Money still lacking for National Slavery Museum

An artist's rendering of the proposed slavery museum. (courtesy of USNSM )

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.

Both Central Park and WorldStreet are part of Celebrate Virginia, a planned "retail resort" of golf courses, hotels and conference centers, stores, corporate offices, upscale homes, an "eco-adventure park" and an indoor water playground - and, not least, the slavery museum.

The new boulevard ends at the garden. Its centerpiece is an eight-foot soapstone sculpture of a man breaking shackles on his upraised arms. Around it, not-yet-installed panels will describe the Middle Passage, the torments of slave life, acts of bravery. The plantings among them will be unassuming - juniper, pampas grass and holly.

It is a simple beginning, the first phase of the first phase of a project of many phases. After the garden's June 21 opening - soon after, museum Executive Director Vonita W. Foster said - work will begin on additional landscaping, parking lots and a 2,500-square-foot visitor center that should open next year.

Phase two would produce the four-story exhibit building for some of the 6,000 artifacts the staff already has collected - chains, deeds of ownership, whips, crude wooden specula to pry open the mouths of hunger strikers.

As soon as that $55 million job is completed, the museum's backers would launch their final, most ambitious drive - to complete the education building, ship replica and glass roof.

"In our business, people don't really believe until you start to move dirt," said John A. Elkington of Memphis, Tenn., a member of the museum's board of directors, "and we're approaching it in phases so that we can start to move some dirt.

"It was the thought of the majority of the board that this was a more prudent approach to take," he said. "We've paid for all the soft costs - we've paid for the architects and the engineers and all the things you don't see on a development - but people really want to see a building."

For good reason: "Long delayed" has become a prefix to the project. Wilder, the museum's board chairman from the start, initially said he hoped to get everything built by 2004. Later, he expected to open all of the exhibits in time for this year's commemoration of the Jamestown settlement's 400th anniversary. Two summers ago, Foster reset the deadline to this fall. The phased approach, approved by the board at a late February meeting in Richmond, amended the timeline yet again.

Money, or lack of it, has been the reason. Foster said last month that pledges, in-kind contributions and cash total about $50 million, adding: "We're very pleased with how it's going."

T he museum's tax records, though, aren't so upbeat. Its 2005 return, the most recent it has completed, show that the organization's assets totaled $17.7 million, the bulk of that amount in donated land. Its cash at year's end amounted to $316,000.

The 38-acre site was donated in 2001, by far the best year for contributions - including the land, they totaled $16.2 million. A year later, the museum raised one-tenth as much. It didn't reach $1 million in any of the next three years, and in 2003 took in just $5,000.

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.

But how much money it drummed up in ticket sales, pledges and gifts remains a question: Nearly a year later, spokesman Matthew Langan noted that the museum had applied for an extension on filing its 2006 taxes and thus could not supply any numbers.

Wilder was more forthcoming. "Did we raise the money we could have? I don't think so," he said. "It didn't raise the millions of dollars we thought it should have."

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."

The comic was seated before a bright green background in that video - a "green screen" on which amateur videographers could overlay their own backgrounds. The museum urged them to do just that - to "create funny, unique videos of Dr. Cosby and share them online."

As of Saturday, nearly two months after its launch, the Bill Cosby Green Screen Challenge had attracted just two participants.

One explanation, Wilder said, is that organizers have not established a national network for their fundraising, which he said would be corrected. Another is that the museum has failed to attract much corporate sponsorship, which he and other board members hope to address with a trip to New York at month's end.

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."

Since early in his quest, Wilder has framed the museum as a tool for reconciliation rather than recrimination. He first envisioned it for Jamestown, where blacks stepped onto colonial American soil in 1619. He had his eye on a property with a view of the James River, but over several years failed to coax it from its owners.

Next came Richmond, where Wilder and his allies spent "four to five years" trying to drum up interest in putting the project on a former industrial tract. Response was tepid. "In the meantime," he said, "I got a call from Larry Silver, a friend and supporter of several years."

Silver, the president and CEO of D.C.- and Florida-based Silver Companies, helped his father develop Central Park in the 1980s, then amassed an adjacent 2,100 acres in Fredericksburg and neighboring Stafford County for Celebrate Virginia. He offered a piece to the National Slavery Museum. The promontory he had in mind was a demographic no-brainer - within 100 miles of 10 million people and a day's drive of half the U.S. population.

Even so, Wilder wasn't excited by the prospect until he visited the tract. "It's magnificent," he said. "Pristine. Nothing's ever been built on it. Accessible, right at the highway. Right in the metropolitan strategic area of D.C., close to presidents' homes, close to Richmond, close to Williamsburg.

"And they gave the land to us."

Not everyone has been so enthralled. Some critics argued that such a museum belongs in Washington, not Fredericksburg. Richmond City Councilman Sa'ad El-Amin was particularly damning, charging that Wilder "allowed himself to be bought by this rich white man who is simply going to exploit our history and heritage for his personal gain."

Others have had no beef with Fredericksburg per se but have wondered whether a development devoted to shopping and leisure is the appropriate setting for so solemn a message.

Wilder and company soldiered on. In 2002, Earl W. Yates, a former Peace Corps officer, came aboard as executive director. He was gone inside a year, replaced by Vonita Foster, a member of the Hanover County School Board and the director of the L. Douglas Wilder Library at Richmond's Virginia Union University.

She also was an author. Among her books was a 1999 children's story, "The Great Little Boy Who Grew Up to Be a Great Man: L. Douglas Wilder."

Before long, the former governor announced that New York architect Chien Chung Pei - son of the famed I.M. Pei, who designed the National Gallery and the glass pyramid at the Louvre - would draw up plans for the slavery museum.

Pei's vision for the project combines heavy blocks, graceful curves and a huge pile of money: An estimated $175.5 million will be required to build the three phases, according to museum documents.

Wilder was undaunted by the task ahead in an interview earlier this month. "We will see it through," he promised. "This is going to get done."

The coming months are critical. "If we start the first phase and show people what could happen, we could do what we need to do in '09 to bring it to further fulfillment," he said. "From there, it might be two to three years in terms of the fuller opening of it. So '08 is the key now to getting something built, seen, used.

"We have the plans," he said. "We have the land. We have the plat. Everything we need, we have - except the money."

Earlier this month, a landscaping crew planted hollies at the site. The soapstone sculpture, titled "Hallelujah" and carved by Staunton artist Ken Smith, had already been lowered into place on a concrete pedestal at the garden's center.

A stiff breeze was sweeping down from the ridgetop where the museum is to stand, and it made the trees chatter and a tarp shrouding the statue flap.

From some angles, where the light was right, the sculpture's raised arms were visible through the nylon.

But barely. They were tough to make out.