Update on Campus Memorial Project: June 2025

A message from Provost and Presidential Endowed Chair of Southern History Michele Gillespie and Vice President and Chief Diversity Officer, Professor of Counseling José Villalba 

Dear Members of the Wake Forest Community: 

In late April 2025, the Administration Committee of the Board of Trustees  reached concurrence on a conceptual design for a memorial to the enslaved individuals who were sold to help establish Wake Forest College’s first endowment, as well as those individuals who labored on the original campus. As we shared in December 2024, almost 175 Wake Foresters provided feedback during fall 2024 on several conceptual themes and potential locations for the memorial. All of this information factored into the conceptual design shared with the trustees. 

The proposed design, created by Baskervill, integrates the 2 conceptual themes most preferred by campus constituents: an amphitheater and a garden. In the current conceptual design that links those original renderings, an amphitheater is surrounded by elevated structural elements, buttressed by flora and foliage. The design incorporates key feedback Baskervill received from community forums, surveys, and conversations with students, staff, and faculty. Baskervill worked with the Campus Memorialization Steering Committee in January and February to finetune initial renderings, and presented this conceptual design to the Steering committee and university leadership in March. Final recommendations from these meetings factored into the conceptual design shared with Board members on the Administration Committee, and is the design shared below today.

In consultation with leaders of the Wake Forest Bicentennial Comprehensive Campus Space Plan, the next step will be to determine a possible campus location for the memorial. Furthermore, the Memorialization Steering Committee will continue to build on ideas for curricular and co-curricular components that not only ground the memorial, but also expand the narrative of Wake Forest’s antebellum history. Fall 2025 will bring additional opportunities to learn more about the conceptual design through listening sessions and sharing more detailed renderings, dimensions, and a proposed final location for the memorial to be considered by the Board of Trustees. You may find renderings of the conceptual design on this website, and please return to this site for updates in early September 2025.