More than 40 members of the community gathered at the Plant Zero event space in Manchester on Saturday for a workshop-style presentation on a Visitor Experience Plan — the penultimate planning phase of the Lumpkin’s Slave Jail/Devil’s Half Acre memorial project site in Shockoe Bottom.
The 2 1/2-hour-long community engagement meeting was the third installment in an ongoing collaboration between engaged residents, the city of Richmond and a slew of hired consultants to plan the trajectory and scope of the project.
Lead project consultants SmithGroup JJR facilitated the Saturday meeting, which included performances by Janine Bell & Elegba Folklore Society and Chicago-based spoken word poet Harold Green. Attendees sat at large circular tables and were asked to participate in three group exercises to help shape the trajectory and scope of the Visitor Experience Plan and project as a whole.
“I think our biggest wish here is to make sure we have full community involvement, and in particular we want the African-American community to feel empowered to be a part of this development and help us determine what the best approach is going to be,” says Hal Davis, the cultural leader at SmithGroup.
Davis’ portfolio includes being a principal for the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian and National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., the NATO headquarters in Belgium and a new embassy master plan in Brazil.
“It’s important in the end we do everything we can to tell this story as truthfully as possible, because it will eventually rewrite the history books that all of us have seen in school,” Davis says. “Particularly as we look at what’s been happening in the United States the last year or two — we’d like to see that pendulum swing back, and we’d like to see the community as a whole be involved.”
The Lumpkin’s jail site in Shockoe Bottom was the home to some of the South’s most savage treatment of slaves, who would be sold at one of the many auction houses in the Bottom, or who were captured under the Fugitive Slave Act. Robert Lumpkin opened the jail in 1844 and it remained in operation until the Union occupation of Richmond in 1865.
Shortly after the Civil War, the “Devil’s Half Acre” was reclaimed as “God’s Half Acre” when Lumpkin’s wife, Mary, once also a slave, made the property available to house a school that became Richmond Theological Seminary — the original campus of Virginia Union University, a historically black college now located behind the Carver neighborhood — on the same plot of land that year.
The historic site was buried during the construction of Interstate 95 through Richmond, and didn’t reemerge until 2008 when archaeologists discovered the original foundations, walkways and more than 6,000 artifacts beneath 16 feet of fill.
“Nobody on our team has any preconceived notions about whether this will be a memorial, or a museum or a park,” says Cybelle Jones, the creative director for Gallagher and Associates, a national consultant group specializing in museum design and exhibitions hired to work on the project.
Jones says Gallagher and Associates aims to make the memorial project visitor-focused and story-driven, because “this is a very particular place with a very particular story and we have to bring those stories to life.”
“We have to be diverse with our narrative because we have a lot of people who don't know this story; who don't believe this story,” Jones says. “We have to reflect and synthesize what we've heard from the community, what we've heard from the historians, what we've heard from personal stories.”
The SmithGroup team initially met with city officials and the Slave Trail Commission in November 2016, and is now working with the community to define and prepare the overall goals of the Lumpkin’s/Devil's Half Acre project, which includes the Visitor Experience Plan introduced on Saturday.
Jame Anderson, an architect at SmithGroup says she was hoping attendance at Saturday’s meeting would be more akin to the introductory meeting, “a listening session” that the consultants hosted in March, when more than 200 people showed up to share their thoughts on the project.
The second meeting, in July, focused on the Statement of Purpose, and the third — Saturday’s event — addressed the visitor experience.
“We’ll have a fourth one, which focuses on the Concept Design, or the real architecture of what is actually being built, and that will happen in late January/early February,” Anderson says. “And by mid-spring we’ll have a product, and a celebration to thank the community for their input.”
After that, Davis says the project will have a price assigned to it, based on an assessment conducted by the team’s cost consultants — but until a rendering of the project is better defined, he says there isn’t a good way to gauge a cost estimate. Once that’s established, he says, the city will be in a position to either raise more funds, or continue with the budget already established through prior fundraising.
“So the entire purpose of going through this process throughout the last year is to determine what is the best possible manifestation on this site to tell the story, specifically of the site, because of the authenticity of it and the archaeology that’s there,” Davis says. “So it’s a really important story, it’s a story that’s important for the community, this city, the region, this country and — particularly as we’re looking at the world today — the world at large.”
During the workshop, organizers asked the crowd to participate in an “Emotion Sequence” exercise, where tables paired different prospective project audiences with words they wanted those audiences to experience while visiting the site. The “Stories That Must Be Told” exercise focused on identifying which themes the groups thought should be most central to the project, and included topics such as “Perceptions of Slavery,” “Business & Politics of Slavery” and “Freedom & Equality.”
A slide presented different price stratifications for slaves‚ ranging from $14,900 to $46,000 in today’s currency. Another slide cited James McPherson’s "Battle Cry of Freedom," stating that in 1860, the nearly 4 million American slaves were worth roughly $3.5 billion (adjusted for inflation), making them the largest single financial asset in the entire U.S. economy — more than all manufacturing and railroads combined.
“This is what slavery did; it built Richmond, it built America,” Jones says. “It was an economically-driven cultural phenomenon — it had a reason; it was making money, it was producing tobacco. We need to make sure that part of the story is not lost.”
For attendee Cheryl Yancey, who was asked to sing at the gathering with the widely renowned, Richmond-based gospel group the Legendary Ingramettes, the most important theme was of “Freedom & Equality.”
“I think this is very important because a lot of times we lose out not really knowing what our heritage is and i think that’s very important in life,” Yancey says. “I picked freedom and equality because we want everybody to be created equal — but is that happening? No, it’s not. And that’s a very important piece.”
Jones, the creative director at Gallagher and Associates, also described the underlying, systemic repercussions of the slave trade still evident today during her presentation to the audience. As Jones spoke, PowerPoint slides depicting images of Colin Kaepernick kneeling and the recent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville flashed behind her.
“We were meeting at [Mayor Levar Stoney]'s office yesterday, and were talking about the issues we're still facing today,” Jones says. “We're hoping this experience will lead to action, to taking action.”
The last group exercise focused on “Visitor Takeaways,” and participants were asked to mark the impression of most importance they felt visitors should leave with. Jones says while there are still “dissenters and naysayers,” and admits the project will probably make some people uncomfortable, the consultants hope it will also help facilitate healing.
“The rate of African-American male incarceration — look at the numbers — those are facts,” Jones says. “That's an important part of the story — we've heard it from some of our young people who come to the meetings and talk about their brothers and sisters and what's unfolding before their eyes — and that narrative needs to be included in the visitor experience, too.”
For other members of the community, the Devil’s Half Acre project is what they hope is only considered the beginning. Phil Wilayto, of the Richmond-based group Virginia Defenders for Freedom Justice and Equality, encouraged the community in an email to attend the event and show support for an expansion of the Lumpkin’s project.
The Virginia Defenders have advocated for a 9-acre memorial site in Shockoe Bottom, although other projects — such as potential high speed rail transit service operating out of Main Street station — could threaten such a proposal.
Wilayto wrote in the email that city officials have acknowledged the call for a wider scope and have said that “while the SmithGroup JJR was limited by their contract to focus on the Devil's Half Acre site, the city of Richmond was working on other ways to expand the footprint of the area.”
“Richmonders have LONG expressed their support for the Memorial Park, and yet not one inch of progress has been made to expand the footprint of the current project,” Wilayto wrote, “nor to secure these other historic sites from inappropriate development — even though the city already owns the majority of the land needed to establish the park.”
As for the next phase of the Devil's Half Acre project, the consultants at SmithGroup stressed the value of community feedback such as Wilayto’s, and say they have generated a lot of valuable responses through the project website.
Harold Green, a lauded spoken word poet and speaker from Chicago, read an account of Anthony Burns, a slave who was imprisoned at Lumpkin’s Jail, to the group — and emphasized the importance of preserving such narratives.
“These are true stories. This is a real person, not too far removed, right there on that land,” Green says. “No matter what side of the fence you stand on, I think truth is the most important. [Burns’ account is] a cathartic story. If you don't feel anything after hearing that story, then I'm not much sure there's much else we can do.”