I can’t believe it.  Style Weekly actually read my mind.  Now, I just have to hope that there are enough of us out here who believe that Richmond’s slave history needs to be told, commemorated and held sacred.  Style’s vision as Richmond as an Ellis Island to slaves is a new one to me.  Of course I’ve heard  of “being sold down river” and I know where that phrase came from. And I knew that Richmond was the slave-trading capital of the world, but still, having that image of millions of slaves sold at auction and the Slave Trail that I’ve walked actually being reversed was new to me.   I’ve always thought of the Africans who were brought here as slaves, when I’ve walked Richmond’s Slave Trail. It didn’t occur to me that many walked the opposite path.

Chris Dovi, did a great job with the article:

Like cattle, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children were herded from the bustling slave auctions of nearby Shockoe — the center of Virginia’s lucrative slave export market — and loaded onto boats for the long passage south. At one time, more than 10,000 souls passed through this port each month on their way to the misery of Deep South plantation slavery.

Prepping his line for another cast into the murky waters of the James River, Burison, who is black, says he’s a product of Richmond Public Schools. Now a successful professional — he has the look of a man who likes his jeans starched and pressed — with an education that took him far past Richmond’s closed classrooms, he says he didn’t even know about the Slave Trail until last year.

And it wasn’t until today that he knew its significance: As many as 10,000 men, women and children a month, up to 100,000 a year.

Burison’s smile vanishes. His moistened eyes stare for a long time across the river’s slow-moving waters. Words come slowly.

“Jesus,” he says, finally. “I think more people need to know that.”

Amen! 

Now, is Richmond ready to give up those tainted parking spots and do what is right? I hope so.

While Ellis Island is preserved, restored and interpreted for thousands of visitors who come each year seeking connection to their roots, Richmond’s history is capped off like a hazardous waste site.

Lumpkin’s, the old slave market at Cary and 15th streets, now provides monthly or daily parking rates for commuters. The old Negro burial ground — final resting place of an untold number of souls and perhaps of rebel slave leader Gabriel Prosser, who was hanged there — provides parking for VCU Medical Center staff. A historical marker for the site is down the block on Broad Street. Attempts by a local black history group to add signage at the lot have been rebuffed. Says one member of the group: “We were told the people who parked there complained that it made them uncomfortable to read about it.”

And then there’s Lumpkin’s Jail, a notorious slave holding pen and auction house known in its time as among the most brutish of the dozen such facilities in town. If Richmond was the central city of the country’s original sin, Lumpkin’s was, to many of the victims of that sin, the lowest rung of hell. Once called the “Devil’s Half Acre” by its victims, Lumpkin’s today is mostly covered by a city-owned parking lot.

To say that Richmond’s most valuable real estate is its downtown parking spaces may be the biggest understatement in Virginia history. Maybe even U.S. history.

“The fact that all of this is buried is sort of symbolic, I suppose,” Herring says. “But you never heal anything unless you confront it. We need to dig it up, rebuild it and show it to everybody — so that this city can finally come to terms with itself.”