Tomorrow’s event is called “We the People: a Summer Celebration.” (Live-streaming here.)
Here is Antonio Olivo at The Washington Post:
This weekend, James Madison’s Montpelier estate will kick off a multiyear project to pay tribute to the nearly 300 enslaved people who lived and died there — the culmination of sometimes tense negotiations between the Virginia museum’s foundation and descendants of that enslaved community over how those stories would be shared.
The Saturday event, called “We the People: a Summer Celebration,” will feature panel discussions, cultural exhibits and other celebrations at the site of a once-unmarked burial ground for the men, women and children enslaved by Madison, the nation’s fourth president, who is known as “the father of the Constitution.”
The museum is also planning to construct a memorial to those people with nearly $5.8 million awarded by the Mellon Foundation this year — part of an ongoing reckoning over race in the country that includes President Biden’s naming of a national monument to honor Emmett Till and his mother and, in Virginia, the removal of Confederate monuments and street names.
“This is a story for America,” the Rev. Larry Walker Sr., president of the Montpelier Descendants Committee (MDC), said about the tribute at Montpelier, noting that the site is known as the home of the Constitution. “It’s an opportunity for us to say to America that there were a lot of people that contributed to make this country great.”
The discussions around the memorial began shortly after the burial ground for the plantation’s enslaved people was discovered in 2018, which grew more charged following George Floyd’s 2020 murder by a Minneapolis police officer.
Read the rest here.