilson’s full essay on our website.
✍🏾Mabel O. Wilson (
@studio_and )
📸 Alan Karchmer
