Dispatch from the Field: Go see Shockoe Institute’s Expanding Freedom exhibit!
- 7 hours ago
- 5 min read
by Debra Copeland
In April, the Shockoe Institute opened its Expanding Freedom exhibit at Richmond’s historic Main Street Station, on land that was once the center of the slave trade. The exhibit is a rich and expansive telling of Richmond’s history as it relates to slavery—a telling which reveals just how deep and significant that relationship was: Slavery once ran the economic engines not only of Richmond, but far beyond, from the agricultural Deep South to the industrial North; from the shores of England to coastal and interior Africa.
Divided into seven sections, the exhibit chronologically explores critical periods in our nation’s history through powerful human stories. It begins with Indigenous history because in addition to Africans, First Nations peoples also were enslaved in the early years of the Virginia colony.
As you enter the exhibit, the sounds of flowing water and Indigenous flute music soften the atmosphere. Flowing lines on the carpeted floor lead the way, and represent Shockoe Creek, which flows through a tunnel beneath the building.
Along the way, Story Tag markers invite you to explore further, in The Lab, when you reach the end of the exhibit. Enduring Impact Challenge panels pose questions which hopefully will inspire people “to learn, reflect, and act,” which is the mission of the Institute.
The kind of slavery practiced in the colonies and United States was the cruelest kind of slavery, chattel slavery, meaning that human beings were treated as property, livestock, commodities to be bought and sold, whose labor was free. Children born to enslaved women became inventory that increased the so-called “owner’s” wealth.
I learn that in 1705, Virginia became the first colony to pass legislation which mandated that chattel slavery would be based solely on a newly coined word, “race,” and that the only race subject to enslavement would be the Black race. Other colonies soon passed similar laws.
I reflect on the fact that the political power of enslavers was once so great that when the government executed an enslaved person for a crime, it compensated the enslaver for his loss. By law, a white person who murdered an enslaved person faced no punishment, but enslaved people were severely punished for even minor infractions.
By 1790, enslaved people made up 39% of Virginia’s population, second only to South Carolina, with 43%. Orange dots on a map on the floor of the exhibit indicate the many Richmond businesses built around the slave trade, a large network of banks, brokerages, insurance companies, law firms, auction houses, railroad lines, industrialists, traffickers, and more. By 1860, if the American South had been a standalone country, it would have been the fourth richest country in the world.
Continuing the journey, we see newspaper ads for the sale of enslaved people, and notices offering detailed descriptions and rewards for the return of escaped persons. One such notice describes “a mulatto man slave named Robin…[who] has several noted scars on his feet and legs…that when he walks or works his foot it draws as if the leaders were cut…has several scars in his head, his back, has been well whipped, and is a carpenter and cooper by trade.” It sounds like Robin had a determined spirit. I find myself hoping he got away.
After the Civil War, formerly enslaved people began to place newspaper ads searching for relatives. One such public notice starts with the poignant words, “I would like to find my people.”
The original U.S. constitution, before amendments, enshrined no rights and protections to African Americans; rather, it deprived them of their humanity. After emancipation, state and federal legislation as well as harsh Supreme Court rulings continued to diminish Black people’s rights.
When Southern states began seceding from the Union in 1860, the new confederacy’s constitution explicitly provided for the continuation of slavery. There was a brief period of progress in racial equality after the Civil War; Black men were elected to both Congress and the Senate, including Virginia’s first African-American congressman, John Mercer Langston. But a change in political leadership in Washington in the late 1800s led to the erasure of the gains made during Reconstruction, and the beginning of a painful, century-long era of Black Codes, lynchings, and Jim Crow. It would not be until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that true American democracy began.
Nearing the end of the exhibit, we are presented with unsettling modern-day statistics about the wealth gap, inequities in health care and school funding, and continued segregation; we see how the legacy of slavery lives on, from social and environmental injustice to mass incarceration.
Standing outside in the parking lot, near the site of Lumpkin’s Jail (infamously known as the “Devil’s Half Acre” because of the misery and torture that occurred there), I try to get a sense of what it was like, standing on that spot in, say, 1860. Not that long ago, when you think about it. Auction blocks. Slave jails. All within a 10-minute walk of the State Capitol. I imagine the commotion. The horses and wagons jostling for space. And dark-skinned humans, reduced to the status of horses, being monetized and “sold”. Hired out. Insured. Used as collateral on loans. I think of mothers separated from their babies, of families torn apart in all kinds of ways, and as author, minister, and formerly enslaved man, Jacob Stroyer described, the “weeping and wailing…as far as human voice could be heard.”
Expanding Freedom tells the painful story of American slavery. But it also emphasizes American exceptionalism in “pursuing the lofty aims of its founding.”
“In the end, it’s all storytelling, right?” says Dr. Gregg Kimball, senior consulting historian at the Institute. “So what more powerful way to tell the history than through personal stories?” Dr. Kimball says the exhibit is a baseline for how we got here. The question that is asked in discussion with him after my friend and I have seen the exhibit is the same one Dr. King asked, many years ago: Where do we go from here? How, and why, does this history live on? Are we moving forward or falling back? What action can, and must, we take? Taking advantage of the important and unique offerings at the Shockoe Institute can help us answer these questions, and many more.
The Shockoe Institute is located at 1500 E Main St, 1st Floor, Richmond, VA 23219. Tickets are free and may be obtained on the Institute’s website. My friend and I spent two hours going through the exhibit but easily could have stayed longer. We did not get to the The Lab, where visitors can use touch screens to access a vast digital library of all the records and resources used to construct the exhibit, as well as discuss with others what they have just witnessed and experienced. Next time.
Cover photo: The Shockoe Institute’s portrayal of Elizabeth Key, whose remarkable story
alone is worthy of an exhibit.
FOR RELATED READING ON THIS WEBSITE:
Check out Marsha Melkonian's August 2022 review of The Devil's Half Acre: The Untold Story of How One Woman Liberated the South's Most Notorious Slave Jail. The book is a biographical account of the life of Mary Lumpkin, the forced "wife" of a brutal slave trader and jailer, and how she transformed the site of the jail into one of the nation's first HBCUs. Link.
In October 2022, Marsha wrote a review of Yellow Wife: A Novel, a fictional account of Mary Lumpkin's life, which describes how she transformed the "Devil's Half Acre" into "God's Half Acre". Link.
Both articles can be found on our Blogs page.
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