Richmond's African Burial Ground

Richmond’s African Burial Ground, originally the Burial Ground for Negroes and used from about 1750 to 1816, is the oldest known municipal cemetery for enslaved and free Blacks in the Richmond area and may be among the oldest in the country. It became the final resting place of many Africans brought in chains from West and Central Africa and of people of African descent born in Virginia, whose forced unpaid labor helped build Richmond, the South, and the United States. The ground also contained the Town Gallows, relocated there by Henrico County authorities, where condemned people were often executed by the painful short-drop method; Billy Harris was executed there in 1796, and Gabriel, leader of the 1800 conspiracy to lead a mass rebellion against slavery, was executed there on October 10, 1800, likely to be buried at the site along with 25 other enslaved Africans executed here or at three other locations for roles in the conspiracy. Gabriel had drawn on lessons from the American Revolution and the triumphs of enslaved Africans in Haiti in planning a coup against Virginia’s government, and in 2007 Governor Timothy M. Kaine pardoned him, saying that his cause had prevailed in the light of history. African burial practices expressed ties between the living and the dead through offerings, family groupings, African-style clothing and beads, and sometimes double burials, and the care shown to the dead affirmed the humanity of people whom society treated as chattel. In 1810 Christopher McPherson, a free African and advocate for improving the site, condemned its condition and warned that rain was washing graves and coffins into Shockoe stream and toward the James River. After the burial ground was abandoned around 1816, it was covered by later development, at times serving as the site of the Richmond City Jail, the city dog pound in the 1930s, part of Interstate 95 in the 1950s, and a parking lot from the 1970s, before its rediscovery in the early 1990s led to research, protest, preservation efforts, removal of asphalt, and a 2011 state-approved transfer of land from Virginia Commonwealth University to the City of Richmond. The site also stands within the broader history traced by the Richmond Slave Trail, which follows the movement of enslaved Africans through Richmond from the docks, across the James River, through markets and jails, to this burial ground and the First African Baptist Church.

Richmond, Virginia · United States