For Meejin Yoon, whose work on the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia has garnered extensive praise, the question is more nuanced. She sees the enslaved people commemorated in the UVA memorial as heroes too: brave casualties of an abhorrent system “who deserve to be honored and dignified.” The memorial includes the names of known enslaved people who helped build Thomas Jefferson’s campus, but several lines are left blank, because the story is unfinished. Yoon says too many memorials “try to close the topic or make it knowable to the public,” when history is never reall...