Roanoke College plans to build a bronze memorial to acknowledge the enslaved people who played a foundational role in establishing the school.
On Friday, the school unveiled the design for “Authors and Architects,” created by Richmond-based artist Sandy Williams IV.
Bronze books will be printed from castings from the original college collection and stacked 6 feet high on a concrete platform. The spines of the books will be engraved with the names of the people who were enslaved at the Salem institution, acknowledging the freedom and education that was denied to them. It will also include people enslaved off campus in Roanoke County.
“As we began doing the research, we realized there would be a huge hole missing if we didn’t show people that were enslaved by members of the board of trustees, faculty, donors or even land owners who sold land to the college,” said Jesse Bucher, the school’s historian.
“Authors and Architects” serves to acknowledge their roles as creators in the school’s history. Many of the people on the memorial played a role in building the school. “Let’s name them as architects,” said Williams.
The memorial will sit near the historic brick library, Bittle Hall, which was built by slaves. “They were not given access to that space, they were not given access to the resources,” said Williams.
The memorial includes the names of 820 people who are known to have had a direct connection to the college’s history, Bucher said. Many of the names are placed on the memorial alongside members of their families, he said.
While most of the books are arranged in an orderly way, some sections of the sculpture are positioned haphazardly to symbolize a tumultuous time, and a few books will be left blank on their spines: “There’s a lot missing, there’s a lot that we’ll never know,” explained Williams.
The project has been five years in the making. When work started in 2019, it was concurrent with a research project, the Genealogy of Slavery, in which 16 undergraduate students at Roanoke College helped sift through Roanoke County archives.
“They pored through the archives, and other sources that are contained in federal collections, to accurately document all enslaved people who lived in Roanoke County in the mid 19th century,” said Bucher. Student researchers compiled names of 4,000 enslaved people with information about where they lived and who they lived alongside.
Roanoke College senior Sydney Pennix flipped through hundreds of pages of research in the county archives over three summers. She dedicated almost a thousand hours to researching, typing out notes and entering them into a free online database.
“This memorial connects the enslaved people in a way that the archives do not reflect,” Pennix said. “They’re mentioned in these documents as ‘owned by these people,’ but they were family units at the end of the day. The database and memorial do a good job unifying that.”
The memorial’s design is meant to engage the community. “The artwork will encourage introspection and conversation,” Bucher said. He said he hopes that visitors will see the names and want to learn more about who these people were. “It’s something that pushes us to investigate and look for answers going forward,” he added.
The artist for this new memorial received national attention in June, when their wax sculpture of Abraham Lincoln lost its head in a sweltering Washington heat wave. The 3,000-pound Lincoln statue was meant to draw attention to the Civil War era and its aftermath. Williams laughed about the outcome but said this new project won’t be temporary. “Unlike the wax one, it will be here as long as the university is here,” Williams said.
“Authors and Architects” will be located across from the college’s admissions building. The school wanted it to be highly visible and accessible to the broader community.
The budget for the project is approximately $300,000, generated through private donations. The sculpture will be formally dedicated in April.
