WASHINGTON — Should an old slave trade auction block stay or go?
Fredericksburg Mayor Mary Katherine Greenlaw told WTOP Thursday a committee is looking into ways it can better utilize the auction block — which currently sits in front of an old hotel where those types of auctions were often held.
One possibility could involve adding more information to the block to help tell a deeper story. Another would involve moving it to a museum with a plaque left behind in its place.
The city already has two other slave-related memorial features used to tell the history of slave trading in Fredericksburg at two nearby intersections on William Street.
Residents, though, aren’t thrilled with the idea of moving it.
“In order for people to understand history, they gotta feel it,” said Crystal McCurdy a half-block away from the stone structure. “They gotta see it to understand it … It means there was once evil here. They had slaves here, they had people selling other people. It’s a symbol of what was in the past. You can’t cover up anything.”
Others agreed with her.
“I think it should stay in the city,” said Rachel Ortiz. “If you move it to a museum, how many chances are people going to see it?”
Ortiz argued that it is currently part of the city’s history tours where visitors already get to see it and learn about it.
She also said it provides children who pass it an opportunity to ask their parents why there’s this stone block — roughly the height of a fire hydrant — is sitting at the corner of William and Charles streets.
Seeing it does more to explain the past.
“Are you going to move battlefields?” Ortiz asked rhetorically. “Are we going to build right on the battlefields and have a depiction in a museum? I don’t think so.”
Others in the city are indifferent to what happens with the block.
“They mean next to nothing to me,” said Stephen Portner about a block away. “It’s kind of a situation where you’re around it all the time, so you don’t notice that it’s there — for me.”
Anthony Blake was spending the morning walking with McCurdy. He said he’d be OK with the old auction block being moved.
Ideally, it would be in a park not too far away with a plaque at the original site telling people where they can see the actual artifact.
“Putting up a placard isn’t half bad,” Blake said. “But still, it’s kind of taking away from its value by being not there so to speak.”
To McCurdy, removing it would be a disservice to African-American history.
“They are minimizing [African-Americans],” she stated.
It would remove the negative aspects of the city’s local history while putting other and more prestigious history on a pedestal.
“It makes them [the Washington family and other founding fathers] more popular. The Mary Washington college, Mary Washington house, all that stuff — they hold that dear to everything. Think they’re going to cover that up? Nope,” McCurdy argued.
“We just going to put that in the past, we just going to cover it up,” McCurdy continued. “They ain’t going to miss anything like that. But they can make Washington and them all the higher purpose and that’s not fair. It seems like you are showing the good parts but leaving out the bigger part and the negative part. You can’t have the negative without the good. You’ve got to have both.”
McCurdy, like Ortiz, said that fewer people will see the auction block if it were put in a museum.
“Museums [are] OK, but people don’t go to museums anymore,” she said. “They’d rather sit on the couch and watch TV or play a game or whatever.”
