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Five family members' names added to UVa Memorial to Enslaved Laborers

Thirmston Hern is no longer alone.

The slave’s name inscribed on the University of Virginia’s Memorial to Enslaved Laborers was joined by five of his family members who also worked, mostly in historical anonymity, to build the university designed by Thomas Jefferson.

Davy Hern, Fanny Gillette Hern, Bonnycastle Hern, Lily Hern and Ben Snowden were officially added in a private dedication held Tuesday at the memorial. All six were related to an enslaved family at Jefferson’s home at Monticello and to Charlottesville native Myra Anderson.

“Thirmston Hern’s name was already on there when they completed the memorial, but there were several others from the family whose names should have been on there,” Anderson said.

The memorial was first proposed by students more than a decade ago and won support across the university community, including alumni. The memorial was seen as a way to acknowledge and honor an estimated 4,000 people who built and worked at the university

“I grew up in Charlottesville — all of my life and in school we never heard about slavery at UVa,” Anderson said, noting instead that use of the word “servant” was prominent. “When you hear ‘servant,’ you don’t think of slavery. We never heard of slavery at Monticello, except for the Hemings family.”

The enslaved workers cleared land, dug foundations, fetched water and wood, cleaned and performed daily chores for students and professors, according to the memorial. These workers also included skilled laborers in cooking, brick making, carpentry, roofing, transporting and carving quarried stone, blacksmithing, and designing, sewing and creating clothing.

In the fall of 2016, the UVa Board of Visitors selected a firm to design the memorial and construction began in 2019.

A planned April 2020 dedication of the memorial fell victim to the COVID-19 pandemic. The official dedication has yet to be rescheduled as the virus has yet to abate.

“We are honored to support families as they share their written and oral histories of their ancestors who were enslaved at the university,” said Carolyn Dillard, of the Division for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at UVa’s Center for Community Partnerships.

“And it is a sobering, heartfelt process and an honor to work alongside of them to ensure the names of the enslaved are forever memorialized in stone and visible to all,” Dillard said.

The memorial bears the names of hundreds of known workers and blank-line “memory marks” for the thousands of names still unknown. Some inscriptions are simply noted by job, gender or age.

“There are inscriptions on there from people whose names aren’t known or remembered. They have ‘stonecutter’ or ‘boy’ or ‘girl.’ There are just blank lines,” Anderson said. “When you think of slavery, how it denied humanity to individuals and degraded human beings into obscurity by denying them even their existence, stripping them of any dignity, you can see why it is important to put the names out there of people you can find.”

Thirmston Hern’s name was easy to find. Because the family descended from slaves at Monticello, and because of Jefferson’s compulsive note-taking, the other names of Hern family members who labored at UVa were far less difficult to discern than most.

When Anderson discovered only Thirmston’s name was on the memorial, she set about to rectify the omission. It took more than a year.

“When I looked up the information at UVa on slavery, they only had two PDFs but when I looked at the PDFs, my family’s names were all over the documents,” Anderson said. “I’m not sure why they weren’t included to begin with, but I wanted to make sure they were on there.”

The process took about 18 months. Anderson said she believes it was because of a lack of a defined process at the time for putting names on the monument rather than any type of stalling or reluctance on the part of UVa staff.

Anderson got the final OK from UVa in December, along with an apology for the length of time it took.

“This process of going back and forth with UVa officials was incredibly confusing and frustrating,” Anderson recalled. “At times, I really wanted to give up but my DNA wouldn’t let me. When you look back at slavery, at the segregation laws, racial purity laws, and eugenics and how long it took to turn those over, I’m really the first generation of six generations of my family to have full rights, the right to drink out of whatever fountain or go into restaurants. That makes honoring my ancestors more important.”

Officials are hoping to work with descendants to identify the families of the enslaved.

“The MEL Names Committee has been established by the university to support descendant families, researchers and genealogists,” Dillard said. “The committee is comprised of university historians, genealogists, alumni, university architects and descendants.”

Names would be added each year, she said.

“It is our desire to host an annual Descendants Day at the university where new names will be unveiled to the families and the community,” Dillard said.

Source: www.dailyprogress.com

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