RICHMOND, VA. — The place called Lumpkin's Slave Jail was indeed a jail, but it was much more than that. It was a holding pen for human chattel.
In Richmond's Shockoe Bottom river district, the notorious slave trader Robert Lumpkin ran the city's largest slave-holding facility in the 1840s and 1850s. Tens of thousands of blacks were held in the cramped brick building while they waited to be sold.
Those who resisted were publicly whipped.
"The individual would be laid down, his hands and feet stretched out and fastened in the rings, and a great big man would stand over him and flog him," a clergyman wrote after witnessing the punishment.
On Wednesday, black and white Richmond residents walked together across the rain-slicked cobblestones, excavated this month, that mark the outlines of the old slave jail. This former Confederate capital's announcement that Lumpkin's Jail had been found was the latest acknowledgment of its painful slave history.
Since Richmond's City Council formed the Slave Trail Commission in 1998, the city gradually has been confronting both the enslavement of blacks and their contributions to the city.
"This is a part of our history that was covered up for too long," said Charles Vaughan, a retired bus operator and commission member.
A descendant of slaves, Vaughan stood staring at the jail's spectral remains Wednesday, wondering whether some distant relative once was imprisoned there.
Richmond, which is 57% black, long has honored its Confederate past with monuments to Gen. Robert E. Lee, President Jefferson Davis and thousands of rebel soldiers. But only with its decade-long examination of the slave trail -- which includes the jail, an adjoining Negro Burial Ground, and the slave marketplace and docks -- has it shone a light on its legacy of slavery.
"It was hushed for so long," said Ana Edwards of the Sacred Ground Project, which erected a historical marker for the cemetery, which is covered by a university parking lot. "Slavery was not something anybody wanted to address."
Blacks called Lumpkin's Slave Jail "Devil's Half Acre." Some died there from abuse or disease. Thousands more were fed and groomed for sale at nearby slave markets, then sent by boat or rail to toil on farms and plantations throughout the South.
"They were literally sold down the river," said Philip J. Schwarz, a professor emeritus of history at Virginia Commonwealth University, standing a few feet from the jail site and gesturing toward the nearby James River.
