Note for the Virginia History forum

> The Richmond Times-Dispatch tells me that it
> intends to print my latest Fort Monroe op-ed

Indeed the Times-Dispatch did print it: 
http://www2.timesdispatch.com/news/oped/2011/aug/11/tdopin02-corneliussen-what-fate-for-this-national--ar-1230828

I hope that forum participants will post comments online at the RTD site, or 
here, or both. Below is a copy of the op-ed's first two paragraphs. If 
President Ayers is even partly right about American history's greatest 
moment, Virginia has on its hands a civic-history issue orders of magnitude 
bigger than has been recognized -- and our leaders are failing. Thanks.

Steven T. Corneliussen
Poquoson

FIRST TWO PARAGRAPHS:
Slavery, wrote a profiler of University of Richmond president Edward L. 
Ayers, began to end early in the Civil War, when three black men fled to 
Fort Monroe and claimed asylum among Union forces. The profiler quoted 
historian Ayers: "It's the greatest moment in American history."

Wait. Fort Monroe? Chesapeake Bay sand spit beside Hampton Roads? Then why 
are Virginia's leaders slating its post-Army future to include "swanky 
condos," as a Times-Dispatch editorial put it? Isn't that too much like 
placing a Walmart beside a battlefield, a subdivision opposite Monticello or 
casinos at Gettysburg? 

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