On a quiet stretch of green just off Main Street, where town and campus meet, two monumental hands rise from the earth – open, cupped, and facing one another. They do not grasp or point. Instead, they hold space. Nearby, just beyond them, sit one modest brick building from the 1830s that is small, intimate, and heavy with presence. Together, the sculpture With These Hands and the historic Oak Row building form one of the most significant cultural interventions in Davidson College’s history – a living memorial to the enslaved and exploited labor that built and sustained the institution. This is not a monument designed to be passed at a distance. It is meant to be entered, touched, and felt.

The project’s roots stretch back to 2017, when Davidson College under then‑president Carol Quillen, a historian by training, launched a Commission on Race and Slavery. The commission was charged with conducting a deep examination of the college’s historical ties to enslavement, racial exploitation, and exclusion. Composed of alumni, faculty, community members, and students, the group spent several years researching archival records, producing a detailed report released in 2020.

Among its key recommendations was a call for visible public acknowledgment that would move institutional reckoning beyond reports and websites into shared physical space. The charge was not simply to mark history, but to make it unavoidable.

To carry that recommendation forward, the Board of Trustees formed a Special Committee on Commemoration, chaired by alumnus Virgil Fludd (Class of 1980). Importantly, the committee’s composition signaled that this memorial would not follow a purely architectural or traditional path. Alongside trustees sat faculty experts who were consulting members, including Africana Studies scholar Dr. Hilary Green and longtime sculpture professor Court Savage, as well as Lia Newman Director and Curator of the college’s Van Every/Smith art galleries.

From the outset, the committee understood that art, not just architecture, could hold emotional, ethical, and historical complexity in ways other forms could not. Rather than beginning with a predetermined form, the committee began with experience. Members were asked to reflect on memorials they had visited such as Holocaust or war memorials, and to identify what made those spaces transformative, particularly when the history commemorated was not their own. A key question emerged repeatedly: How does a memorial change you as you leave it?

From these conversations grew a set of guiding values including emotional resonance, openness, physical engagement, and an invitation to reflection rather than instruction. Those values shaped an unusually open call for proposals. The request did not specify artists, architects, or designers, but invited anyone who felt capable of responding meaningfully to the history to apply. From roughly sixty‑five submissions, the committee selected five finalist teams, each of whom was paid to develop a full proposal. Ultimately, the chosen design emerged from a collaboration between artist Hank Willis Thomas, known for his work addressing race, labor, and collective memory, and architecture firm Perkins&Will.

Site as Meaning

Selecting a site proved as consequential as selecting an artist. After walking the campus together on what was described as a long, sweltering July day, the committee narrowed its options. One possibility lay deep within campus near Sparrow’s Nest, a small historic structure believed to have housed enslaved people. While historically significant, the location felt hidden, reinforcing the very marginalization the memorial sought to confront.

The chosen site, by contrast, sat at the edge of campus, directly visible from Main Street. Flanked by the two remaining original dormitories from the 1830s, it offered historic adjacency in the most literal sense. These buildings were constructed from bricks known through archival purchase records to have been made by enslaved laborers from a nearby plantation. Even today, close inspection reveals fingerprints pressed into the clay, physical traces of unnamed individuals whose work endures long after their identities were erased.

The space itself carried an almost uncanny stillness. Despite its size, it had rarely been used for recreation or gathering. Committee members described it as feeling “sacred,” a place that seemed to hold memory even before anything was built there.

Visibility mattered, too. Davidson’s campus has long carried an unspoken perception, especially among Black community members, that it was not a place they were welcome. Positioning the memorial where town and college intersect was a deliberate act of invitationthat this history belongs not only to the institution, but to the broader community whose ancestors labored there.

At the center of the site stands With These Hands – two monumental bronze hands, palms up, facing one another. The gesture is both literal and symbolic. It speaks to the physical labor that built the campus, brick by brick, hand by hand, but also to acts of care and nurture that extended far beyond construction. As project leaders note, enslaved and later segregated Black workers cooked meals, cleaned dormitories, tended grounds, and supported students and faculty for generations. Their contributions persisted through emancipation, Jim Crow, and well into the twentieth century, often without acknowledgment or credit.

Thomas’s hands do not depict suffering explicitly. Instead, they offer presence. Visitors are encouraged, almost compelled, to step inside the circle they create. The surrounding landscape design reinforces this invitation with a ring of loose gravel defining the inner space, while irregular, “frayed” paver paths radiate outward. Benches curve and ripple away from the center, suggesting the spread of memory, history, and responsibility.

The design accommodates both intimacy and scale. One person can sit quietly, tracing the surface of the bronze. Hundreds can gather for vigils, ceremonies, or communal reflection. The space is meant to be used to allow dialogue, reflection, and, potentially, healing. Although perhaps not intentional, the hands face outward toward the nearby church so that when its sanctuary doors open, the sculpture reads almost as an embrace of an unspoken acknowledgment of shared moral and communal responsibility.

Oak Row: Completing the Story

While With These Hands provides an emotional entry point, it does not attempt to tell the entire story. That work unfolds just steps away, inside the Oak Row building. Once cramped dormitories housing sixteen students each, with no indoor plumbing, Oak Row now serves as an interpretive and research space. Inside, visitors encounter textured walls etched with marks, scratches, and fingerprints, evoking the physical presence of those who built the structures. Touchscreens present names, timelines, and emerging research on enslaved individuals and their descendants.

This component of the project was developed in close collaboration with archivists, historians, and Dr. Hilary Green. What began with a small list of identified family names has grown to well over a hundred and continues to expand. Crucially, the work is ongoing. The memorial was never intended as a “one‑and‑done” gesture, but as a catalyst for continued research, engagement, and acknowledgment.

That commitment is embodied institutionally at Davidson College through the creation of a new leadership role focused on descendant community outreach. The position aims to locate and support descendants, assist with genealogical research, and ensure that descendant voices help shape how the history is told going forward, including through paid participation and programming.

Reception and Resonance

Since its dedication, the response to With These Hands and Oak Row has been overwhelmingly positive. Visitors come in all weather. Many instinctively reach out to touch the sculpture or the brick walls, drawn to the tactile connection. For some, the experience is deeply emotional. For others, it reframes an institution they thought they knew. Skepticism about whether a sculpture could “do anything” often gives way to quiet reflection once people enter the space themselves. Importantly, the memorial is already functioning as a public commons, a place for remembrance, dialogue, and gathering that extends beyond campus boundaries. Ultimately, the memorial does not seek consensus. Instead, it invites visitors to pause, to enter, and to remember that institutions are shaped not only by ideals but by people – many of whom worked without recognition, their names still being recovered, their fingerprints literally pressed into brick.

The hands remain open. What is placed in them and what is carried forward remains a collective choice.♦