New Richmond institute to examine how slavery helped build modern America

RICHMOND — This city tried hard to purge its landscape of reminders of slavery. The old slave jail, the auction blocks, even the African burying grounds were paved over long ago and largely forgotten.

But an ambitious effort here aims to shed light on artifacts that linger in everyday life: the ways the slave economy and its major hub in Richmond contributed to the development of modern-day America, with all of its promise and problems.

The Shockoe Institute, funded partly with an $11 million grant from the Mellon Foundation, unveiled plans this week for a facility that will anchor Richmond’s broader effort to memorialize its history as one of the country’s biggest markets for the buying and selling of enslaved people.

The project is an attempt “to really put Richmond … at the center of the national conversation about monuments, memory, the public realm, landscape and the ways in which we use and/or misuse our history for various purposes,” Marland Buckner, president and CEO of the Shockoe Institute, said in an interview with The Washington Post.

It comes as institutions across the city take new steps to confront Richmond’s past as the capital of the Confederacy. Earlier this year, the Valentine Museum opened a new gallery examining how its namesake — sculptor Edward Valentine — helped create the myth of the “Lost Cause” through his depictions of noble Confederate generals and hapless Black stereotypes. On the city’s riverfront, the American Civil War Museum launched an exhibit called “The Impending Crisis” that addresses “the ways in which slavery caused the war.”

At Shockoe, work begins soon to convert a 10,000-square-foot section of the former train shed at Main Street Station in downtown Richmond into a building for the institute, which will have public exhibition space as well as a “lab” for studying public and personal history. Set to open by the end of next year, the space is being designed by the New York firm Local Projects, which also created the 9/11 memorial in New York and the Greenwood Rising civil rights museum in Tulsa.

The train shed site itself is deep with history. In what’s now the parking lot and along a nearby stretch of Interstate 95 stood “Devil’s Half Acre,” where enslaved people were bred, sold and held at the notorious Lumpkin’s Jail. Across Broad Street was the city’s first African burying ground, rediscovered under a parking lot in the 1990s.

Those features are set to be commemorated through the massive Shockoe Project, announced earlier this year, which includes archaeological sites and a national slavery museum. The full project could cost an estimated $265 million — most of which has yet to be raised — and take years to bring about; the Shockoe Institute is the first step.

While the project has a long way to go, it marks a huge advance for a city that has struggled for years to decide how to commemorate this past, much of which had been deliberately obscured until the last 30 years or so.

“This geography has been contested and litigated and been a political football far too long, and I have no truck with that,” Buckner told a gathering of local dignitaries, advocates and history buffs at a preview event Thursday night.

Richmond City Council member Cynthia Newbille, who has lived through many of those squabbles, said she was thrilled to finally see actual steps forward. “It’s been a long time,” Newbille said, adding that the pieces of the history have been like the disjointed squares of a quilt. “It has only been when we got to this point that we actually have the quilt, and because we have that quilt now, we can tell the whole story.”

The story is woven directly into the development of the nation, said Gregg Kimball, a historian working with the institute who has also written a book about antebellum Richmond called “American City, Southern Place.” By the 1840s and 1850s, Kimball said, Richmond had become the primary hub for the slave trade in the Upper South, exceeded in size only by New Orleans in the Deep South.

Tobacco farming had declined in Virginia, but the cotton economy farther south was labor-intensive and had an insatiable appetite for enslaved laborers. So human chattel became a big export for Virginia, Kimball said. Part of the reason the state eventually outlawed the international slave trade was that new supplies from overseas would dilute the value of Virginia’s own production of enslaved humans.

The slave trade and the cotton it produced built economic connections between the South, England and western Africa, not to mention rapidly industrializing cities in Northern states, Kimball said. “Capital was flowing between Richmond, London and New York. Those large-scale connections are pretty profound,” he said.

Kimball is working with Buckner and others at the Shockoe Institute to portray that history in a way that’s interesting and relatable to modern-day issues. Thursday night’s preview suggested some of the elements of telling the human tale.

Photos and stories of formerly enslaved Virginians recorded in the 1930s. Reconstruction-era newspaper ads from Black people trying to find their sold-off families. Legal paperwork related to an enslaved girl named “Lizzie” — born in Virginia, sold into Louisiana, changing hands five times before dying of a seizure at the age of 13. Her death sparked litigation when a buyer charged that she was “totally valueless as a slave.”

Through individual stories, Kimball said, the aim is “to get at these larger themes: What does freedom mean, and how did Americans develop as a slave society yet talking about these ideals that are embedded in the Constitution and the Declaration?”

Buckner, who spent years in D.C. as the government affairs director for Microsoft, said the message of the institute is not political. It’s intended to put today’s issues and events into a fact-based, historical context that helps people think about them in fresh ways.

He said he envisions inviting experts and thinkers to a yearly symposium — like Davos or the Aspen Institute — to focus on a question about history and race in America. “I’m not just talking about historians. I’m talking about economists and political demographers and public policy people and legal experts, so that we can begin to do … the hard work of understanding the choices that got us to where we are today.”

On Thursday, he offered three words to guide the institute as it tackles a subject of intense emotional impact: maturity, candor and generosity.

“We’ve got to be kind and we have to be decent when we have these conversations with one another,” Buckner said. “That’s the only way this shared experience stays shared.”

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