REV. BEN CAMPBELL

FORMER DIRECTOR OF RICHMOND HILL

“The National Slavery Museum project is the product of 25 years of work that began with the Healing the Heart of America conference of Hope in the Cities/Initiatives of Change in 1993.  As a part of that conference, Hope in the Cities, Richmond Hill, and the Elegba Folklore Society sponsored a History Walk through unmarked black historic sites in downtown Richmond.  

Over 500 persons participated in that walk, including Walter Kenney, then the mayor of Richmond.  Subsequently, the City of Richmond appointed a Slave Trail Commission to mark and develop a trail between many of the sites, allowing the retelling of the history that had essentially been buried. Hope in the Cities director Rob Corcoran, Sylvester Turner, and I were members of that Commission.  

In 2007 the Commission installed the Reconciliation Statue on the trail, at the corner of 15th and Main — a situation which had been developed through Hope in the Cities’ relationships with Liverpool and Benin.  At about the same time, we uncovered the fact that Richmond had been the second largest slave market in America for the hitherto unknown Downriver Slave Trade, in which more than 300,000 persons of African descent were sold from Richmond to the cotton and sugar fields of the South from 1830-1860.  

We then uncovered Lumpkin’s Jail, one of the major slave jails in that market, and ultimately the postwar site of the founding of what became Virginia Union University.  That excavated slave jail will be the hard, undeniable artifact on which the National Slavery Museum will be built.  The Museum will tell the story of enslavement, of struggle, and ultimately of victory for the untold half of the American Revolution.”