George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia unveiled a new memorial honoring the people enslaved by the university’s founder,
The memorial features 81 names representing the 100 people George Mason IV owned and who worked at the Mason on the Gunston Hall plantation.
In honor of the people enslaved by the university’s namesake, the VA school shined a light on the prominent figure’s beliefs with The Enslaved People of George Mason memorial.
Wendi Manuel-Scott, a professor of integrative studies and history and one of the faculty members who had a hand in the Mason memorial, told CNN the university decided to keep Mason’s statue and added the monument next to it to “raise awareness about George Mason.”
“In many ways, this memorial is an invitation for people to come and sit in the messiness, the complexity of the past and be comfortable with what makes us uncomfortable,” Manuel-Scott told CNN.
Students “are often surprised to learn that George Mason IV was also a slaveholder,” Manuel-Scott added.
According to the Washington Post, although Mason opposed the slave trade, had a hand in the Virginia Declaration of Rights, and believed “all men are born equally free and independent, and have certain inherent natural rights,” –he still enslaved more than 100 people at his Gunston Hall plantation, Manuel-Scott noted.
In celebration of the university’s 50th anniversary, the campus revealed The Enslaved People of George Mason memorial to the Fairfax, VA, community.
The memorial now sits next to a statue of Mason in the university’s newly renovated plaza.
Mason’s personal servants James and a child, Penny, are specifically highlighted in the memorial.
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“We discovered a young man named James George Mason’s personal attendant. And we discovered Penny, a child given by Mason to his daughter, and many others who were not recognized or acknowledged,” Manuel-Scott said.
The statue features four quotes at the bottom of its pedestal describing Mason’s many facets in life.
“What we tried to do was show the four Masons in one, that was really critical for us. He wasn’t just this incredible legal mind. But he was also a father, he was also an enslaver, and he was also a Patriot,” George D. Oberle III, the director at Center for Mason Legacies, told CNN.
The memorial project began in the summer of 2017 when five George Mason University students and three faculty members sought interest in their namesake and started investigating the people enslaved by him.
“This memorial educates us about the contradictions and complexities of George Mason. A man of the 1700s whose actions, in some cases, didn’t match his values. But more than that, it conveys the values and actions of George Mason University in the 21st Century. We grow wiser from examining our full truths, no matter how complicate, messy, or discomforting they might be,” university president Dr. Gregory Washington said in a statement.
“George Mason was a great patriot, but today is not the day to mythologize him. He was an enslaver of people but we are not here today to cancel him,” Washington said. “We are here to contemplate how a person could believe so passionately in the tenets of the Bill of Rights while simultaneously holding so many souls in enslavement. And we are here to offer this contradiction as a teaching moment to the community and to the nation.”
Stephanie Wolfgang, an architectural design employee for Perkins & Will, creatively directed the piece.
