The Downtown Mall now boasts "The Community Chalkboard and Podium: A Monument to the First Amendment," a monument dedicated by the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression in a ceremony held yesterday morning.
The 42-foot-long monument, designed by architects Peter O'Shea and Robert Winstead, bears inscriptions of the First Amendment and the words of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and serves as a literal chalkboard upon which citizens can express their thoughts.
Among the numerous speakers at the dedication were Bruce W. Sanford, chairman of the Board of Trustees for the Center, Charlottesville Mayor David Brown, former Virginia Poet Laureate George Garrett, novelist and Charlottesville citizen John Grisham, writer and NPR commentator Dahlia Lithwick and Dave Matthews Band member Boyd Tinsley.
According to Sanford, the monument will serve as a user-friendly vehicle for self-expression.
"In this age, when communication is increasingly digital and messages and images are more and more virtual, there is something very comforting about having an old-fashioned, physical board [upon] which people can express and share their views," he said.
Grisham discussed the special freedoms the First Amendment lends American writers.
"Because of the purity and simplicity of the First Amendment and because it has been fiercely protected by the courts for over 200 years, I am able to write anything I want to write," he said. "I am able to criticize and ridicule, and even satirize, the FBI, the CIA, the Pentagon and the president and because of the First Amendment, I am able to create characters and stories and plots without giving a thought as to how far I can go."
Lithwick, the keynote speaker, also discussed the importance of free speech and emphasized the responsibility of "free listening," which she described as "the most under-recognized right that we have."
According to Lithwick, freedom of speech depends on the ability and desire of citizens to thoughtfully listen to one another.
"We have an unprecedented right to write, to speak, to protest but, with that right, comes the responsibility to listen, to hear what others are saying, to converse, to have discourse and dialogue and debate," Lithwick said. "Without listening, there is no free speech."
Sanford said he believed the monument would foster such debate.
"Any other person who disagrees with what's been said has a ready remedy -- making a counter-statement on the chalkboard or erasing what's there," he said.
The ceremony culminated with a musical performance by Charlottesville High School student Brandon Dudley and an invitation to speakers and audience members to write messages on the monument, which will undergo its first weekly erasing next Thursday.
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