[8] They are derived from an image of Isabella Gibbons, an enslaved woman who was owned by professors at the university before emancipation and who went on to become an educator of freed African Americans.

[5][9] The following words of Gibbons are engraved on the memorial: Can we forget the crack of the whip, the cowhide, whipping-post, the hand-cuffs, auction-block, the spaniels [manacles], the iron collar, the negro-trader tearing the young child from its mother’s breast as a whelp from the lioness?

The second path aligns with the sunset on March 3rd, which commemorates the day that Union troops emancipated the local enslaved community at the close of the Civil War.

The communities of Charlottesville and the University will observe this important event through the newly instituted Liberation and Freedom Day March through the city.

Also sharing the same north/west orientation is the Memorial’s grove of gingko trees that harkens back to the area’s previous use as a productive landscape of fruits and vegetables tended to by enslaved laborers.

The Memorial was designed as part of a collaboration between Höweler+Yoon Architecture, Studio&, Gregg Bleam, a local landscape architect, Frank Dukes, and Eto Otitigbe.