Richmond Virginia, Once the
Slave Trading Capital of the United States

By Skip Schiel

Essay #7 from the Interfaith Pilgrimage of the Middle Passage

July 29, 1998--Norfolk, Virginia

(For other essays, see <www.brightworks.com/quaker/midpas.html> and for general information about the Pilgrimage, see <www.interfaithpilgrimage.com> To reach me by email: skipschiel@gmail.com. Or by snail-mail: 9 Sacramento St, Cambridge MA 02138. Comments appreciated.)

Slavery is like an unburied corpse, racism is its stench. What to do? Acknowledge the decomposing tissue, bone, bodily fluids-slavery in all its manifestations. Allow into awareness the revolting stink racism-one third of young African American males part of the penal system, the disproportionate frequency of AIDS and HIV among people of African descent, and all the other indices of oppression faced by black people in this nation. Dispose of the remains. And mark its place in the earth so powerfully that it can never come back to life again. Finally purify our realms with prayers, reflections, messages, song, dance to freshen the air, allow us all to breathe fully once again. This I and my fellow pilgrims of the Middle Passage attempted to do recently in Richmond Virginia.

For the nearly 50 years prior to the outbreak of the Civil War, Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy, largely built with slave labor, was also this nation's slave trading center. After intercontinental slaving was abolished in 1809, Richmond discovered that shipping enslaved people further south and west was lucrative. The city grew as an extension of Jamestown and Williamsburg. The first "twenty or odd" captured Africans arrived on these shores in 1619. Today, racism, slavery's legacy, continues--in Richmond and beyond.

So when the people of Richmond threw our Middle Passage Pilgrimage its heartiest welcome to date, I shouldn't have been surprised. Greeted first by about 25 people at the outlying Azalea Mall, many of them joining to walk with us, accompanied by some 15 police officers on motorcycles and in cruisers, along with two paramedics on bicycles, we arrived at the campus of the largely black Virginia Union University amidst an enthusiastic, joyous, festive throng of Richmonders, mostly African-American. I'd walked ahead of a sturdy black man saying to the pilgrim he'd just met, "I was just seated on the city council and I back this effort of yours totally." This was Sa'ad Al-Amin, the key organizer of the Richmond section of our pilgrimage.

He'd been contacted in early July, some two weeks before the Pilgrimage was scheduled to arrive in Richmond. Earlier contacts had not borne fruit. He'd won a city council seat in May, began his term in July, and could now marshal city services and facilities to support the Pilgrimage. He also hoped our presence would help unlock city council approval for one of his efforts-enhancing a local slave history site. Other cities like New York and Washington had ignored our presence-no officials, minimal hospitality, little media coverage. For example, in Washington, as we began our procession on the National Mall to the sites of slave trading, I counted two photographers, one video team, and a reporter or two. Minutes earlier, I'd walked by a court house and noted the cluster of some 50 eager media folk waiting for an appearance of someone connected to the Clinton-Lewinsky debacle. We had invited officials from the White House, Congress, and DC local government. Total municipal and federal turnout to our Mall procession: zero.

Contrast this with Richmond. We met city council members, as well as the mayor and the vice mayor, discussed local history with the director and education department manager of the Richmond Historical Society, toured the black history museum, meeting its director, slept in a city sports arena, ate courtesy of the city at a black owned restaurant, shuttled on city school buses. And we concluded our three-day stay with two signal events: an apology for slavery by the mayor and an evening procession down a riverfront slavery trail with more than 150 local community members.

On the first day, at the university gathering, outside on a sultry day, refreshed with fruit and cold drinks, we heard from a local historian how the slavery system evolved in this country during a brief four decades, from indentured servitude modeled after the British system to the lifelong bondage of full scale slavery. Making the message more poignant for me was the fact that we'd soon be walking to the site of the invention of slavery: Jamestown, settled in 1607 and in 1619, the community first importing captured Africans onto this continent.

I wish I could quote for you now the mayor's speech. I have it on audiotape and in pictures; perhaps it will be a central feature of the slide show I hope to make when finished with this yearlong journey. The mayor, a young white man, first iterated two arguments our federal president used to justify not apologizing for slavery-an apology won't help and why should I, not complicit in slavery, apologize? He then said, in effect, "I am deeply grieved by what happened in the past, what my ancestors perpetrated, and what I continue to benefit from." He was greeted with a standing ovation from the 150 or so mixed race people in the council chambers of city hall (mostly black. Where were the Richmond citizens of European descent?). And a hug and words of surprise and approval by one of the African American pilgrims, Smitty.

That speech, and the accompanying drumming, poetry reading, singing at city hall, sparked our evening procession across the James River. We began at a place where for decades Africans were taken from ships and marched along a trail at night-to conceal from others their moaning, weeping, screaming, and their odors from the weeks on board slave ships, afraid this sensory barrage would reveal the shameful importation of human beings as beasts of burden, bought and sold as if oxen, mules, horses, tractors. They were forced into pens and put on auction blocks, examined like animals, families wantonly broken, sold as property. From the Manchester Docks, across Mayo Island, to the site of Lampkins Jail, all beginning to be marked and interpreted. We were a long line, a total of some 300 persons, most from Richmond's black community. For one hour or more we walked, some in silence, some drumming and chanting the Buddhist prayer for peace and reconciliation, some chatting amiably, laughing. I photographed-my form of prayer-and attempted to imagine the horror of those captives first touching the earth at Richmond.

As we emerged from the river edge woods and climbed a ridge, I recalled a famous photograph from the Civil Rights era, a line of walkers in silhouette, flags flying, people in different postures, some leaning into the future, their hopes and prayers visible against the gray sky. I saw the same image as the Richmond walkers ascended a river flood control bank, hazy pink sky in the background, silhouettes becoming enslaved Africans, no matter what the skin color now, each carrying the spirit of those bound over into servitude. This I saw, for sure, and photographed.

Or so I imagined, dreamt, one of many images from our Richmond experience.

Sa'ad Al-Amin praised us for walking, thanked us for choosing Richmond as a way station to Africa, announced that our expected presence had helped motivate a stuck city council to approve a mandate upgrading the slave trail site, prayed we would be a part of the transformation of the city from slave capital to a city of racial justice, honoring all who have worked to make life better. On Monument Avenue, path of one of our earlier processions, we had begun at a statue of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, and ended at a recent statue of Arthur Ashe, black tennis champion, whole man, and role model for youth of African descent. "We need more leaders and honorings of them," Mr. Al-Amin asserted, "people building the new Richmond, the new nation, the new world."

"When we walk together, our feet touch the same earth, we walk beneath the same sun and soak the same rain. As we journey together with a common purpose, we realize that joys and difficulties can arise but the difficulties need not stop us. In walking, we begin to restore the spiritual strength of humanity, the strength to reverse the vicious repercussion of our history and to move towards a genuinely peaceful society nourished by the innate generosity of human beings and the natural world."

(Middle Passage Pilgrimage literature)

 

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