RICHMOND — Lucy Mead, born into slavery and sold multiple times after age 9, had been free for 30 years when she took out a newspaper ad with a simple plea:
“I would like to find my people,” she wrote in 1895 in the Richmond Planet.
Her mother, two sisters, two brothers and stepchildren all disappeared into the South’s pre-Civil War market for humans. Her husband was “killed by a mob in Texas.”
Mead’s words, along with scores of similar pleas, are exhibited at a new facility in Richmond aimed at stimulating discussion about America’s darkest chapter. While that might seem like subversive counterprogramming to President Donald Trump’s efforts to celebrate “Freedom 250” this week, organizers say it is actually a tribute to America’s struggle to attain its unique promise of greatness.
“You better believe America’s an exceptional nation. Absolutely,” Marland Buckner, president and CEO of the recently opened Shockoe Institute, said in an interview. “The story of the struggle to expand human freedom is what makes us exceptional.”
The Trump administration has tried to purge the issue of slavery from public spaces in the name of patriotism or, in the case of traveling “Freedom Truck” exhibits, recast emancipation as proof of the nation’s virtue. The Shockoe Institute, by contrast, aims to examine the origins and legacy of enslavement to better understand the country today and, as said in an orientation video, “improve our civic life.”
The institute, four years in the making, is the first piece of what’s envisioned as a national memorial and museum to the slave trade just down the hill from Virginia’s Thomas Jefferson-designed Capitol. The Shockoe Bottom area of Richmond was one of the South’s busiest slave markets before the Civil War.
Highlighting that legacy is part of an effort across Richmond to take a more comprehensive view of the city’s influential history, beyond the longtime obsession with commemorating it as the capital of the Confederacy. The Skipwith-Roper Cottage, which opened near Shockoe in April, celebrates a free Black man who helped establish the city’s most melting-pot neighborhood, Jackson Ward, in the late 1700s.
The Virginia Museum of History and Culturehas marked America 250 in part by opening a major exhibit on how immigration created today’s America. Last weekend, the museum showcased a 20-minute montage of the diversity of American history projected across the building’s facade. On July Fourth, it hosted a citizenship ceremony.
Buckner said the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence is the perfect time to consider the nation’s progress in achieving Jefferson’s proclamation of the equality of all — and the context in which it was written.
Funded by an $11 million grant in 2022 from the Mellon Foundation, the Shockoe Institute was designed as part museum, part research and conference facility. The exhibit is free to tour, but visitors are asked to reserve tickets in advance. It’s located at one end of the vast train shed at downtown Richmond’s Main Street Station.
The railroad played an important role in shipping human chattel from the slave market that once stood in what’s now the parking lot, and giant iron girders supporting the tracks overhead run through the interior of the institute.
“It’s designed to be an immersive experience,” Buckner said. The curved lines on the floor and sound of gurgling water evoke Shockoe Creek, which flowed through the bottomland of the site. Colored lights, moving images and voice recordings draw visitors through areas devoted to the roots and practice of slavery in America.
The institute’s displays use hard data to show how developments throughout history made enslavement integral to establishing English colonies and the United States.
European slave trade routes built an international economy. The language of Virginia law — highlighted in large print on the walls — inexorably tightened the grip on Africans over indentured Europeans and Native tribes. While some still dispute whether slavery was at the heart of the Civil War, the exhibit highlights how Southern states explicitly invoked slavery in their secession declarations.
From that stark reality, Buckner said, came the unique story of a nation fighting against itself to pursue the lofty aims of its founding. There should be no fear, he added, in confronting those facts.
“We love, love, love to tell ourselves and the rest of the world how big and bad we are. Well, if we’re so big and bad, then let’s take a good, hard, long look in the mirror and let’s get tough-minded about fixing how we got to be where we are,” he said.
The human stories bring the threads of history to life. The exhibit highlights a few individuals, among the millions lost to time, whose lives were caught up in “the abominable Trade,” as one Quaker abolitionist termed it:
Elizabeth Key, a Black woman who sued for freedom in 1656. William Watkins, born into slavery, then photographed and interviewed in 1937. Journalist John Mitchell Jr., who warned of the repression of Jim Crow.
And Lucy Mead, born in Hampton, Virginia, who simply wanted to find her family. It is not known whether she — or any of the others whose similar stories are collected at the institute — ever found them.
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