After a year of political unrest and urban strife, the solemn “Memorial to Enslaved Laborers” in Charlottesville also takes on new significance. Built to commemorate the slave labor force that built the University of Virginia, it takes the form of a circular outdoor temple, open to the sky. Like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial that inspired it, it presents a wall inscribed with names, but they are fragmentary and incomplete. And while the Vietnam memorial is in effect a tombstone, speaking primarily of loss, the Charlottesville memorial aspires to something else, to grant retroactively to its Bl...