Upper Shockoe Valley in Richmond, Virginia — The American South (Mid-Atlantic)

Richmond’s African Burial Ground

Photographed by Devry Becker Jones (CC0), September 7, 2024

1. Richmond's African Burial Ground Marker [Left plaque]

Inscription. "Se wo were fi na wosankofa a yenkyi."
"It is not wrong to go backfor that which you have forgotten."
- A proverb of the Akan people of West Africa

This Burial Ground for Negroes (ca. 1750-1816), reclaimed as Richmond's African Burial Ground, is the oldest municipal cemetery for enslaved and free blacks known to have existed in the Richmond area, and may be among the oldest in the entire country.

This is the final resting place for many of the Africans who arrived on Virginia's shores in chains from West and Central Africa, as well as for people of African descent born in Virginia. While disrespected, exploited and terribly abused in their lifetimes, their forced, unpaid labor established an economic basis for the development not only of Richmond, Virginia, and the South, but also contributed to the development of the United States as a whole. Because of Richmond's central role in this country's internal slave trade, descendants of those buried here can likely be found throughout North America.

The relationship that Africans saw between the living and the dead was demonstrated in burial rituals. Research conducted at other locations, such as New York City's African Burial Ground, shows that people often were interred with offerings and according to family groups, wearing African-style clothing and beads. Sometimes there were double burials of family members, such as a parent and a child.

Burying the dead is one of the fundamental practices that distinguishes human beings from animals, and the care that the families of those buried here showed their departed was an expression not only of their love for their family members, but also a defiant affirmation of their own humanity, so cruelly denied them by the society that saw them only as chattel fit for exploitation.

This Burial Ground was also the site of the Town Gallows, where Virginia's young freedom-fighting hero Gabriel of the nearby Prosser plantation was executed on Oct. 10, 1800, for his role in attempting to lead a mass rebellion against slavery. Courageously, Gabriel planned a coup against Virginia's government. He established methodology from observing the American Revolution and the triumphs of enslaved Africans in Haiti. Gabriel and 25 other enslaved Africans were executed here or in three other locations after courts convicted them for their roles in the conspiracy. In 2007, Governor Timothy M. Kaine pardoned Gabriel, saying, "Gabriel's cause -- the end of slavery and the furtherance of equality of all people -- has prevailed in the light of history."

An elder once said that cemeteries are not for the dead, but for the living. They are a place where the living come and pay homage to those whom a debt is owed. This reclaimed sacred ground is where the living descendants of those enslaved and free Africans who rest here now come to pay homage to those upon whose shoulders we stand, and to find that which has been forgotten. On October 10, 1800, the last of the rebels executed in Richmond at the city gallows — the "usual place" — was Gabriel, the famous 1800 conspiracy's leader. The gallows are roughtly marked with the letter "N" on the 1810 Young Map within the Burial Ground (see map above). When citizens had pleaded that the executions that occurred near Gamble's Hill had caused distress to their families, Henrico County authorities agreed to relocate the gallows to "the ground adjacent to the powder magazine." Condemned people were often hanged by strangulation, the most painful execution method at that time. Attached to the gallows — two upright posts and a cross piece — a rope and noose suspended and strangled the condemned person as the cart that had carried the victim to the gallows was moved away, causing a slow death known as the "short drop". This kind of torturous capital punishment of an enslaved man, Billy Harris, had occurred in Richmond just four years earlier in 1976.

An advocate for a dramatically improved burial site, free African Christopher McPherson (b 1763?) pointedly observed, "the humiliating circumstances, that this [burial ground] is the very express gallows ground where malefactors are interred." It is likely that Gabriel was buried there. Historian Douglas Egerton assumes the site is now below an overpass and "rusty cars leak oil onto the blacktop just above Gabriel's bones."

In 1810, prominent Richmonder Christopher McPherson, a free African, complained to the political leaders of the day about the Burial Ground's poor conditioning, observing "Every heavy rain commits ravages upon some one grave or another, and some coffins have already been washed away into the current of Shockoe stream, and in a very few years the major part of them will no doubt be washed down into the current of James River."

After the Burial Ground was abandoned around 1816, it was covered under layers of successive development, and was later largely forgotten. At one point the Richmond City Jail was located here. In the 1930s this land was used for the City dog pound. In the 1950s the Burial Ground was partially covered by Interstate 95. From the 1970s it was used as a parking lot, most recently by Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), a state institution.

Rediscovered in the early 1990s, community organizations and advocates began demanding that the site of the Burial Ground be reclaimed and properly memorialized. Through a process of research, education and protest, this goal is being accomplished. In 2011 funding proposed by Governor Robert F. McDonnell was approved by the Virginia House of Delegates and the Senate to allow the transfer of land from VCU to the City of Richmond. The parking lot asphalt has been removed. This signage is the next effort to memorialize the Burial Ground. With the continued interest and support of the community, more extensive preservation measures will be taken.

Henrico County, Court Records, Judgements 1793-1800, folder "Sept-Oct 1800": Commonwealth Causes, Gabriel's Rebellion, Petition, Dunscomb et al (12 others) ti the Wroshipfull Justices of Henrico County, September 18, 1800, EP; Robert Gamble, Mutual Assurance Society policy no. 635, 1802, http://image.lva.virginia.gov/cgi-bin/GetMU.pl?dir=0526/G0034&card=103.Document.Image; Jeffrey Ruggles, "The Burial Ground: an Early African American Site in Richmond," http://www.scribd.com/doc/42051809/Burial-Ground-Ruggles-12-09; The Virginia Journals of Benjamin Henry Latrobe, 1795-1798, Edward C. Carter II, ed. (New Haven, 1977), I. 191-93; Richmond City Hustings Court Order Book, 1792-1977, 492; McPherson, A Short HIstory of the Life of Christopher McPherson (Lynchburg, Va., 1855); Douglas R. Egerton, Death or Liberty: African Americans and Revolutionary America (N.Y., 2009), 281

About the Trail
Designed as a walking path, the Richmond Slave Trail chronicles the history of the trade in enslaved Africans from their homeland to Virginia until 1778, and away from Virginia, especially Richmond, to other locations in the Americas until 1865. The trail begins at the Manchester Docks, which, alongside Rocketts Landing on the north side of the river, operated as a major port in the massive downriver slave trade, making Richmond the largest source of enslaved blacks on the east coast of America from 1830 to 1860. While many of the slaves were shipped on to New Orleans and to other Deep South ports, the trail follows the footsteps of those who remained here and crossed the James River, often chained together in a coffle. Once reaching the northern riverbank, the trail then follows a route through the slave markets and auction houses of Richmond, beside the Reconciliation Statue commemorating the international triangular slave trade and on to the site of the notorious Lumpkin’s Slave Jail and leading on to Richmond’s African Burial Ground, once called the Burial Ground for Negroes, and the First African Baptist Church, a center of African American life in pre-Civil War Richmond.

[Captions:]
Title image: "After the Sale: Slaves Going South", 1853, Painted from live by Eyre Crowe, courtesy the Chicago History Museum

This graphic is a depiction of the Sankofa, a symbolic bird that flies with its head turned backward. The egg in its mouth represents the knowledge of the past upon which wisdom is based. It also signifies the generation to come that would benefit from that wisdom. The word "sankofa" means "to go back and get it" in the Twi language of the Akan people of Ghana and Ivory Coast.

Artist rendition of the city gallows within the burial ground, Mike Odum, Illustrator (Top)

Painting of Gabriel Prosser, Ana Edwards, 2004 (Right)

Image from the "Atonement Ceremony Performed for the Ancestors" on this site, November 6, 2008 by Chief Kundumuah of Princes Town, Ghana (Left)

Erected 2011

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by Richmond Slave Trail Commission. (Marker Number 16.)

Topics. This historical marker is listed in these topic lists: African Americans • Anthropology & Archaeology • Cemeteries & Burial Sites • Law Enforcement. A significant historical date for this entry is September 18, 1800.

Location. 37° 32.269′ N, 77° 25.644′ W. Marker is in Richmond, Virginia. It is in Upper Shockoe Valley. It can be reached from North 16th Street north of East Broad Street (U.S. 250), on the right when traveling south. Touch for map. Marker is at or near this postal address: 1504 E Broad St, Richmond VA 23219, United States of America. Touch for directions.

Regionally, this marker is in Central Virginia.

It is also in the American South

and specifically in the Upper South.

Globally, it is in the North Atlantic Region,

North America,

the Western Hemisphere,

the Western World,

and the Anglosphere.

Historically, it finds itself in what was once the territory of the Mississippian Culture,

one of the original Thirteen Colonies,

one of the Confederate States of America,

and the Antebellum South.

Other nearby markers. At least 8 other markers are within

Richmond's African Burial Ground Marker [Right panel] image. Click for full size.

Photographed by Devry Becker Jones (CC0), September 7, 2024

2. Richmond's African Burial Ground Marker [Right panel]

walking distance of this marker: Execution of Gabriel (within shouting distance of this marker); Gabriel Prosser Execution Site (about 300 feet away); Lumpkin's Jail (about 600 feet away); First African Baptist Church (about 600 feet away); a different marker also named First African Baptist Church (about 700 feet away); Winfree Cottage (about 700 feet away); The Virginia Convention of 1788 (approx. 0.2 miles away); Theatre Fire of December 26, 1811 (approx. 0.2 miles away). Touch for a list and map of all markers in Richmond.

Other markers no longer nearby. Richmond's African Burial Ground (was here, next to this marker but has been replaced with another marker now near it); Old Negro Burial Ground (was about 300 feet away, measured in a direct line but has been replaced with another marker now near it); a different marker also named Lumpkins Jail (was about 700 feet away but has been reported to have been replaced with another marker now near it); The Slave Trade In Richmond (was about 700 feet away but has been reported to have been replaced with another marker now near it); Egyptian Building (was approx. 0.2 miles away

Richmond's African Burial Ground Marker image. Click for full size.

Photographed by Devry Becker Jones (CC0), September 7, 2024

3. Richmond's African Burial Ground Marker

but has been permanently removed).

Related marker. Click here for another marker that is related to this marker. This marker has replaced the linked marker. There are slight differences in the inscriptions.

African Burial Ground Artwork image. Click for full size.

Photographed by Devry Becker Jones (CC0), September 7, 2024

4. African Burial Ground Artwork

Credits. This page was last revised on December 23, 2024. It was originally submitted on September 8, 2024, by Devry Becker Jones of Washington, District of Columbia. This page has been viewed 408 times since then and 41 times this year. Photos: 1, 2, 3, 4. submitted on September 8, 2024, by Devry Becker Jones of Washington, District of Columbia.