One of the first messages visitors will see inside the Shockoe Institute is a blunt, unflinching introduction to a history the city has long struggled to confront:
- “American racial slavery began in Virginia. Richmond played a central role in its expansion.”
State of play: The 12,000-square-foot institute, housed within Main Street Station, is the first major piece of Richmond’s $265 million Shockoe Project — a sweeping, decades-in-the-making plan to memorialize the city’s part in the slave trade.
- Axios got a preview on Thursday, along with elected officials, historians and RPS students, before the institute’s public opening on Sunday.
- The event — which included Gov. Spanberger, Mayor Avula, Sen. Tim Kaine and Rep. Jennifer McClellan — was emotional, as speakers framed the institute as a reckoning and a turning point.
- And Avula noted the scale of Richmond’s impact: The city was so central to American slavery that an estimated 1 in 4 Black Americans can trace some ancestry back to the area.
Yes, but: It was Marland Buckner, the institute’s CEO, who brought the room to tears, as he turned to Samaya, the daughter of project leader Todd Waldo, and said, “[Todd] wasn’t doing it for us. He wasn’t even doing it for the ancestors.”
- “Samaya, your daddy built this place for you.”
The comment was part of a repeated theme on Thursday: This privately funded portion of the project is as much about the next generation as it is about the past.
Zoom in: Inside, the “Expanding Freedom” exhibit traces the forced migration of enslaved people, starting with the colonization of Indigenous people in the 1600s.
Plus: There’s “The Lab,” which has touch screens with a digital library of the extensive records used to put the exhibit together.
Among the more emotional segments: An animated illustration depicting enslaved men, women and children in chains walking from Richmond to other southern cities — some as far as Natchez, Mississippi, a thousand miles away…