The memorial is located on the university's main campus, near the
University of Virginia Corner, east of Brooks Hall and the
Rotunda. It consists of a wall of local "Virginia Mist" granite, in the shape of a broken ring, to symbolize broken shackles. The ring is about in diameter, echoing the dimensions of Jefferson’s iconic
Rotunda. Inside it is a second concentric ring with a timeline of slavery at the university. If more names are discovered they will be added. The exterior of the outer wall also includes an engraved subtle set of eyes, the work of
Eto Otitigbe. They are derived from an image of
Isabella Gibbons, an enslaved woman who was owned by professors at the university before emancipation and who went on to become an educator of freed African Americans. The following words of Gibbons are engraved on the memorial: {{blockquote|Can we forget the crack of the whip, the cowhide, whipping-post, the hand-cuffs, auction-block, the spaniels [manacles], the iron collar, the negro-trader tearing the young child from its mother’s breast as a whelp from the lioness? Have we forgotten that by those horrible cruelties, hundreds of our race have been killed? No, we have not, nor ever will.{{cite web "The Memorial is oriented tangent to two paths. The first path leads from the Memorial in the direction of the
North Star, which
for the enslaved led to freedom. The second path aligns with the sunset on March 3rd, which commemorates the day that Union troops emancipated the local enslaved community at the close of the Civil War. The communities of Charlottesville and the University will observe this important event through the newly instituted
Liberation and Freedom Day March through the city. Also sharing the same north/west orientation is the Memorial’s grove of
gingko trees that harkens back to the area’s previous use as a productive landscape of fruits and vegetables tended to by enslaved laborers." ==History of the memorial==