$850,000 in federal funds to help protect Shockoe's historic slavery sites
The big, yard-long check that Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., and Rep. Jennifer McClellan, D-4th, brought from Washington to help protect Shockoe Bottom sites that tell the story of slavery marked one step in a long, long journey, Warner said.
“Way, way back at the beginning of this century, when I was governor, Delores McQuinn never missed an opportunity to get in my face and say ‘We gotta tell the whole story,'” Warner recalled.
Back then, McQuinn was a member of the Richmond City Council, pushing for ways to memorialize the city’s central role in the tragic history of slavery.
She’s kept pushing as a member of the House of Delegates, and the $850,000 check from federal infrastructure funds that Warner and McClellan presented will help protect sites in flood-prone Shockoe Bottom like Lumpkin’s Jail, the slave market and Burial Ground.
Ultimately, McQuinn, The Shockoe Project and the city want the area to be a place to understand the history of enslaved and free Africans and people of African descent, with elements including Lumpkin's Jail, the Shockoe Institute, the National Slavery Museum and the Trail of the Enslaved. The project is currently in the final planning stages.
“This was the second-largest epicenter of the slave trade in America, and the grief that thousands upon thousands of individuals experienced here echoes today, here, into the present, and we still feel it,” Mayor Danny Avula said at a Main Street Station event to formally hand over the federal money.
“It has always been my firm belief that in order to create a better future, we need to not only look at our past, but we've got to be thoughtful about the ways that we uncover and uplift our history,” he said.
Though the check came from Washington, Washington doesn’t always understand that, Warner said.
“Unfortunately, we have people now in the White House who want to rewrite that story and go back to some kind of 1950s sanitized version, and that is not the truth of America,” Warner said.
With that rewriting comes a push to retreat from the progress the nation has made on rights for all, McClellan said.
“We have come a long way towards the ideal promise, on which this country was founded 250 years ago, that all men are created equal, endowed by their creator with the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, but we have to acknowledge when Thomas Jefferson wrote those words, he did not include me … and he most certainly did not include the men, women, and children that he owned at Monticello, and that passed through the Devil’s avenue,” McClellan said, referring the paths Africans walked from the docks to the marketplace where the chained men and women were sold into bondage for life.
“There are people in power in the White House and in Congress who want to not only bury that issue, but they want to go back and undo a lot of the progress that we have made … and we are here to say, stay out of our lives,” she said.
The money, meanwhile, will help fund several site-specific flood prevention projects, said Scott Morris, director of the city’s Department of Public Utilities.
Finding federal funds to help Richmond and other central Virginia localities with their challenges with water and stormwater is a continuing priority, McClellan and Warner said.
At a roundtable last year, “We were able to talk to a lot of local governments about the water infrastructure needs and what the federal government had to do. Spoiler alert, the needs are too great for the localities, or even the state, to handle alone,” McClellan said.
And although with the $850,000 “we did ask for more than we got,” she said, “we're going to keep asking; this is just the beginning.”
For now, though, that $850,000 is a big deal, McQuinn said.
“Yesterday, while having a grown-up conversation with my 8-year-old granddaughter, Haven, she reminded me that time passes in seconds and minutes and hours, days, and she went through the whole list, days, weeks, months, years, generations, and centuries,” McQuinn said.
“I put these words in my heart today as I reflect on and celebrate what some once called a pipe dream. It was just too fantastic. It was too far-fetched and too unlikely to come to pass. Yet here we stand today, witnessing it being realized,” she said.
“This is a great investment in excavation, education, and elevation is investment toward liberty, remembrance, repair and true justice for all,” McQuinn said.
“When we do all of these things, we are always preserving what we feel for reconciliation of a country that needs it so much.”