“Stumbling stones” honoring the lives of people enslaved in pre-Civil War Arlington will soon be coming to more local neighborhoods.
An additional 15 of the brass memorial markers are slated to be placed in seven neighborhoods in coming months, part of a joint initiative of the Arlington Historical Society, Black Heritage Museum of Arlington and the county government.
The new markers will be placed in the Yorktown, Arlington Ridge, Green Valley, Westover, Lyon Village and Boulevard Manor neighborhoods, delegates to the Arlington County Civic Federation recently were informed.
Those 15 will join three markers placed in front of the Ball-Sellers House in Glencarlyn in 2023, honoring individuals who were held in slavery on what is Arlington’s oldest home still in existence.
Adding the memorial markers is one way of doing “the hard work of building a more truthful and unified future,” said Jessica Kaplan, co-chair of the Arlington Historical Society’s Memorializing the Enslaved initiative.
Kaplan was joined at the Feb. 11 Civic Federation meeting by Tim Aiken, another leader of the initiative.
Last September, County Board members approved spending $15,000 for up to 30 additional memorial markers, which have been designed by students in the Arlington Tech program at the Arlington Community Center.
The historical organizations will determine what individuals to honor; the county government will install the plaques into sidewalks and provide maintenance.
A ceremony for the first three new stones is slated for Saturday, March 15, at 3 p.m. at the intersection of Little Falls Road and N. Harrison Street. They will honor Margaret, George and Charlotte Hyson, who were enslaved by William and Catherine Minor. The community is invited to the event.
The Memorializing the Enslaved in Arlington initiative has identified about 4,000 individuals kept in bondage in what is now Arlington between 1669 and 1865, Kaplan said. Future efforts will include tracing the post-war lives of those emancipated.
“This is just an incredible project,” said former Civic Federation president Allan Gajadhar.
He asked whether plans were in the works for a countywide memorial to those enslaved. The answer, for the moment, is no, Aiken said.
Instead, Aiken said, the goal of having more stumbling stones throughout the county is to provide “the effect you experience when you realize [slavery was] everywhere,” he said.
There will be efforts to host community events, write mini-biographies of some of the individuals memorialized, and create a speakers’ bureau, Aiken said.
One of those participating at the Civic Federation event voiced concern the initiative was focused on only one part of a broader story.
Bernie Berne said there needed to be “balanced representation” that included the fact that enslaving of those transported to colonial America and later the U.S. happened in Africa, often by other Africans.
“Nobody’s telling this story,” Berne said. “Are you going to tell the whole story or just your perspective? It’s your job to tell the entire story.”
Kaplan said robust information could be found on the Memorializing the Enslaved website, as it was too complicated to work into the stumbling stones themselves.
Slavery represents “a long, big, complicated story,” she said.
The concept for stumbling stones originated in Europe, where “stolperstein,” as they are known in German, commemorate Jews and other victims of the Nazi regime during World War II.
