The Shockoe Institute is located at the northern end of Main Street Station in Shockoe Bottom. (Photo courtesy Shockoe Institute)
The air always seems heavier in Shockoe Bottom.
As one might expect, there’s a scientific explanation: Air molecules condense under the weight of atmospheric pressure at lower altitudes, and the Bottom is essentially the city’s lowest-lying neighborhood, roughly 10 feet to 30 feet above sea level.
That geography is the reason Richmond was founded here in 1737. As the James River flows downstream, its shallow, sloping falls end near the 14th Street Bridge and the river officially becomes tidal, or deep enough for ships filled with tobacco, flour, wheat and Richmond’s most notorious cargo: enslaved Africans.
Physics aside, if you’ve ever visited the Shockoe Bottom African Burial Ground during the heat of summer or after a good rain, chances are you felt the weight of history.
Souls seem to linger here: the Indigenous people who used the area as a trading hub before European settlers arrived in the 1600s and, later, the hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans shipped in and out — by sea and by rail — to and from the auction houses dotting Shockoe Creek, which ran just beneath present-day Main Street Station.
Marland Buckner, president and CEO of the Shockoe Institute (Photo courtesy Shockoe Institute)
Between 850,000 and 1 million enslaved Africans were “forcibly moved from the upper South to the lower South” from 1790 to 1860, says Marland Buckner, president and CEO of the Shockoe Institute. The newly established interactive museum and educational center is located in the Main Street Station train shed.
By the early 1800s, Virginia’s labor-heavy tobacco industry was waning after years of over-farming, Buckner explains, so plantations shifted to wheat crops, which required fewer workers. Richmond, the second-largest slave-trading hub in America, was the primary transfer portal for selling enslaved laborers downriver as cotton farming took hold in the Deep South. From 1830 to 1860, the domestic slave trade accounted for roughly half of the city’s economy.
Now entombed underground as part of the city’s waste disposal system, Shockoe Creek at that time was a slow-moving river of sewage. The city gallows were moved here and placed next to Lumpkin’s Jail, the notorious slave pen that was renowned as the “devil’s half-acre” for its brutality and lack of sanitation.
There were between 15 and 25 auction houses and slave jails around the creek, Buckner says, but historians still don’t know for certain how many operated in the Bottom — and the trade was hardly limited to the dedicated merchants. It was ubiquitous, a “vertically integrated” business woven into the city’s fabric.
Gregg Kimball, senior historian in residence at Shockoe Institute, says enslaved laborers were also critical to the city’s industrial development during this period. There were even “shops that dressed enslaved people being prepared for sale.”
This wasn’t so much a devilish half-acre as it was a hellscape.
“So, you know exactly where you are — topographically, you’re 20 feet above Shockoe Creek,” Buckner explained while guiding this reporter through the institute’s first exhibit, “Expanding Freedom,” in mid-April.
“I’m sure you’re familiar with the argument that we’ve always had slavery, and slavery exists throughout the human condition,” he said. “We’ve come to realize the importance of using the term ‘American racial slavery,’ because it was in the United States where we concretize this notion of enslavement based on race.”
The Shockoe Institute’s inaugural exhibit, "Expanding Freedom," explores the granular details of "racial slavery," which had a global reach. (Photo by Scott Bass)
This particular point is crucial, Buckner says. In 1705, Virginia codified racial slavery, which was rooted in the “ideological origins” of the European settlers who had arrived a century earlier. They saw Indigenous people as primitive and inferior, just as they did the Africans who were bound and shipped into slavery.
“It was at that moment that the Colony of Virginia set the stage for racial enslavement for what would become the United States,” Buckner says in a recent interview. “Only Africans could ultimately be enslaved. And that’s when Blackness becomes hardened into this idea of what we called ‘race.’ Race, as we understand it today, did not exist in 1705.”
The idea that Black people were inferior became part of “our DNA,” Buckner adds. “Most people don’t know where it comes from, but we invented it here.”
Shockoe Institute attempts to set these parameters for visitors. “We wanted to frame the conversation first in the context of the evolution of this question of the ‘hierarchy of human value,’” Buckner says, “so that the visitor would be anchored in that idea first.”
Understanding the intentionality of American slavery, how it came to be codified in Virginia law and integral to America’s economy and existence as a nation — it all starts in the Bottom. It’s not an unfamiliar story, obviously. But do we fully grasp the history?
As a reporter who has covered the Bottom off and on for 30 years — intermittent crime waves, the post-floodwall development boom, Tropical Storm Gaston’s destruction in 2004 and multiple attempts to pave over the area’s history with a ballpark — I consider myself at least marginally educated on the topic.
Still, during my first visit to the Shockoe Institute, I found myself overwhelmed. Maybe it was the lower elevation, the atmospheric pressure or the ghosts of all those commodified souls. But I suspect it’s because the full breadth of our history hasn’t been told. At the institute, where visitors are immersed in the granular details of Richmond’s slave trade and its global reach, it becomes painfully clear this wasn’t just some unpleasant side effect of America’s rise on the global stage. Slavery propelled the United States into an economic power. This is why it was so pervasive.
And it’s why Juneteenth, which commemorates the end of slavery in the U.S. — or, specifically, when Union Gen. Gordon Granger issued a legal decree enforcing the Emancipation Proclamation in Texas on June 19, 1865 — is so important. Celebrations date to 1866 in Texas and spread across the South in the years that followed. But it didn’t become an official federal holiday until 2021.
Blame it on our collective amnesia when it comes to America’s brutal underpinnings. Buckner says this is the point behind the institute’s inaugural exhibit: to break down the “hierarchy of human values” that has defined America for more than 400 years and still lives and breathes in cities like Richmond. From slavery to Jim Crow to segregation to racial profiling to government-sponsored economic disinvestment, Richmond, and America, still has work to do.
“The way we connect the dots? The answer to that question is why we built this,” Buckner says of the Shockoe Institute. “It starts here.”
