Richmond, which has stopped running and hiding from a fundamental facet of its history, is poised to give birth to a slavery museum that never should have been shopped elsewhere. The Richmond Slave Trail Commission unveiled plans Monday for a slave heritage site in Shockoe Bottom that would include a slavery museum. It’s hard not to examine what has been proposed by the commission, led by Del. Delores L. McQuinn, D-Richmond, and not sense that we’re at the portal of something transformative.

You are about to read three words you thought you’d never see in this space: I was wrong. Three months ago, I boosted Shockoe Bottom as the inevitable site of a new Richmond baseball stadium and all but urged Mayor Dwight C. Jones to grab a ceremonial chrome-plated shovel and break some ground, already. As it turns out, the stadium proposal was about to have dirt shoveled on it. It died last week when Highwoods Properties withdrew its $363 million redevelopment plan for Shockoe Bottom.

In the more than 15 years since Doug Wilder floated the idea of building a slavery museum, nearly nothing has come of the notion. Momentum in Fredericksburg—Wilder’s odd choice of location—has deflated. In the meantime, Richmond is moving forward with efforts to improve the Shockoe Bottom area and to preserve the nationally significant history there: the Lumpkin’s Slave Jail, recently unearthed and now an archeological dig site.

Now that we’re shoveling dirt over the slavery museum in Fredericksburg, let’s bury the notion of a baseball stadium near the Richmond site of a slave jail known as The Devil’s Half-Acre. The apparent demise of the U.S. Slavery Museum in Fredericksburg—which is more than $24,000 in ar rears in real estate taxes and whose founder and chairman, L. Douglas Wilder, has gone incommunicado—offers an opportunity to make things right.