The contributions that African Americans have made to The United States of America are many, however the single greatest contribution was the free labor system of The Slave Trade which enabled a struggling string of European Colonies to rise to the greatest economic and industrial power in the world. Through the suffrage of both black and white abolitionists and philanthropists and the ultimate sacrifice of thousands of lives of idealistic and brave white soldiers the institution of slavery was finally bought to and end. For a country that was profoundly invested in the slave trade it took a relatively short time, roughly 100 years after The Revolutionary War, to end slavery altogether. In another hundred years The Civil Rights Movement would Bring forth a new era of racial and economic freedom for blacks. As a child I was fascinated with the long period of African American Enslavement. I wondered about the lives of those born into slavery who longed for a freedom that would elude them in this life. Surely slaves, seeing themselves as links in the centuries old unbroken cycle felt at times that freedom was only to be had in the afterlife. How utterly miraculous was freedom for such a people... that heretofore had resolved to die bound to the land... but proud... I imagined a great hall where the consciousness of all of the ancestors could be collected... but a mere hall was insufficient to contain such a boundless presence... The memorial should be in the very place that these agrarian peoples knew best... the open land...
The lives of most slaves were intimately tied to the agrarian economy of this country. The first significant cash crop was indigo, next tobacco, and then cotton and finally corn and other grains. Plantation owners descended from the noble houses of England and Europe, the landed aristocracy of young America sat at the reigns of the slave driven economy. While they lived in a relative opulence reminiscent of the Robber Barons of the Gilded Era slaves lived in uttermost squalor and ignorance. In large but rare cosmopolitan cities such as Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, New Orleans and Washington, D.C. African Americans both freedmen and slaves became reputable entrepreneurs, craftsmen and intellectuals. But the American economy and the politics that drove it were impenetrable to them. The free labor enjoyed by American plantation owners/businessmen allowed America to grow into a wealthy world power producing cash crops in the south virtually free of all taxes and wages; exporting their crops to factories in the highly industrialized states of the north or to the global marketplace. For this reason I chose to create a monument that incorporated these crops as an integral element of exhibition. The real day to day experience of the slave took place on the thousands of farms and plantations across the south amidst hearty crops growing rapidly in the sweltering summer sun. Washington, D.C. is a white collar town and hardly the experience that most slaves would have known; I wanted a site that would have enough land so that the viewer would be able to immerse themselves in growing fields and crops... a beautiful and natural world where they could visualize things that would have been all too familiar to a slave from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth.
Water was also an important feature singly because Africans who had been illegally captured and torn from their homes endured the infamous middle passage across the ocean to North American ports. Water was the medium that separated them from their old lives and which, likewise held the promise of a return... Water was an integral element in their agrarian livelihoods a metaphor perhaps for the sweat and bloodshed spent in the brevity of their captured lives. I wanted water to be both the primary means of arrival and departure to the monument and I wanted the monument to be experienced from the water with vessels that ferried visitors around what I envisaged as a very substantial site. In the late Twentieth Century the term "Sankofa" was coined to symbolize the physical and spiritual return to the motherland for spirits who had been centuries severed from its womb. If there were a conceptual return then I would that it be from the gateway of this revered site on the banks of the James River on the ancient loam of Virginia where so many of the bodies of the ancestors, including many of the very first, were laid to rest in their last quest for deliverance.
The site may also be accessed via automobile since this is a more practical means of locomotion to such a remote location. Ferries and water taxis, bicycles, and small motorized vehicles could easily provide transportation to and around the memorial grounds but the site is vast and would definitely require several hours to be seen and experienced properly in its entirety.
At the entry a channel opens from the James River. The channel is truncated so that it is widest at the river flanked by two small islands in the shape of ships... slave ships. the ships are replicas of actual slave ships and are virtual museums designed to show the visitor what it would have been like to be imprisoned on a slave ship. The islands are accessible via bridge along an ambulatory walkway that encompasses the site. I nicknamed the walk, "The Encompass" for this reason since it literally encloses the site.
The barge moves on the the second obelisk memorializing the second hundred years of enslavement and the crops will change to tobacco on either side. The memorial will be a living museum with slave quarters just off the rivers edge and the fields will be farmed by men and women dressed in the appropriate attire.
The next obelisk memorializes King Cotton and the three hundred years since the first enslavement of Africans in North America. the crop is grown on either side and is the largest of the three cash crops growing along the channel. Each of he crops is grown on an individual island totally surrounded by a canal. the fields outside of the island are all working farmland complete with re-created domiciles, workshops and other features that would have completed a period farm.
the end of the channel is marked by a round island and quay with an obelisk at its center representing 400 years of African American presence in the Continent of North America. The barge is compelled to go around the island taking the visitor off center to view the next monumental edifice, The Shrine and Memorial Building of African Enslavement in The United States of America. The edifice is a Neo-Egyptian Structure consisting of a large columned hall with a long quay stretching the full length of the river front and a large basin along the rear facade. At the center of the hall is a great freestanding obelisk commemorating the many lives lost to the middle passage. This feature is located in what I call the hall of the ancestors and is flanked by great propylons containing small shrines to the women and men separately who were born into, lived and died as slaves.
The conceptual elevation sketches for this project reveal a very robust Egyptian and Greco-Roman Revival style in the Beaux Arts tradition.
The front elevation shows a columned facade with a rusticated base rising from the quays along the water. Stramps, (stair-ramps), lead up from the low quay to the terrace along the front. Three propylons interrupt the colonnade, the middle is the primary entry to The Hall of Ancestors which stretches transversely to the entry axis. Each wing of The Hall of Ancestors has a clerestory and a high ambulatory gallery level from which the skylight can be viewed and from which visitors man gaze down onto the main floor of the halls. A double pleached allee encompasses the sides and rear of the building and its rear ornamental pond.
THESE ARE ALL CONCEPTUAL SKETCHES I MADE AND ARE STILL BEING UPDATED
I LOVE THE SIDE FACADE, IT REALLY HELPED ME RESOLVE SOME MASSING ISSUES I DID NOT SEE IN THE FRONT FACADE. I REDUCED THE WIDTH OF END PORTICO IN ORDER TO CORRECT THE MASSING AS THE BUILDING TURNS THE CORNER.
THIS IS A VIEW OF THE OBELISK AT THE FRONT OF THE MEMORIAL ON THE ISLAND IN THE FRONT ORNAMENTAL POND
END ELEVATIONS SHOWING SECESSION OF OBELISKS GOING TOWARD THE JAMES RIVE FROM LEFT TO RIGHT.
DETAIL OF ROOF SHOWING CLEARSTORY AND ACROTERIA, SLATE ROOF, AND CAPITAL/ECHINUS
Over the past few days I have been revising the plans and elevations for the monument. I am not sure if I am wholly satisfied with the massing and plan to do some alternate facade designs and then cross sections. the site is most intriguing to me and I have begun to lay out the residential quarters for the botanists, farmers and other agricultural staff.
One of the features I had not originally incorporated into the design is an amphitheater. I do see the relevance of creating a space devoted to performance and it seems that this space should be outside.
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