Originally published in the Spring 2022 edition of the Virginia Defender, issue 68, printed April 21. Reproduced here for accessibility and archival purposes. To find other stories in the Spring 2022 issue or to download the full PDF, see this post. For other issues dating back to 2012, see the Full Issues page.

By Ana Edwards

How real is the city’s commitment to the Heritage Campus?

As of today, it looks good. The decision to make Richmond’s Black history and the Heritage Campus the thematic centerpiece of the small-area plan for Shockoe Bottom’s development has had nearly unanimous support from the community and from the members of the Shockoe Alliance.

However, the status of the small-area plan is in limbo. A request for an update sent to the city’s economic development department in April received no response.

The city has committed $2.8 million of Capital Improvement Project funds for fiscal year 2023 to the community engagement, planning and designing of “multiuse enslaved African cultural and heritage park-like campus,” the Enslaved Africans Heritage Campus. The total commitment is $38 million, with almost half of that going to a parking structure to address the pressures of Shockoe Bottom’s other function, that of a multimodal transportation hub and business district.

City funding for improvements to the Richmond Slave Trail at Ancarrow’s Landing and the National Slavery Museum are listed separately, but amount to more than $24 million proposed, with $8 million already appropriated. Recent estimates for the full museum concept are $220 million.

Obviously, the Memorial Park/Heritage Campus will cost far less than the planned museum while including its footprint, as well as the African Burial Ground and blocks east as far as 17th Street and south to Main Street.

There are those who believe it is important than the museum itself be a monumentally scaled structure, conceptually as large as the significance of the slave trade that once fueled Virginia’s and this country’s economy. That which fueled the economy was part of a system of racist laws and practices that simultaneously thwarted African-American progress, and part of our cultural and social responsibility is to ensure that what we create today furthers that progress.

The Sacred Ground Project believes the impetus for representing the significance of Shockoe Bottom to our complex and problematic past lies in our ability to make such a site acknowledge the past while addressing the very real needs of the present. How? By thinking creatively, not just “big.”

I’d like us to imagine how the creation of the nine-acre area in Shockoe Bottom could be developed to serve all the functions outlined in our Community Proposal for a Shockoe Bottom Memorial Park – gathering, memorialization, reflection, education and equitable economic redevelopment. The city’s commitment to the Heritage Campus needs to incorporate by design, engineering and implementation the aspirations for a truly equitable and environmentally sound social system and quality of life for all descendants of those who suffered during slavery and Jim Crow.