Many of Virginia’s African American communities memorialize or maintain sites significant to the culture and history of Africans and their descendants in Virginia. However, for many Virginia residents and visitors these sites and their histories are hidden in plain view, obvious as physical places but absent from their understanding of Virginia’s past.  Our goals, therefore, include:

• To publicly recognize sites throughout the Commonwealth associated with slavery, resistance to slavery, and emancipation from slavery
• To foster respect for the lives of enslaved persons and to contribute to an honest and informed public understanding of the consequences of the enslavement of Africans and African Americans
• To assist in the public’s recognition of “slaves” as complete persons who recognized and asserted their own humanity by memorializing their dead, who should be credited for what they produced, and who, by their very humanity and personalities, naturally resisted attempts to turn Africans and African Americans into property
• To reveal the pervasive historical presence of African and African American lives and experiences
• To provide events of remembrance that contextualize Virginia’s commemoration of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, Lincoln’s relevance to Virginia and the Emancipation Proclamation
• To design a commemorative website based on the messages and goals identified by regional communities