FAIRFAX COUNTY, Va. — George Mason University is confronting the contradictions of its namesake.
George Mason IV was among Virginia's biggest holders of enslaved people, despite also being the one who wrote: "all men are born equally free." Mason also refused to sign the Constitution, in part because it failed to end the slave trade.
But now, George Mason University is raising money for a memorial to the people he held in bondage.
"This will be a very interactive memorial that has multiple elements," Wendi Manuel-Scott said. Manuel-Scott is a history professor at GMU who has been working with the five students whose research project gave birth to the memorial.
The new memorial at the university will allow people to look at the founding father through the lens of two people he held in bondage.
One panel will silhouette James, the personal manservant who cared for Mason when he was sick The other will show Penny, a little girl torn from her family in Maryland, and bequeathed as a chambermaid to Mason's daughter.
Each panel will be etched with the names of the more than 100 people Mason enslaved, more than half of them children.
"This is so powerful, because people will have the opportunity to think about the relationship between slavery and freedom, and the relationship between George Mason the man, the patriot, the slaveholder, and ten-year-old Penny, an enslaved child," Manuel-Scott said.
"To see all sides of history is how we're going to make sure history doesn't repeat itself," Kye Farrow said. Farrow is one of the five students who worked on the project that took them to Mason's plantation, Gunston Hall, and to the courthouses around the commonwealth where Mason's records are kept.
The process of recognizing Mason's contradictions is a process that other institutions tied to slavery are also trying to recognize, and something the university is seeing as an educational moment.
"George Mason University has been around since 1972, we weren't built by enslaved labor, so this allows us to undertake this as an academic endeavor," Julian Williams, the school's Vice President of Compliance, Diversity, and Ethics said
History is complicated. The memorial is designed to help people recognize that.
The University is trying to raise half-a-million dollars to build the memorial. The university hopes to dedicate the memorial in 2021.