'Why I did it:' County resident confesses to taking slave auction block [Charlottesville]
C-ville
Laura Longhine
2/07/20 at 5:05 PM
Albemarle County resident Richard Allan, an amateur local historian, has admitted to taking the bronze slave auction block marker from Court Square in the early morning hours of February 6. Charlottesville police would not confirm whether Allan was in custody.
“I did not remove the metal slave plaque in the ground…with the intention to offend anyone in our great town or our historic county,” Allan told C-VILLE in an exclusive interview before an acquaintance turned him in to the police. “I want it to be clear that there was no harm intended.”
Allan, 75, says he found the plaque’s placement in the sidewalk to be insulting, and that he acted after years of frustration that nothing was done to create a more fitting tribute to the enslaved laborers who built much of Charlottesville.
Noting that his family had a history of owning slaves along the Gulf Coast, he said, “Out of respect to the enslaved persons in my own family’s personal history; out of awareness that down the generations I have inherited money that should have been paid in wages to those people… I removed the insulting plaque and have ensured that it will not be recovered.”
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Read more at https://www.c-ville.com/why-i-did-it-county-resident-confesses-to-taking-slave-auction-block/
= new reply since forum marked as read
and protect it. ~ In Germany there are small memorials, 'Stolperstein,' stumbling blocks made of square brass bricks to remember Nazi victims of the Holocaust around homes of Jewish persons. I've seen news of vandalism of these memorials recently.
- Slave auction plaque area in Charlottesville, Va.
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- 'Brick by brick, Guenther Demnig is working to change how the Holocaust is publicly remembered in Germany,' NPR, 2012
On a recent afternoon, the 62-year-old Berlin-born artist is on his knees on a sidewalk in a prosperous section of Berlin's Charlottenburg district, working a hammer and small trowel. He is installing dozens of small, square brass bricks, each one inscribed with the name — and details about the death of — people who once lived in apartment houses on Pestalozzi Strasse.
"Today we are laying 45 stones for Jewish victims that lived in these houses," Demnig says as he secures the brass brick for Martin Lwowski, a former resident deported in 1943 and murdered at Auschwitz.
..The brick project has its critics. Some homeowners elsewhere have complained quietly that having quasi-tombstones in the sidewalk outside is bad for property values and business. But the main complaints are that the bricks only highlight victimhood, and that when people, dogs and bikes trample over the names of the dead, some argue, they are victimized a second time...
More, https://www.npr.org/2012/05/31/153943491/stumbling-upon-miniature-memorials-to-nazi-victims
- Brass bricks known as Stolperstein, or "stumbling stones," in front of a home in Raesfeld, Germany, where 5 members of a single family were forcibly removed by the Nazis. Across Germany, the stones commemorate the millions of victims of the Nazi regime.
