A Slave Auction Block’s Final Public Act

Stephen Hanna, Ph.D. - RESET Research Fellow

Fredericksburg, Virginia. June 2, 2020: A young Black man stood upon a sandstone block with a noose around his neck.  Below his feet, an inscription, “Auction Block. Fredericksburg’s Principal Auction Site in Pre-Civil War Days for Slaves and Property,” was obscured by spray-painted tags.  In his upraised hand a white piece of poster board proclaimed, “#BLACKLIVESMATTER!”  A photo published in the Free Lance Star, Fredericksburg’s local paper, shows him surrounded by a crowd of young people who included “Remove the Block!” into their call-and-response chants.

Three days later, the slave auction black was gone. A temporary marker explaining why the City of Fredericksburg removed the block now straddles its location.  The marker proclaims that removal “is a significant step in living City Council’s directive to relocate the historic artifact, and to work to better tell a more complete history of Fredericksburg – specifically its storied African American history.”

The sign’s remaining 550 words describe almost three years of City Council actions that followed public demands for the block’s removal in the wake of the 2017 White Supremacist riots in Charlottesville, Virginia. Readers patient enough to reach the end of the second paragraph will learn that on June 11, 2019, Council reversed its earlier decision to reinterpret the block in situ by voting 6 to 1 to remove it from public space and relocate it to the nearby Fredericksburg Area Museum.

Nearly a year passed between that vote and the sudden action to remove the slave auction block while passionate BLM protesters continued to march through the city’s streets. The sign explains the delays by noting: the legal complications involved in removing a historical artifact from a designated Historic Preservation district; the lawsuit filed by two local property owners challenging the process the city followed to resolve those complications; and the COVID-19 pandemic.

The fact that BLM protesters routinely chanted, “Remove the Block!” as they marched by is not mentioned on the sign.

To be clear, every word on the temporary marker at the slave auction block site is factual. City Council voted to remove the block and was committed to acting on their decision. I am not writing this to suggest otherwise.  Instead, I believe the juxtaposition of the City’s explanatory text and protesters’ interactions with the block reinforce the fact that bodily practices can affect the meaning of commemorative landscapes more than carefully crafted representational texts.

In my earlier TourismRESET blogpost, I argued that absences in how the city’s history has been represented for tourists and residents only partially explains why and how Fredericksburg’s slave auction block became a symbol of white supremacy for African-American residents. To a greater degree, the block accrued its status as a symbol of racist oppression because of a history of disrespectful bodily practices caused, in part, by its location on a busy corner of the city’s “Old Town” heritage tourism district.

Despite the sincere wishes of many Fredericksburg residents, the slave action block was never a relic heritage tourists visited to participate in solemn practices commemorating the lived experiences of once enslaved women and men. While some individuals may have touched it while silently mouthing prayers for Black people sold away from their homes and families, public rituals, such as those regularly performed in the city’s national and confederate cemeteries, are absent from the public record.  Instead, oral history contains descriptions of people spitting on or allowing their pets to urinate on the block. Residents also described White tourists posing their children on the block for photographs. Mostly, however, the block was simply sidestepped by visitors and residents making their way to the restaurants, shops, and other heritage sites that draw people to the city’s historic district. These daily acts of neglect, themselves made possible through White privilege, constitute the clearest evidence that the block did not inspire respectful commemorative practices.

As downtown Fredericksburg transitioned from a regional central business district to a heritage tourism attraction during the second half of the 20th century, the slave auction block became a numbered dot on a tourism map that, along with brochures and tour scripts, mostly erased African-American experiences from local histories. In other words, for those in the tourism industry, the block became an element of a landscape designed, in part, to commodify carefully selected moments of the city’s history. 

The auction block’s role in tourism was evident during public discussions about its fate after the events in Charlottesville led to renewed calls for its removal in August 2017.  Professional tour guides often argued that the block should remain in public space so they could discuss slavery with tourists. And, the property owners who filed the lawsuit challenging the City’s process for relocating the block argued that removal would result in loss of business due to the decline of tourist visits.

During the public debates and discussions that ultimately led to the City Council’s vote to remove the slave auction block, however, local African-American voices ensured that the block’s meaning to local residents superseded its place in the tourism landscape.  Their recollections of both the history of disrespectful practices and the pain caused by its continued presence in public space helped more city residents understand why the block had become a symbol of White supremacy rather than being an artifact that reminded visitors of the evils of slavery.  

The actions of BLM protesters in early June indicate that they had no doubts about the slave action block’s meaning. By tagging it with spray paint, they placed it in the same category as statues to Confederates in other American cities – a category containing the still too prevalent memorial practices, street names, and monuments that sustain racism.

And by deliberately placing their feet where once-enslaved people were forced to place theirs, the protesters ensured the slave block’s final public act was one of resistance and change rather than subjection. 

What becomes of the corner where the block once stood?  That too will depend on bodily practices and emotional responses as much or more than on any interpretative text describing the space’s role in the massive domestic slave trade that separated people born in Virginia from their daughters and sons, mothers and fathers.  I’m very confident the citizens tasked with imagining how to transform this street corner into a commemorative space understand this.  In the meantime, there’s nothing wrong with offerings of flowers.