A dozen years ago I attended a talk by the Reverend Benjamin Campbell, discussing his new (and essential) examination of Richmond’s racial troubles, Richmond’s Unhealed History. Campbell (who could play Santa Claus if he cared to) spoke movingly about the ways our city has marginalized and oppressed Black people, going all the way back to the first slave ship and the first legislation identifying a person as white or colored, moving step-wise through the decades of the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the destruction of Jackson Ward (known as the Harlem of the South) by the Interstate highways, redlining, desegregation, and re-segregation. The good Reverend’s take home message being that our city has long suffered a self-enforced amnesia about all of this, our forgotten or suppressed past burdening our souls and dampening any hope of progress.
The book puts it this way:
The impact of this buried history is difficult to estimate. Clearly, much of this history was psychologically and emotionally hidden from Richmond when it was actually occurring…. Is it possible for healing to take place? How? What are the mechanisms? To what degree is the current disintegration of metropolitan Richmond due to an unconscious flight from trauma, fear, and guilt?
The most overt example of this buried trauma, he said, was the erasure of Richmond’s role as the nation’s second largest market in humans, the market district buried under highways. Classroom history books, right up until the 1990s, never mentioned this monumental historic fact. I recalled the Virginia history books from my childhood that replaced the word slave with servant. My sons were in middle school in suburban Chesterfield County when Reverend Campbell spoke, and though slavery was discussed in their history classes, Richmond’s key role in it all was neglected. Why, one had to ask, were we failing to face facts?
Since Reverend Campbell’s book, however, things have begun to change (hard to say how much the book itself has influenced this change, but it must have had an impact). Gradually, our suppressed heritage is being uncovered, sometimes literally unearthed. Already, at the turn of the century, a Slave Trail Commission had mapped a walking trail from the ship dock at Manchester out to the paved-over sites of the slave markets downtown. The site of the largest slave market, Lumpkins Jail, was excavated in 2008, and in 2011 the city’s first African Burial Ground, long a VCU parking lot, was marked out as a sacred space, and added to that slave trail map. Bones of Black people, whose disinterred bodies had been used for anatomy classes at the Medical College, had been dug up in 1994, but it was not until 2019 that they were honored with a funeral ceremony and a plea of atonement from VCU. The city installed a striking monument to Emancipation on Brown’s Island, the Kehinde Wiley equestrian statue Rumors of War (depicting a young Black man looking back with an affecting expression of defiant sorrow as his horse races north) went up at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and then, following the 2020 demonstrations in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, the Confederate monuments came down. Efforts are underway to somehow honor the 20,000 in the city’s Second African Burial Ground on Shockoe Hill, though most of that cemetery now lies under Interstate 64, and volunteers meet regularly to restore another Black burial site, overgrown Evergreen cemetery on the East End.

Workers installing Rumors of War monument, VMFA, December 2019.
Could it be that we Richmonders are shaking ourselves awake, beginning to clear away the fog, to see what we’ve done to ourselves? And if so, as our memory clears, will we find ways to heal our wounds? All the changes I’ve listed are symbolic. They do not solve the racial gaps in employment, wages and health, the covert red-lining, our re-segregated schools, or the plain old Confederate flag-waving red neckery we know so well. But something other than symbolic seems to be happening as the fog clears. The Richmond Metro Area has grown to 1.2 million people, 179,000 more than when Reverend Campbell spoke. New small businesses are outpacing national trends, especially among Black and Latino start-ups, and the fastest growing part of town is Jackson Ward. High School graduation rates are up citywide. Richmond is still a violent place -- barely a day goes by without a shooting -- but overall crime drops year after year.
I feel in writing this a bit like Dylan’s Mr. Jones. Something is clearly happening here, but I don’t know what it is. My hope, though, is that we Richmonders are learning to see ourselves and our past more clearly. And in facing even the ugliest of these stories, perhaps we can awaken from our collective PTSD, and in doing so, move forward together. To that end, I recommend Reverend Campbell’s essential, and highly readable, Richmond’s Unhealed History. Gotta go. I’m grabbing my rake and headed out to join a clean-up crew at Evergreen Cemetery at noon.
You bring me to tears, knowing that you teach more real history than most classes, schools, or books we are able to read. I always knew there was so much in the gaps that went unlearned, spoken, or heard. I know what my older relatives tried to pass to me, but you have no idea how so many Blacks do not know nor have they ever had the privilege to learn that you know about Black History in Virginia, and the United States overall. With the current political race, we are potentially doomed to ever know more than what we already know, before we revert to the days of past history, which is the future that is being planned.…