By: Matthew A. Ward
CHESAPEAKE (REUTERS).- Exploring one of the country’s darkest chapters, the United States National Slavery Museum was supposed to open four years ago on 38 acres along the Rappahannock River in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Plans for the 100,000-square-foot museum were elaborate: a 450-seat theater, full-scale replica slave ship and hundreds of donated relics such as the leg irons forebears of many Americans wore during the long, cruel voyage from West Africa. But the museum filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on September 21, putting its prospects in doubt and leaving donors and supporters of the project conceived 10 years ago by Virginia’s first black governor to wonder what went wrong. Lawrence Wilder, the former governor, and other museum