Monday, October 10, from 6:30-10p.m., at the Shockoe Bottom African Burial Ground in downtown Richmond, the Sacred Ground Historical Reclamation Project will host the 20th Annual Gabriel Gathering. This yearly observation marks the date that the great slave rebellion leader Gabriel was executed.
After more than 20 years, the Richmond city government has finally committed to memorializing Shockoe Bottom, the downtown district that once was the epicenter of the U.S. domestic slave trade. Many outstanding questions remain the current plan, however. Here are some of ours.
After more than 20 years of confrontational struggle between the community and Richmond’s city government and business elite, many people are asking what’s happening with Shockoe Bottom, the long-neglected downtown district that once was the epicenter of the U.S. domestic slave trade.
Closed in 1879, the Shockoe Hill African Burying Ground may have been the largest 19th century municipal cemetery for free and enslaved Black people in the U.S. Now, it’s finally getting some recognition.
Jan Meck and Virginia Refo, in their book “The Life & Legacy of Emily Winfree: From Enslavement to Carnegie Hall,” depict the perseverance and survival of the owner of Winfree Cottage, a fixture of the Lumpkin’s Jail Archaeological Site about which little was publicly known until now.
Yes, there needs to be a slavery/slave trade museum or interpretive center in Shockoe Bottom, but it doesn’t need to be a $220 million legacy project for people who have played a very mixed role in the ongoing struggle to reclaim and properly memorialize what once was the epicenter of the U.S. domestic slave trade.
The book that Jan Meck and Virginia Refo have written is the first study of the life of Emily Winfree, a Virginia-born African woman who lived from 1834 to 1865 enslaved in Petersburg and Chesterfield Country and, after Emancipation, in Manchester until her death in 1919.
The Virginia Defender 