A Slavery Museum?: Race, Memory, and Landscape in Fredericksburg, Virginia

In spring 2001, former governor Douglas Wilder announced that he might locate the United States National Slavery Museum in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Despite some recent changes, Fredericksburg's heritage tourism landscape, as it is built and performed, reproduces a white American nationalism extolling the virtues of individualism, valor, and free enterprise. The mere potential of adding the Museum to Fredericksburg's landscape engendered intense debates about the ways the City's cherished Colonial and Civil War pasts are remembered. In this article, I use recent literature on landscape, memory, and race to explore changes in how African-American histories are represented in and through the landscape. Then, I examine one venue for these debates—the letters to the-editor, op-ed pieces, and online reader responses published by Fredericksburg's newspaper of record, The Free Lance Star . In these texts, Museum opponents and supporters selectively deploy constructions of race, versions of Fredericksburg's past, and visions for the City's future to support their arguments. I conclude by noting how debates over the Slavery Museum continue to inform more recent proposals to change Fredericksburg's landscape.