This story was reported and written by VPM News.
Richmonders got a sneak peek Thursday of an exhibition space at Main Street Station that in the future will shine a light on a dark chapter of American history: the experience, struggle and legacy of slavery.
LED screens showed visitors at a one-day preview exhibit, “Enduring: The Struggle to Expand Human Freedom,” what Shockoe Institute exhibits might look like when the organization opens its space next year.
“There will be all kinds of interdisciplinary content that will bring together scholars and practitioners of every kind, in an effort to invite people and keep people in a space … where they can learn all of what happened here, why it mattered then, and how it matters now,” said Shockoe Institute CEO Marland Buckner.
An estimated 1 million people were sold into slavery through Virginia, a place described in the exhibit as the “epicenter of human trafficking” in the upper South; the exhibit shows little-known facets of what some of those people experienced in Richmond. One enslaved girl, known as “Lizzy,” was sold five times on a path that led from Norfolk to Louisiana and died of an epileptic seizure at the age of 13.
“It leaves me speechless to think about it, that where we’re standing today, there were people who were bought and sold into slavery,” said Taekia Glass, a Varina resident visiting the exhibit.
The presentation also delved into the difficulties people of color faced in accessing capital and credit in the aftermath of the Emancipation Proclamation.
The Mellon Foundation issued a grant to establish the Shockoe Institute at the end of 2022. The project's also being funded by the city of Richmond. Design agency Local Projects — which also designed exhibit spaces related to the history of racial injustice in Montgomery, Alabama; Tulsa, Oklahoma; and New Orleans — is designing the space, with construction set to start in October.
The finished space will be around 12,000-square feet and occupy a part of the city known today for its restaurants and nightlife, but once was the center of Richmond’s slave trade.
"Part of our challenge is to separate myth from fact," Buckner said, "and to use that history in an effort to heal and move the country forward. Not to divide and to weaponize."
The Shockoe Institute is tentatively scheduled to open in fall 2025.
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