Public historian Ana Edwards at Richmond’s African Burial Ground in Shockoe Bottom (Photo by Ash Daniel)
The 9-acre Shockoe Bottom Memorial Park is happening. Funds have been dedicated, and plans, negotiations, procedures and next steps are all underway. City Council recently allocated $1 million to the planned Heritage Campus, growing the pool of money for the establishment of the Shockoe Bottom Memorial Park to $2.7 million. An economic impact study by VCU’s Center for Urban and Regional Analysis indicates that the memorial park is likely to cost $8.7 million.
City Council has also approved $300,000 to seed the fundraising activities of the National Slavery Museum Foundation (formerly the city’s Slave Trail Commission). The museum would cost upward of $220 million. Plans call for building the museum on what was once known as the Devil’s Half Acre, the home and headquarters of notorious 19th-century slave trader Robert Lumpkin. The former slave jail and the nearby African Burial Ground are located just north of Main Street Station in the Bottom.
While the desire for a museum in that spot is understandable, focusing on it to the exclusion of the African Burial Ground site is not. Our history is complicated, and it requires binding many stories and places to truly demonstrate how Richmond came to be.
The Shockoe Bottom site operated from 1799 until 1816 and is one of the few landscapes in Richmond that can speak from the ground up about the journey of free and enslaved people. It’s sacred ground, a key space for civic ritual in early Richmond.
At the close of the 18th century, Richmond was a city of 5,700 people, nearly half of whom were African or of African ancestry. The African Burial Ground, set into the fragile, sloping, southwestern bank of Shockoe Creek, was designated specifically for Black burials.
After years of community struggle, the 2004 unveiling of the state historic highway marker for “Gabriel’s Execution” on East Broad Street became a turning point. It planted a stake in the ground, effectively declaring that to understand the Black fight for freedom, this history could not be left out. Gabriel’s Rebellion was, to the slaveholders of Virginia, the most notorious attempted slave insurrection in the former English colony, and it took place at the same moment that General Toussaint Louverture, leader of the Haitian Revolution, had total control of that island (both its French and Spanish colonies). Presidential candidate Thomas Jefferson was beginning to realize he might have to do political business with the Black leader of a conquered European colony. Shortly after Gabriel's Rebellion was aborted, Jefferson, as the newly elected third president of the United States, decided to establish a committee to discuss ending slavery.
Of the 300,000 to 350,000 Black people sold in Virginia in the 30 years leading to the Civil War, the majority of them were sold from market and auction spots in Richmond’s Shockoe Valley.
The marker overlooks the long-abandoned site where Gabriel and others may have been martyred. In 2005, this site, along with the former slave jail and African Burial Ground, were threatened by the first in a series of economic development proposals that included a new baseball stadium, just as we were beginning to understand the significance of the area. The experience was an immersion in historic preservation, activist strategy and self-determination by the Black community.
Like so many Americans, my ancestors can be traced back to Virginia and enslavement. In 2002, as I began to learn about Gabriel’s Rebellion, I began to rethink my relationship to U.S. history. This was not the stuff of my high school classroom quizzes. This was happening on the farms and labor camps of Henrico County, on docks and by-ways of the James River, and in the muddy streets and alleys of a young Richmond.
According to historian and former Slave Trail commissioner Philip Schwarz, of the 300,000 to 350,000 Black people sold in Virginia in the 30 years leading to the Civil War, the majority of them were sold from market and auction spots in Richmond’s Shockoe Valley. The tobacco that they grew, picked and processed was traded into wealth beyond measure — wealth used to run a nation. And my roots are connected to it.
In exercising our right to determine the future of our African American cultural resources, civic process matters. Governance and stewardship matter. Now that the city has approved $2.7 million in funding for the Heritage Campus to secure land and begin design work, we must make sure those plans include protective zoning, interpretive planning and progressive environmental planning (including coordination with state and local infrastructure improvement projects already in motion). We must build into the governance of the campus a democratically run consulting body with decision-making authority.
Learning that little bit of Richmond history many years ago helped me better understand the founding documents of the United States, how European men and women could build their livelihoods and aspirations on the trafficking of African men, women and children. We must reclaim Richmond’s African Burial Ground and tell the story of Gabriel and the slave rebellion of 1800. It’s telling as much of a part of our history as Patrick Henry’s famous speech at St. John’s Church in 1775.
The original footprint of Richmond still exists, and from those streets and corners (and burying grounds) this vast history can finally be told.
Ana Edwards, a public historian, is chair of the Sacred Ground Historical Reclamation Project and a founding member of the Defenders for Freedom, Justice & Equality. She’s also the education programs manager at the American Civil War Museum.
