September 30, 2011
UN Slavery Memorial Design Competition Launched
The United Nations Friday announced an international competition to design a memorial honoring the victims of slavery. It’s estimated that over 500 years, more than 18 million people were abducted from Africa and forced into slavery in the Americas, the Caribbean and Europe.
The sculpture will be located at U.N. headquarters in New York. Its official name is The Permanent Memorial at the United Nations in Honor of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade.
“The issue of slavery and the trans-Atlantic slave trade stands out still today as a crime against humanity – one of the first manifestations of man’s inhumanity to man,” said Ambassador Raymond Wolfe of Jamaica, chair of the memorial committee.
The memorial, he said, is not an attempt to dwell on the past.
“It is to bring the international community to acknowledge, to take note of what has been one of the worst chapters in human history is finally being acknowledged and honored here at the United Nations and what better place,” he said.