Richmond’s African Burial Ground

Richmond’s African Burial Ground, originally the Burial Ground for Negroes and dating from about 1750 to 1816, was the oldest known municipal cemetery for enslaved and free blacks in the Richmond area and may have been among the oldest in the country. It became the final resting place of Africans brought in chains from West and Central Africa and of people of African descent born in Virginia. Their forced, unpaid labor helped establish the economic basis for the development of Richmond, the South, and the United States, and because Richmond played a central role in the internal slave trade, descendants of those buried there can likely be found throughout North America. Burial practices reflected African understandings of the relationship between the living and the dead, including interment with offerings, family groupings, African-style clothing and beads, and sometimes double burials such as a parent and child. The care shown to the dead affirmed the humanity of people whom society treated as chattel. The ground was also the site of the Town Gallows, where Gabriel of the nearby Prosser plantation was executed on Oct. 10, 1800, for attempting to lead a mass rebellion against slavery, and where he was likely buried; 25 other enslaved Africans were executed here or at three other locations after convictions in the conspiracy. In 2007, Governor Timothy M. Kaine pardoned Gabriel. Free African Christopher McPherson later protested the burial ground’s poor condition, warning in 1810 that heavy rains were washing graves and coffins into Shockoe stream and toward the James River. After its abandonment around 1816, the site was covered by later development, at various times including the Richmond City Jail, a city dog pound in the 1930s, Interstate 95 in the 1950s, and a parking lot from the 1970s. Rediscovered in the early 1990s, it became the focus of research, education, protest, and reclamation, and in 2011 land transfer funding was approved so the site could be returned to the City of Richmond for preservation and memorialization.

Richmond, Virginia · United States