Sacred & Profane

Sacred & Profane


Sites of Memory

October 27, 2021

The Confederate monuments around Charlottesville’s county courthouse have all been removed, and a new kind of public memory is emerging in Charlottesville’s Court Square. The streets around the courthouse were the site of hundreds of slave auctions over Charlottesville’s history, and the descendants of the people who were bought and sold in the square are at the center of a movement to bring their stories to the forefront — in essence, to create a new civil religion. Our colleague Jalane Schmidt and descendant Myra Anderson met in Court Square to discuss how the memory of the humans bought and sold in the square is changing both Court Square itself and how Charlottesville understands the past.