Category: African Burial Ground

On December 20, 2022, Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney announced that the city had received an $11 million grant from the Mellon Foundation via its Monuments Project for the Shockoe heritage campus interpretive center. This award was part of a larger $16 million package from the Foundation’s Monuments Project aimed at Richmond’s revised monumental landscape. The…

The city of Richmond has recently released a draft Shockoe Bottom Small Area Plan. It was designed with input by the by the many public and private partners in the Shockoe Alliance, a group put together by Mayor Levar Stoney in 2019 and “charged with guiding the design and implementation of concepts and recommendations for…

The history-laden Shockoe Bottom area of Richmond has been subject to a lot of development, proposals, and visions over the years. One of the most constructive voices in the process, the Sacred Ground Historical Reclamation Project of the Virginia Defenders for Freedom, Justice & Equality, has put together a symposium on the subject, to be…

From Michael Paul Williams in the Richmond Times-Dispatch (January 8, 2018), a lovely and thoughtful meditation on African American history and commemoration in Shockoe Bottom. Williams explores the possibilities for Richmond’s African Burial Ground and other sites in Shockoe in light of related public history projects in Washington, DC, and Fredericksburg and beyond.

Last night, under clear skies, Richmond’s Defenders for Freedom, Justice & Equality hosted what has become an annual memorial at the African Burial Ground. About fifty people attended to remember that night in August 1800 when the enslaved Henrico County blacksmith Gabriel and hundreds of his fellow conspirators sought to march on Richmond and seize the…