Well, I'm on my way to Los Angeles this evening for a conference that Ariela Gross has put together on law and memory at the University of Southern California. I'm going to be on a panel about slavery and memory -- and will be talking about Allan Johnson, an early twentieth-century history professor at Yale, the lawsuit around Vanderbilt's Confederate Memorial Hall, and Thomas Cobb's interpretation of history in An Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery.
Because of the conference, I thought that I'd post a picture of a monument to a "faithful slave" -- Harry, who passed away in a fire at Howard College in Marion, Alabama, in October 1854. (Marion, you may recall, was a very important site of civil rights activity in the 1960s; Mary Dudziak's written about one piece of this story.) Harry roused students when a fire started in their dormitory and then jumped from an upper story of the dormitory and thus perished. The monument to Harry is in the Marion City Cemetery. The side of it pictured here reads, "HARRY, Servant of H. Talbird, D. D., President of Howard College, who lost his life from injuries received while rousing the students, at the burning of the College Building, on the night of October 15th, 1854, aged 23 years."
I'm a little confused about the monument's base; I don't know if that's a modern addition -- it looks like it might be. Also, the monument is set at an oblique angle to the rest of the monuments in the cemetery, which confuses me a little.
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