October 7, 2019 If only the walls could talk, as the saying goes, what stories they would tell.
Consider this investment summary for the Freedom House, a registered National Historic Landmark building, currently for sale on Duke Street in Alexandria, Va. The building is perfect for an office or residential property and priced at $2.1 million. But due to certain circumstances, it needs a new owner right away.
On one hand, the words used to tell this story could be the happy ones found in the ad, like “historic charm,” with “high ceilings, finished wood floors, original wooden railings, exposed brick walls, wood-burning fireplaces,” and proximity to “walkable amenities.”
But to tell the full story of the Freedom House, which is currently owned by the Northern Virginia Urban League, other words will be necessary.
Words like, “slave pen.”
“Historians say it was one of the largest and cruelest slave depots in the country, sending tens of thousands of enslaved Africans from Virginia and surrounding states into the Deep South before the Civil War,” explains the Washington Post in this must-read story.
Of course, both “stories” are true. But one matters far more.
If walls could truly talk, the Freedom House would no doubt tell the tale of the lone enslaved Black man who had been found by Union soldiers in 1861, shackled and abandoned. He was the last of the thousands of people who had been held in a basement “slave pen” by slave-trading firms which began operating on the premises in 1828—the same basement that now has the names, ages, and sale prices of some of the humans held there inscribed on its walls.
While this information is not found in the marketing materials for the property, it really should be. It's a feature more American than original brick or hitching posts.
The building's first owners were Issac Franklin and John Armfield, who were among the most successful slave-traders of the day. Now, the Northern Virginia Urban League operates a small museum in the lower part of the building and maintains offices in the upstairs rooms once occupied by Armfield, who ran his business over the torture facilities below.
But even with the 2017 opening of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture—and the country's burgeoning capacity for truth-telling—they've struggled to keep the lights on.
Now it's down to the wire.
Lyn Hoyt, a distant white relative of Isaac Franklin's, was horrified to learn that “the horse traders” of family lore were, in fact, enslavers. “It's difficult to hear,” Hoyt says in a different, but equally important, Washington Post story. “My family sold human beings. It's a horrible, horrible thought. It's like we descended from Hitler.”
Along with some distant cousins, Hoyt has become a vocal supporter of the Freedom House, using her unique connection to the property to help raise awareness of the effort, while being careful not to play the role of a white savior dashing in to do the work that African Americans have already taken on. “A sustainable solution is what we would hope for in order to establish the Freedom House permanently as a place that matters in the bigger national discussion around our country's enslavement history,” she says.
It's a reminder that everyone has a role to play in telling the truth.
“Our decision to buy that first group of first twenty to thirty Africans would influence almost everything that would follow after,” the New York Times domestic correspondent Nikole Hannah-Jones says, referring to the 400th anniversary of the first official arrival of enslaved Africans in 1619.
Hannah-Jones was the force behind The 1619 Project, a cross-platform journalistic effort from the New York Times Magazine to explore the ongoing legacy of slavery today. Speaking recently on CBS This Morning, she said the date is “as foundational to who we became as a country as our decision in 1776 to break off from the British.”
“Nobody wants to talk about their sins or the worst moments,” because this history is shameful, she says. “Slavery gives contradiction to our entire creation story of the United States. So we try to push it aside, we've tried to make it marginal,” marginalizing millions of African American people in the process.
Only embracing the whole truth can set us all free, she suggests.
“Well then maybe we start to move past slavery and become what was written in our ideals in the Constitution and the Declaration [of Independence.]"
And then maybe real estate developers wouldn’t get to decide which stories are more valuable than others.
Ellen.McGirt@fortune.com
@ellmcgirt
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