"Josh Wheeler stands in front of City Hall with a bag of chalk and checks the slate surface of the Community Chalkboard and Podium: Monument to the First Amendment.

It’s working. Only 48 hours after its last cleaning, the wall is near chock-full of chalked commentary. It is, Mr. Wheeler says with satisfaction, doing its job.

“It’s been accepted in the community,” he says, eyeing the cluttered commentary crammed onto the near-full wall. “There are a variety of topics on there, from local issues to national issues, from the ridiculous to the sublime.”

Mr. Wheeler keeps a close eye on the wall. In some ways, it’s his baby. His organization, the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression, proposed and pushed the project, seeking funding and approval. Since its dedication on April 20, the response has been so great that it’s being cleaned twice a week instead of once a week.

Interactive medium

“It gets filled up so quickly that you can’t find a place on it to write,” he says. “People are not erasing speech they disagree with, they’re responding to it. That’s a pleasant surprise.”

Mr. Wheeler proves his points, pointing first to a long string of tightly printed words near the top of the wall: The U.S. government spent 30 billion dollars to rent airplanes from Boeing even though their own study found it to be a waste of money. Rumsfeld can’t remember how that happened. He doesn’t want to quibble about it. Just think what $30 billion could do for our schools.

“The idea of having rough slate was that it would require people to write large, legible letters, but that person thought it so important to write a message that it was crammed into the smallest space available,” he says. “I also love the mix of the commentary. There are a lot of religious statements, most about love and tolerance. Look at for God so loved the world down there in the corner.”

When the wall was under discussion, the most common fear was that obscenities would be written big and bold. They are. There are also drawings by artists with no classical training depicting various carefully chosen portions of the human anatomy. Fortunately, you have to look hard to find them because commentary that is more important is scribbled and drawn all around them.

Selective editing

“You know that statement has been changed,” laughs Mr. Wheeler as he points to “I love analogies” with the “ogies” in a different color chalk. “That’s the beauty of this monument. People are having fun with it. They’re being creative and expressive.”

Fear that racial epithets would arise have also been confirmed, but to a lesser extent than the obscene. On this day, none can be found, although “racists should die” is scrawled on the nearby podium.

“The purpose of any monument is to inspire and energize people and in that way this monument has been a great success,” Mr. Wheeler says. “It’s like our center. We strive to be non-political and the monument itself is non-political. There are people on the left and the right who don’t agree on anything but they do agree on freedom of speech.”" (Bryan McKenzie, The Daily Progress, July 3, 2006)

Note: View an Index to Coverage of the First Amendment Monument on the Loper website