This strikes me as a truly inspired idea.  Thanks so much for bringing  
it to our attention, Steve (and for all your dedicated work to save,  
preserve, and celebrate Fort Monroe).

How can those of us who are residents of Virginia advocate this  
proposal?

--Jurretta Heckscher


On Feb 28, 2009, at 1:51 PM, S. Corneliussen wrote:

> In this thread two days ago, Brent Tarter offered an article from  
> the Richmond Times-Dispatch that speculated that if the envisioned  
> slavery museum is being abandoned in Fredericksburg, maybe it should  
> be built in Richmond instead. Another candidate location is Fort  
> Monroe, as is argued in the July 7, 2008, op-ed that appears below.
>
> At Citizens for a Fort Monroe National Park (CFMNP.org), we advocate  
> a revenue-generating, self-sustaining, innovatively structured  
> national park something like San Francisco's Presidio. It seems to  
> us that Robert F. Engs, a historian at Penn, is right that Fort  
> Monroe is not just _a_ place where slavery began to die, but is  
> _the_ place where it began to die. But Fort Monroe was also part of  
> the beginning of American slavery, nearly a quarter of a millennium  
> before the self-emancipators James Townsend, Frank Baker and  
> Sheppard Mallory took the risk of escaping enslavement and sought  
> sanctuary there following Fort Sumter. So last July 7 in the Norfolk  
> Virginian-Pilot, CFMNP's Scott Butler published this op-ed arguing  
> for a Fort Monroe location for the slavery museum.
>
> (Note: Anyone within the WHRO PBS Channel 15 broadcast area might  
> want to plan to watch the Fort Monroe discussion that will take  
> place at 8:30 next Friday, March 6. Cathy Lewis, the host -- and  
> also the host of a noontime talk show on the NPR channel 89.5 FM --  
> has begun her own speculating about what Scott proposed.)
>

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