Richmond looking beyond its slave-trading past

Across from a Shockoe Bottom strip club bearing a whiteface image of the first African-American president, Richmond once had a Wall Street that traded in human bondage.

At what is now a parking lot north of Main Street Station, Robert Lumpkin's jail held tens of thousands of Africans who were whipped and sold if they survived the notorious "Devil's Half Acre." On nearby East Franklin Street, prosperous slave dealer Hector Davis sold humans and livestock alike from a tiny shed.

Underneath Interstate 95 near East Broad Street -- and possibly beneath layers of parking-lot pavement -- lies a municipal cemetery whose graves were the final resting place of free and enslaved blacks.

In the years since the end of the Civil War and emancipation, neither blacks nor whites were willing to talk openly about what truly happened here. Richmond's story has been treated as an embarrassing family secret, to be told in furtive whispers or spun in exalted myths.

But Richmond shows signs of awakening from what University of Richmond President Edward L. Ayers terms "America's amnesia" about its slave-trading past.

And while this next chapter remains unwritten, some key leaders see a story emerging that moves from denial toward truth and reconciliation.

Ayers last fall helped launch a series of forums cleverly titled "The Future of Richmond's Past," attracting more than 400 people to the first two sessions so far. They are a prelude to the 150th anniversary of the Civil War and the end of slavery -- an equal billing that the head of the Museum of the Confederacy described as "a profound breakthrough" that is changing the conversations about race in Richmond.

"It's hard to recognize a turning point when you're in the middle of it," said S. Waite Rawls III, president and CEO of the museum. But he hopes historians will judge this period as such when they look back on what's happening now in the former capital of the Confederacy.

A period, participants hope, when Richmond finally sets the record straight.

"It is important to get it right this time," said local lawyer Robert J. Grey Jr., a past president of the American Bar Association who helped jump-start the "Future of Richmond's Past" dialogue. "It is important that this community say to itself, 'We're going to write our history. We're going to write the history that actually took place in our community. And that will be of value not only to our citizens, but it will be of value to the nation.'"

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History is not always written by the victors.

Shunted aside in the Lost Cause narrative of antebellum Virginia was Richmond's role as a major slave exporter to the deep South. On the eve of the Civil War, Virginia was the largest slave state, with nearly a half-million people in bondage, and Richmond the center of slave commerce.

Richmond had dozens of slave dealers, auctioneers and collecting agents, including Locust Alley trader, Omohundro traders and the notorious Lumpkin's Jail. Just one of those dealers was selling 2,000 people a year, splitting children from their mothers and husbands from their wives. In 1857, R.H. Dickinson & Brother of East Franklin Street reported its sales totaled more than $2 million.

But a generation of Richmonders was weaned on a different story of slavery, as told in the 1957 high school textbook, "Cavalier Commonwealth -- History and Government of Virginia":

What can be said, finally, of the Negro slave in Virginia in 1860? We know that there was some cruelty and suspicion. But we know also that the relationship between the two races was governed by much kindness and mutual trust. Both understood that bondage as they knew it was not totally evil; both realized that enslavement in a civilized world had been better in many respects for the Negro than the barbarities he might have suffered in Africa; and both were aware that it was questionable whether the Negro was adequately prepared for freedom.

Textbooks were penned by handpicked authors with marching orders from state leaders fearful of the encroaching civil-rights movement. This sanitizing of slavery left a gap in Richmond's résumé that eased the consciences for some and led to generations of misunderstandings for others.

The texts legitimized Southern perceptions of a romanticized antebellum era and of the Confederacy as a noble struggle to preserve it -- a Lost Cause so named by an 1866 history of the war by Edward A. Pollard, editor of the Richmond Examiner during the Civil War and a staunch defender of slavery.

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Richmond appears to be emerging from this memory fog.

That Rawls and Del. Delores L. McQuinn, chairwoman of the Richmond Slave Trail Commission, are sharing the same stage "is, if not a turning point in Richmond's history, close to it," Rawls said.

The Slave Trail Commission garnered a historic designation for the dirt trail on the south banks of the James River where newly arrived enslaved Africans disembarked and were marched under cover of darkness, so as not to offend the sensibilities of white townspeople. The commission also led the effort that resulted in the successful 2008 archaeological excavation at the Lumpkin's Slave Jail site in Shockoe Bottom.

The implication of this partnership between guardians of the legacy of slavery and Confederate history is not lost on McQuinn.

"There are individuals at the table who a few years ago wouldn't dare be sitting there having this conversation about race relationship and the history of Richmond," she said.

Rawls notes that the Sons of Confederate Veterans supported archaeological work at the slave jail site. And he's not heard of resistance among Richmonders more inclined to view the Confederacy through the Lost Cause prism.

"There is no white history and black history. There's Richmond history," he said. "And by sharing the stage, we both get to talk and we both get heard."

Factor in the Richmond area's growing ethnic diversity, the more broad-minded views of a younger generation, the influx of newcomers from other regions and a more assertive cultural community, and the table is set for a discussion unlikely a decade ago.

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But some leaders are approaching the table with skepticism and an appetite for change.

"We've had a lot of dialogues for the sake of dialogue," said Jonathan Zur, president and CEO of the Virginia Center for Inclusive Communities.

The talk must move beyond the head and the heart and to the hands so that people can get to work transforming Richmond, he said.

"Let's look at our education system. Let's look at our housing. Let's look at our city-county structure. Let's think about who benefits from things being the way they are, who's invested in things being created the way they are and staying there. And so the work then is critically looking at these structures and institutions that have been governing our way of life for so long, and perhaps making changes where changes need to be made."

"People have very different lived experiences in metro Richmond," said Zur, who grew up in New Jersey. "And so the conversation is why and how. And the action is, 'What do we do to change that so there is an equitable lived experience?'"

A visiting historian who spoke at the UR meeting voiced the Freudian slip that Richmond is sitting on a "landmine." Lawrence Pijeaux, president and CEO of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, meant a gold mine of economic benefits from tourism, and quickly corrected himself.

But Richmonders must have equal opportunity to mine the windfalls from tourism and commemoration-related projects, said Stacy Burrs, board chairman of the Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia.

"This isn't just going to be the telling of history," he said. "There's going to be an economy that evolves out of it."

"I'm optimistic about the potential, concerned about the way these sorts of things have developed historically and encouraged that so many folks up to this point have participated in the conversations," Burrs said. "It now needs the validation of everyday citizens. Otherwise, it's not legitimate."

The Rev. Benjamin P. Campbell, pastoral director of Richmond Hill, an ecumenical retreat center in Church Hill, said the ongoing dialogue "may represent our greatest opportunity to get closer to racial justice and reconciliation and heal some of the racial and economic issues that have been allowed to fester."

"The question," he said, "is not merely 'Do we want to uncover our history?' but 'Do we want to be a great city?'"

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That aspects of Richmond's history remain covered was dramatized this month by Sa'ad El-Amin, founder of the nonprofit Society for Preservation of African-American History and Antiquities.

He filed a lawsuit in Richmond Circuit Court to compel the Virginia Department of Historic Resources to conduct test excavations to determine the boundaries of the antebellum "Negro Burial Ground" near or beneath a Virginia Commonwealth University parking lot.

Shawn O. Utsey, chair of the Department of African American Studies at VCU, recently completed a documentary on the burial ground and the community's attempts to reclaim it. He maintains that VCU, a "Future of Richmond's Past" participant, missed an chance to "get out in front" of the burial-ground controversy by funding an archaeological dig.

Told of the criticism, VCU spokeswoman Pam Lepley said VCU agreed with the Richmond Slave Trail Commission to set aside a portion of the parking lot identified by a Department of Historic Resources report as possibly being part of the burial ground. "The Slave Trail Commission has taken the lead to obtain public input into formulating specific plans for treatment and memorialization of the property," she said.

Utsey, an associate professor of psychology, says Richmond's muted response to the plight of the burial ground -- save the efforts of a handful of VCU students and activists such as Ana Edwards -- is a lingering legacy of Jim Crow: the tendency of black Southerners to cloak themselves in protective silence. Black people have been ashamed to speak out about the impact of slavery or conditioned to be silent by white ridicule and scorn, he said.

El-Amin, who as a member of Richmond City Council drafted the resolution creating the Slave Trail Commission in 1998, said progress has been made in the discussion of slavery, but open and honest dialogue remains elusive. He has complained that "Future of Richmond's Past" meetings have fallen short on that count. And honesty, he said, requires Richmond to confront the contradiction embodied by the Lost Cause figures so vividly lionized on Monument Avenue.

"How do you condemn the bad that was done but glorify the bad doers?" he said. "What do you do with those monuments? This is really, really what's going to be difficult for Richmond."

Zur said participants must take the past personally.

"People have a hard time saying the structure, the legacy is bad, even if I didn't create it. Even if I don't actively contribute to it day to day, I may still benefit from it or I may still be hurt by it. And if we're only talking about it as something in the past, as something impersonal, then our conversation can only go so far."

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"America as a whole has not really thought hard about what the slave trade really was," said Ayers, a Civil War historian and a native of Asheville, N.C.

Slavery is often oversimplified as a labor system that brought people from Africa to work on plantations, he said. But it was much more than that. "It was at the very center of the American economy and Richmond had an important role in that," he said.

In Richmond, surplus slaves were sold and shipped to plantations farther South, but many also were rented out to work at Tredegar Iron Works and tobacco factories. Urban life brought a measure of freedom to slaves, who could work extra hours to earn money for themselves. Some earned enough to buy themselves and family members out of slavery. Some bought their own slaves.

On city streets, urban slaves mingled with free blacks, heightening white fears of insurrections. Those fears resulted in a state law mandating that white ministers lead black congregations and a city code allowing whippings and requiring blacks to yield the sidewalk to whites.

The scars of that era remain visible in many ways, says Ralph White, manager of Richmond's James River Park. He's written a booklet to accompany a self-guided tour documenting the city's slave legacy.

"Seeing the Scars of Slavery in the Natural Environment" is an interpretive guide to the Manchester slave trail, but it also talks of the painful scars that persist today among black people -- from high blood pressure to the weakened family structure.

VCU's Utsey, whose great-grandfather was born into slavery, said there's no empirical data to support the scars of slavery but significant anecdotal evidence.

"The trauma that we see today around slavery is our silence," he said.

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In October 1994, Christy Coleman played the pregnant slave Lucy in the groundbreaking and controversial re-creation of a slave auction at Colonial Williamsburg.

Coleman, then Colonial Williamsburg's director of African-American Interpretation and Presentations, moved members of the audience to tears and led one protester, Jack Gravely of the state NAACP, to reconsider his opposition to the enactment.

Today, Coleman is president of the American Civil War Center at Historic Tredegar in Richmond. She's excited by what she sees and hears in Richmond nowadays.

"That energy is different and it's coming from a collective body that's saying, 'We can't wait. We've got to make this work,'" said Coleman, a Winter Park, Fla., native who arrived in Richmond from Detroit, where she headed The Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History.

"It is for something bigger," Coleman said. "It's about transforming a community. It's about having people stop saying, 'Why can't we be like Charleston?' Beat Charleston! Be something bigger."

For so long, Richmond has seemed less than comfortable in its historical skin, which was largely monochromatic. But within the past three years, a memorial to the civil-rights movement was unveiled in Capitol Square near statues of an architect of Massive Resistance (U.S. Sen. Harry Flood Byrd Sr.) and a Confederate general (Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson). The Slavery Reconciliation Monument, which has companions in Benin, West Africa, and Liverpool, England -- the other points of the slave-trade triangle -- was unveiled in March 2007 without controversy.

The Richmond-based Hope in the Cities seemed like a voice in the wilderness 20 years ago when it was organized to promote honest racial dialogue. But its founder now feels similar winds of change.

"It's no longer just some fringe groups working on it," said Rob Corcoran, the group's national director. "I think it's becoming much more mainstream."

When James River Park manager White first put up interpretive signs in the 1990s about the Manchester slave trail, they were removed not by vandals but by city workers.

"There was opposition" even among African-Americans in the parks and recreation department, he said. He remembers being told to let "bygones be bygones [and] 'we don't want to look back to the painful past,'" he said. "It was a strange response, I thought." But he said he now has whole-hearted support from his department for his efforts.

McQuinn said business leaders are asking her what they can do to assist the slave trail with signage or help make a proposed slavery museum a reality in Shockoe Bottom. Such conversations were unfathomable five years ago, she said. "You can see some things manifesting . . . as a result of the dialogue."

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For the first 100 years after the Civil War, conversation about it was dominated by the white veterans and their descendants," said the Confederacy museum's Rawls. "And therefore the bulk of the conversation was about battles and battlefields."

But in the past 20 to 25 years, "we saw this pendulum swing from 'tell nothing but the Confederate veteran's story' and it swung . . . past neutral to 'we're not going to tell the slave story yet, but we're not going to tell the Confederate story either,'" he said. "Richmond turned turtle. It said, 'We can't talk about it; we can't see it; we can't say slavery; we can't say Confederacy.'"

The awkward silence was punctured by bitter outbursts.

In 1995, hate fliers attributed to the Ku Klux Klan were distributed in the Monument Avenue neighborhood where a statue to the Richmond-born tennis champion Arthur Ashe was erected the following year. The fliers described Ashe as "an AIDS-infected nigger."

A mural of Robert E. Lee -- one of 13 along the floodwall depicting Richmond's history -- sparked controversy before it was torched by a Molotov cocktail in January 2000.

The April 2003 dedication of a statue of Abraham Lincoln and son Tad at the Tredegar Iron Works attracted Confederate flag-waving protesters and an airplane overhead trailing a banner that read "Sic Semper Tyrannis" -- the Virginia motto John Wilkes Booth shouted when he shot Lincoln.

Rawls credits Ayers with raising the discussion "above historical baggage and passion."

Ayers, who said he knew more about Richmond's past than its present before he moved here from the University of Virginia, emphasized the dual commemoration in introducing the first "Future of Richmond's Past" session.

Many people, he said, have been preparing for decades for a time "when we can tell the story of Richmond whole, when we can tell the story of Richmond honestly."

The genesis for this push to reach common and productive ground occurred in, of all places, The Commonwealth Club, once a symbol of white male political hegemony.

Local lawyer Stephen E. Baril heard Ayers speak there at a luncheon and was intrigued by what he heard about the upcoming commemoration. Baril, a Civil War buff, discussed the matter with Grey, a longtime friend and fellow lawyer.

Baril, who is white, and Grey, who is black, recognized an opportunity to make the commemoration more inclusive. They attempted to drum up support for their mission.

"I wondered if we were on some misadventure," Baril recalled. "When you start talking about the Civil War and race, it can be a difficult issue here in Richmond. So I wasn't sure where this was going to go. But we stuck with it."

Grey says those initial conversations "were the fuel that has ignited a broader conversation with more people than we've ever had about one of the most difficult subjects that this community continues to deal with. And that is the Civil War, the end of slavery, and what do we say about it?"

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In 1998, then-Mayor Timothy M. Kaine issued an apology for slavery on behalf of the city. But McQuinn said the March 2007 dedication of the Slavery Reconciliation Statue in a plaza at 15th and Main streets brought a tangible end to civic denial.

The 15-foot, half-ton bronze sculpture is a candid acknowledgement of Richmond's participation in human trafficking. For Richmond, the monument represents a symbolic door of no return, not unlike the Goree Island portal that memorializes the final exit for enslaved Africans leaving what is now Senegal.

"That statue really helped all of us rethink who we are as a city and our obligation to do things better," McQuinn said. "It forced us to get on that pathway to have the sometimes very painful . . . but very meaningful discussions."

Catty-corner from the monument, above the strip club, hangs a mural of President Barack Obama as the Joker from Batman, with the word "SOCIALISM" printed beneath. The mural sparked outrage from the Virginia NAACP, among others.

"We still have a lot of work to do," McQuinn said. "Some folks, it's going to take a lot longer to get there."

But participants engaged in the ongoing conversation say Richmond must get it right this time.

If reconciliation is an objective, Burrs said, the conversations must be about "unvarnished truth, and not polite, convenient truth."

Contact Michael Paul Williams at (804) 649-6815 or mwilliams@timesdispatch.com.

Contact Karin Kapsidelis at (804) 649-6119 or kkapsidelis@timesdispatch.com.