This article has been updated since it first appeared in print.
The vision of a slavery museum in Virginia was originally floated nearly 30 years ago, in 1993, by then-Gov. L. Douglas Wilder, a native son of Richmond and an iconic figure as America’s first elected Black governor.
The vision is still there.
But the slavery museum itself is not. It remains a moving target.
In the mid-19th century, from 1830 to 1860, Richmond was the largest source of enslaved Africans on the East Coast. Although Richmond, and even Jamestown, were in contention as the possible site of a slavery museum, Wilder chose Fredericksburg, about 60 miles north of the city.
The Fredericksburg effort eventually stalled and then collapsed amid unpaid real estate taxes and a bankruptcy filing.
A decade later, in 2013, former Richmond Mayor Dwight Jones tried to tie a slavery museum to the construction of a baseball stadium in Shockoe Bottom. But without community support, that vision also faltered and failed.
The city, under Mayor Levar Stoney, is trying once again.
Last summer, as Confederate statues were coming down on Monument Avenue, and protests arose there and in other parts of the city in the wake of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of Minneapolis police, the idea of a slavery museum once again gained momentum.
Mayor Stoney recommended that Richmond invest $25 million to $50 million in seed money over five years to memorialize the city’s “complete slave history” in a Heritage District set in Shockoe Bottom. That was in addition to the $11 million in state money pledged by former Gov. Bob McDonnell.
On Jan. 10, Richmond City Council approved $1.3 million to begin work on the project, with $1 million going to design services and a community engagement process and $300,000 to hire staff.
The Heritage District would include not only a slavery museum but also a 9-acre memorial park consecrating the many thousands of African Americans buried in various areas of Shockoe in makeshift cemeteries or burial grounds.
Overall, the Heritage Campus is projected to incorporate the Lumpkin’s Jail and African Burial Ground historic sites, and it will better connect the various portions of Shockoe from Main Street Station down the Virginia Capital Trail.
Shockoe is generally bounded by the James River to East Leigh Street and from 14th Street to 25th Street to the east of the Central Business District. It encompasses the oldest section of Richmond, laid out in 1737 by Major William Mayo, and portions of the Shaccoe Plantation.
Challenge and Opportunity
Today, one of the biggest questions about the proposed slavery museum is its potential cost.
The potential price tag comes into sharper focus in a recent feasibility study from SmithGroup, an architectural and engineering firm based in Detroit that serves as the city’s principal consultant and architect for the slavery museum.
The study, delivered to the city in early September, estimates that the final cost of a roughly 100,000-square-foot museum on the site of Lumpkin’s Jail could range from $184 million to $225 million.
That far exceeds the $25 million to $50 million investment Stoney has proposed, in addition to the state’s $11 million pledge.
The jail’s remains were unearthed during a 2008 archaeological excavation, but more-extensive archaeological investigation still remains, not only of Lumpkin’s Jail but also of other slave jail sites, auction houses and assorted businesses associated with the massive domestic slave trade that involved hundreds of thousands of men, women and children.
Lumpkin’s Jail was called “Devil’s Half Acre” by enslaved people awaiting auction in its putrid swamp-like environs — it’s in a flood plain — and by others aware of its infamous reputation.
In its executive summary, SmithGroup says the goal of its feasibility report “is not to discover why NOT to build a museum.”
“The challenges outlined and analyzed should not be the starting point. The goal, for memorialization and acknowledging the importance of both site and history should be to use human ingenuity to overcome the challenges, mitigate the constraints, and reveal the untold, hidden, and covered up story of the enslavement of Africans and African Americans.”
The challenges outlined in building the museum include everything from potential flooding, large sewer-line structures, and vibrations from nearby Interstate 95.
“The city is still working with the SmithGroup, consultants for the project, reviewing their site feasibility study,” says Kimberly Chen, a senior manager in Richmond’s economic development department, who has been a lead on the project. “We have been focusing in detail on several issues, including the flood way and flood plain, which are among the numerous constraints with the proposed site.”
Chen says her group hopes to bring recommendations to City Council about how to proceed in early 2022.
The Shockoe Small Area Plan, which Chen has overseen, was released by city planners in July 2021 and is expected to become a blueprint for making Shockoe Bottom a destination for both Richmond-area residents and tourists.
In late September 2021, City Council approved the transfer of nearly $2 million in tax delinquent property sales to fund the planning and design of the memorial campus and to keep the ball rolling.
Del. Delores McQuinn at the Lumpkin’s Jail site (Photo by Jay Paul)
Unearthing Buried History
Perhaps no one is more determined to see the slavery museum built than Richmond Del. Delores McQuinn, who is widely acknowledged as a driving force in the development of the Richmond Slave Trail, which started small about two decades ago and has now become an iconic part of Richmond’s often hidden history, especially when it comes to slavery.
The Richmond Slave Trail is where enslaved people and their handlers walked from the Manchester Docks to slave-trading sites in the city.
McQuinn says she is undaunted by the prospect of raising $200 million or more for the museum, if that is what it costs to tell the story of the slave trade in Richmond.
“Sometimes these things are a little costly on the front end, but when you get to the other end, you basically have these resources being poured back into the city,” she says.
The Shockoe area has a long history of flooding, and related water issues and the pre-construction work associated with the museum will ultimately benefit the entire city, according to McQuinn.
She says the success of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. (which was also designed by SmithGroup), foretells the appeal of having a slavery museum in the city.
“There’s a hunger to better understand the history and to better understand the story,” McQuinn says. “People want to see where things happened.”
A former Richmond City Councilwoman who was first elected to the General Assembly in 2009, McQuinn says she is pleased with the preliminary renderings SmithGroup has published of the proposed slavery museum.
In the October 2020 issue of Architecture magazine, Dayton Schroeter, a principal with SmithGroup, described what was then the design concept of the museum as erupting from the ground “based on this idea of unearthing buried history, buried truths.
“The facade uses the iconography of stripes — which recall the American flag and ‘the uniforms of Black men on chain gangs during Reconstruction, physical jails, and even the rows of cotton of Antebellum slavery, in which African labor was exploited,” Schroeter is quoted as saying in the article.
It’s not clear whether or not the design as proposed by Schroeter will be the final design.
In another iteration of the proposed museum, it appears to be an ascending garden.
In describing the interior of the museum, SmithGroup says, “Spaces and exhibits pivot around a central core that descends to the actual archaeological remains of the sacred site [Lumpkin’s Jail] and then ascends upward with exterior views that symbolize resilience and rising amid unthinkable constraints.”
1 of 2
Proposed rendering of a Richmond slavery museum created by the SmithGroup, which serves as the city’s primary architect and consultant on the project. The firm designed the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. (Image courtesy Smith Group)
2 of 2
Image courtesy Smith Group
‘An Epochal Realignment’
A slavery museum has long been at the forefront of efforts to pull the curtain back on Richmond’s slave-trading past, as has the site of Lumpkin’s Jail. But honoring the burial grounds for enslaved and freed Blacks in the city’s earliest days has gained momentum as an equal partner in telling the city’s story of slavery.
Shockoe Bottom was a scene of grisly horrors and a vile display of human greed on the part of white slaveholders, and it equally was a place where tender prayers and remembrances were offered to enslaved and free men and women in their final resting places.
Virginia Commonwealth University history professor Ryan K. Smith, who recently published a book on the topic, “Death and Rebirth in a Southern City: Richmond’s Historic Cemeteries,” says the former burial grounds for the enslaved and others serve “as a spiritual portal and a key feature marking the city’s bedrock of slavery.”
Smith suggests both in his book and in a recent interview that the long-delayed recognition and sanctification of early Black cemeteries and burial grounds, coupled with the removal of Confederate statutes, mark “an epochal realignment” in Richmond’s history.
“The stakes are high,” he writes, “involving the recognition of Black and indigenous personhood, a redefinition of Confederate memory, and the possibility of a rebirthed community in the symbolic center of the South.”
While a slavery museum may eventually be built on the third try, Smith says he’s not sure that any building will have “the same kind of power as going down to visit the old slave-trading district and confront those things where they happened or where bodies are buried.”
McQuinn, meanwhile, says that a slavery museum is essential to telling the story of Richmond and understanding its history.
A foundation has been formed to raise money for the museum, and McQuinn believes its presence will will lift every part of Shockoe.
The delegate adds that she has been in ongoing discussions with U.S. Senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, both former Democratic governors, and says, “I am hopeful that where they are, they will help us.”
“The first of the year, we are moving in a very aggressive manner,” McQuinn adds. “I’m happy to have former Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell working for us. So we’ve got people on both sides of the political arena.”
