ALEXANDRIA, VA — The black-and-white portrait does not reveal the contradictions in Monday Robinson’s life. Born enslaved in Virginia in 1778, Robinson gained his freedom, became active in his community and conducted business with Belle Grove Plantation in Middletown.
But the record then takes a turn that is difficult—and impossible—to forget: Robinson later legally enslaved members of his own family.
That extraordinary and deeply complicated story is at the center of Monday Robinson: A Life of Thorns and Roses, opening Thursday, Oct. 22, at Alexandria’s Freedom House Museum. The traveling exhibition does not squeeze Robinson into an easy category of hero or villain. Instead, it follows the documentary evidence wherever it leads.
Freedom—and a painful contradiction
Researchers believe Robinson may have enslaved relatives in an effort to protect them within a system that offered Black families few safe choices. Yet the surviving documents tell a more unsettling story, too. Robinson hired out his children to area landowners and used his wife and three children as collateral for a loan…