WaPo: “The city [of Richmond, VA] has announced plans for a major memorial to its history as the nation’s second-largest market in the pre-Civil War trade in enslaved people, culminating years of frustrated efforts to recognize a difficult past.
“We have collectively, as a city, been neglectful for far too long in recognizing the part of the story that is uneasy for people to consume — that is, that human lives were trafficked through Shockoe Bottom,” Mayor Levar Stoney said in an interview with The Washington Post, referring to a section of downtown. “And for much of this city’s lifetime it was paved over and forgotten.”
Ambitious plans unveiled Tuesday night call for developing the 10-acre Shockoe site as a kind of “Smithsonian” campus commemorating the brutal marketplace of human enslavement that once operated there. Conceived in two phases on either side of the city’s busiest thoroughfare, Broad Street, the project has an estimated total cost of $265 million and would be completed by 2037 — the 300th anniversary of Richmond’s founding by wealthy enslaver William Byrd II.”