WaPo: “This city tried hard to purge its landscape of reminders of slavery. The old slave jail, the auction blocks, even the African burying grounds were paved over long ago and largely forgotten.
But an ambitious effort here aims to shed light on artifacts that linger in everyday life: the ways the slave economy and its major hub in Richmond contributed to the development of modern-day America, with all of its promise and problems.
The Shockoe Institute, funded partly with an $11 million grant from the Mellon Foundation, unveiled plans this week for a facility that will anchor Richmond’s broader effort to memorialize its history as one of the country’s biggest markets for the buying and selling of enslaved people.
The project is an attempt “to really put Richmond … at the center of the national conversation about monuments, memory, the public realm, landscape and the ways in which we use and/or misuse our history for various purposes,” Marland Buckner, president and CEO of the Shockoe Institute, said in an interview with The Washington Post.”