RALEIGH - Gov. Mike Easley has thrown his support behind a proposed monument on the State Capitol grounds honoring the African-American experience in North Carolina.

The governor will ask the General Assembly for $1 million for the N.C. Freedom Monument Project as part of his proposed budget released this week.

State legislators approved $100,000 in planning money for the project last year. The $1 million in the proposed budget will pay for more planning, monument design and preparation of the site, Easley spokesman Seth Effron said.

On Thursday, project officials submitted a list of quotations that would appear on the monument to the N.C. State Historical Commission for approval. The commission's actions will be announced soon, said David Warren, a project board member and professor emeritus at Duke University.

The quotations include the words of prominent blacks who have made contributions to the state and at least one from a slave, Warren said.

The historical commission endorsed the basic design for the monument in 2006.

"We are pleased at how receptive they were and have been in the past," said Reginald Hildebrand, a UNC-Chapel Hill professor of African and Afro-American studies and co-chair of the project board.

In 2006, the statewide group selected a Chapel Hill artist team to design the monument on a half-acre parcel of land behind the N.C. Office of Archives and History near the corner of Wilmington and Lane streets.

"It's a prominent site," Effron said, noting that the governor's recommendation for the site echoed those of its supporters: a place where discussions can be enriched by symbolic representations of the struggle for freedom among all people.

The winning design featured a series of vignettes covering major periods in black history, including slavery, segregation and the civil rights movement, and their impact on North Carolina. Jim Crow segregation is depicted by a serpentine wall beside a separate wall, with a large crack representing the 1898 Wilmington race riots. Slavery will be addressed with a water wall -- "the weeping wall" -- and an auction block inscribed with well-worn footprints.

Hildebrand said the goal is to create a monument to freedom that will resonate with all North Carolinians by focusing on people who were denied freedom.

The monument project was started in 2002 by the Paul Green Foundation of Chapel Hill. Organizers say that except for an anonymous, wounded black soldier in the N.C. Vietnam Veterans Memorial, blacks are not represented on the State Capitol grounds.

Project organizers held their first meeting in 2002, followed by a series of town meetings across the state to gather input from hundreds people about the scope and appearance of the monument, said Marsha Warren, a freedom monument project board member.

In 2004, the project spun off from the Paul Green Foundation and became a separate nonprofit group.

"It had taken on a life of its own," Warren said.

Effron said the monument is expected to cost about $4.5 million. Effron said $2 million should come via gifts and matching grants. Marsha Warren hopes the state will give $2 million more to the project, with the remaining $1.5 million contributed by the hundreds of thousands of school-age children who visit the State Capitol each year.

Warren said similar contributions from children enabled the state to create a museum at the USS North Carolina Battleship Memorial.

"This is all about the children," she said. "When they come, they will know that their nickels and dimes helped to build the space."

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