Welcome.

This exhibit is intended to share additional layers of University of Virginia history.

Here we encounter a history more complex than the celebration of Thomas Jefferson’s 19th century architectural vision, with its innovative “Academical Village” crowned by an iconic rotunda. We reveal a reality beyond the lovingly preserved pavilions designed for faculty comfort and the prestigious lawn and range rooms for student convenience. We uncover facts more challenging than the revisionist mid-20th century transformation of the walled yards, where enslaved people labored, into the beautiful pavilion gardens that we enjoy at leisure today.

These fresh layers tell the stories that have often not been told, stories deemed less important to remember, stories about people whose humanity we have stubbornly failed to value. These stories enrich our understanding of our University, our history, and ourselves.

My family moved upstairs into Pavilion X in 2020. A friend asked me what I imagined it would be like living in a house built by the forced labor of people enslaved as property. Was I worried about their ghosts in the house or in the gardens where their struggles had been hidden from view by serpentine brick walls?

Before answering, I paused to think about the people who carried the bricks and columns used to build this historic University. I paused to think about the generations of Black and brown human bodies whose involuntary toil built this country’s wealth and shaped its institutions.

Could they have imagined my family—ourselves descendants of Blacks who were enslaved, whites who owned slaves, Eastern European Jewish refugees, Chinese laborers, and other population groups—someday occupying this space? Could they have imagined me, a Black man who served in the administration of America’s first Black president, as the dean of an influential school of leadership and public policy? Could they have imagined how far America has come, and yet how far we have still to go to overcome our founding birth defects of slavery and white supremacy?

What do all of us owe our ancestors for their sacrifice and memory?

At a minimum, I believe we owe them our commitment to seek and tell the truth. We owe them our diligence in excavating and explaining the past in all its layers of blood and dirt, rock and sediment, cruelty and craftsmanship. We owe them our respect and humility in uncovering the lost narratives of hundreds of children, mothers, and fathers who lived here, loved one another, and dreamed of freedom.

If anything, let us welcome their ghosts into our midst to share their truths.

As you learn about Fanny Gillette Hern, her husband Davy, Henry (who self-emancipated in 1865), Old Sam and Young Sam (carpenters who built this pavilion), and others, I hope you will see history as an unfolding process of discovery and understanding in which each of us plays a part. Their stories—our shared stories—are still being written as we work to cure our defects and fulfill America’s founding promise of freedom and equality.

This exhibit is but a small token of my gratitude for the opportunity to give voice to the ghosts of yesterday, to provide context for many of the challenges of today, and to help shape our community’s better tomorrows.

With love and hope,

Ian H. Solomon

Dean of the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy