New institute in Richmond examines how slavery helped build modern America

The Shockoe Institute, funded in part by an $11 million grant from the Mellon Foundation, unveiled plans this week for a facility that will bolster Richmond's sweeping efforts to memorialize its history as one of the nation's largest markets for buying and selling slaves.

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

This comes as institutions across the city are taking new steps to grapple with Richmond's past as the capital of the Confederacy. Earlier this year, the Valentine Museum opened a new gallery exploring how its namesake — sculptor Edward Valentine — contributed to the “Lost Cause” myth through his depictions of noble Confederate generals and helpless stereotypes of black people. On the city's riverfront, the American Civil War Museum opened an exhibit called “The Looming Crisis,” which looks at “the ways in which slavery caused the war.”

In Shockoe, work will soon begin to convert a 10,000-square-foot portion of the former Main Street Station locomotive shed in downtown Richmond into an institute building that will provide both public exhibition space and a “laboratory” for studying public and personal history. It is scheduled to open late next year. The space is being designed by New York-based firm Local Projects, which also designed the 9/11 memorial in New York and the Greenwood Rising civil rights museum in Tulsa.

The rail shed site itself is rich in history. The current parking lot and along a nearby stretch of Interstate 95 was the site of “Devil's Half Acre,” where slaves were bred, sold and held in the infamous Lumpkin's Jail. Across Broad Street was the site of the city's first African cemetery, rediscovered under a parking lot in the 1990s.

These features are to be honored by the massive Shockoe Project, announced earlier this year, which includes archaeological sites and a national slavery museum. The entire project could cost an estimated $265 million – the majority of which has yet to be raised – and will take years to complete; the Shockoe Institute is the first step.

While the project still has a long way to go, it represents a huge step forward for a city that has struggled for years to find some way to commemorate a past that was largely deliberately repressed until about 30 years ago.

“This area has been the subject of dispute and litigation and political football for far too long, and I have nothing to do with that,” Buckner told a gathering of local dignitaries, stakeholders and history buffs at a preview event Thursday evening.

Richmond City Council member Cynthia Newbille, who has witnessed many of these squabbles, said she was thrilled to finally see real progress. “It's been a long time coming,” Newbille said, adding that the pieces of the story were like the disjointed squares of a quilt. “It wasn't until we got to this point that we actually had the quilt, and because we have it now, we can tell the whole story.”

The history is directly intertwined with the nation's development, says Gregg Kimball, a historian who works with the institute and also wrote a book about pre-Civil War Richmond called “American City, Southern Place.” By the 1840s and 1850s, Kimball said, Richmond had become the most important center of the slave trade in the Upper South, surpassed only by New Orleans in the Deep South.

Tobacco farming in Virginia was in decline, but the cotton economy further south was labor-intensive and had an insatiable appetite for slave labor. As a result, human property became a major export for Virginia, Kimball said. One of the reasons the state eventually banned the international slave trade was that new shipments from overseas would dilute the value of Virginia's own slave production.

The slave trade and the cotton it produced created economic links between the South, England and West Africa, not to mention the rapid industrialization of cities in the northern states, Kimball said. “Capital flowed between Richmond, London and New York. These large-scale connections are pretty profound,” he said.

Kimball is working with Buckner and others at the Shockoe Institute to present this story in a way that is interesting and applicable to current issues. Thursday night's preview hinted at some elements of the telling of this human story.

Photos and stories of former Virginia slaves from the 1930s. Reconstruction-era newspaper ads from blacks trying to find their sold families. Legal documents related to an enslaved girl named “Lizzie” – born in Virginia, sold to Louisiana, changed hands five times before dying of an epileptic seizure at age 13. Her death sparked a legal battle when a buyer claimed she was “totally worthless as a slave.”

Through individual stories, Kimball said, the aim is to “address these larger issues: What does freedom mean, and how did America evolve from a slave society to a society that nevertheless speaks about the ideals enshrined in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence?”

Buckner, who spent years as director of government affairs at Microsoft in Washington DC, said the institute's message is not political. It seeks to put current issues and events into a fact-based historical context that will help people think about them with different eyes.

He said he envisions inviting experts and thinkers to an annual symposium — like in Davos or at 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 politicians and legal experts so we can start … to do the hard work of understanding the decisions that got us where we are today.”

On Thursday, he gave the institute three words to guide it as it grapples with an issue of intense emotional significance: maturity, sincerity and generosity.

“We need to be kind and civil when we have these conversations with each other,” Buckner said. “That's the only way to keep this shared experience.”