Walking Through History

Hope in the Cities believes that participating in the ritualized recognition of historical sites and events can lead to reconciliation between polarized groups or individuals. It is through addressing the historical injustice as an inclusive group made up of descendants of both perpetrator and victims that each group can help in healing itself and the other group. Hope in the Cities calls its history concept, Sacred Stories.

Unhealed history and memory can be “containers for grievances.” The right kind of remembering can build a common narrative for a local or national community and can act as a corrective and a guide for the future. The concept of Sacred Stories recognizes that each individual and group has memories that are important, often specific to them and which shape their identity. The walk through history enables different groups to share their Sacred Stories and to learn to hear history from the perspective of “the other.”

Experiential learning, actually walking and touching the places where wounds were created and maintained through individual or systemic injustice, and embracing a shared history, is the most impactful way to begin creating healed and honest relationships based on trust.

Today, serving as a center for community trustbuilding, Richmond provides a resource for all groups and communities seeking to heal history. An accurate, respectful public telling of the story of all groups can unite communities long divided. 

Background: Why Richmond?

Richmond is at the heart of the “history corridor” of the east coast. Proud of its history as a birthplace of democracy, a more recent telling of the story has acknowledged that Richmond was also second only to New Orleans in the domestic slave trade market, served as the capital of the Confederacy and was a leader of Massive Resistance. In the first half of the 19th century as many as 300,000 people were sold in the city’s auction houses and transported to plantations in the Deep South. By 1860 Virginia had the largest slave population of any American colony. Within 30 miles of Richmond Union and Confederate armies fought 43 major battles and suffered almost 25% of the entire Civil War’s casualties.

Richmond is a city that continues to grapple with the legacy of its past. In 1993 Hope in the Cities led a broad-based coalition of citizens in a first Walk through History making Richmond the first US city to publicly and formally recognize its racial history. For the first time, white and black came together to mark significant sites. These include Manchester Docks where Africans disembarked from slave ships and Lumpkin’s Jail where families were torn apart and ”sold down the river.” Over the past 15 year this sustained work of healing painful racial history has continued. In 1996 the City of Richmond created a Slave Trail Commission. In 1999 apologies for slavery were issued by Liverpool City Council, UK and President Kerekou of Benin, West Africa. In 2007 the Virginia General Assembly issued a resolution of “profound regret” for slavery and 5000 people gathered to see the Reconciliation Statue unveiled in the heart of the city’s commercial district at the site of Richmond’s slave markets. In 2008 excavation began in Shockoe Bottom of Lumpkin’s Jail and is cited in Smithsonian Magazine, March 2009

The “walk through history” pioneered in Richmond in 1993 has become a model for communities everywhere seeking to heal from a painful past. Richmond’s historic Slave Trail now forms the heart of interpretive walks held on request throughout the year.

What the Participants Experience

The Walk at Manchester Docks is led by an African American and European American pair. After an introduction to the trail and its history, the group walks in silence, single file and holding hands to the mid-point. There walkers are told the second half of the history of slavery, of those sold from Richmond to plantations further south, and they walk back, again in silence, this time putting their hands on the shoulders of the individual in front of them.

Participants’ experiences are widely divergent from a sense of sorrow to even affirmation. However, all seem to experience a release of emotion and stored pain/shame, in some cases unknown to themselves prior to the walk. Releasing those emotions/thoughts/traumas creates space for the possibility of reconciliation.

The walk includes acknowledging a memorial to young Confederate soldiers and sailors who died, as well as sites of slave and civil war history. It is important that everyone understand this is the group’s collective history, not black history or confederate history, but a shared history. Everyone is needed to create a new future for all.

The walk continues on to the heart of Richmond’s economic district to the site of Lumpkin’s Slave jail. The final stop is at the Reconciliation Statue where the focus shifts to the legacy that remains and the need to address the current realities and create a just and inclusive community. On the base of the Reconciliation statues are inscribed the words of Richmond’s children ‘Acknowledge the past, embrace the present, shape a future of reconciliation and justice.’

A walk through history is a model for an accurate, respectful, inclusive public telling of the story. It establishes an agenda for healing by:

• Allowing the conscience of large numbers of people to be mobilized
• Liberating all parties by breaking the cycle of guilt, avoidance and resentment
• Enabling people of different backgrounds to take ownership of shared history

Whether this experience is shared by students, family reunion members, church groups or simply those seeking to heal painful racial history, the discovery is that history acknowledged can provide creative energy for the restoration of broken relationships and the reform of unjust systems.

For more information or to schedule a walk please contact us.

James W. Loewen, author of Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong, writes about his experience of walking through Richmond’s history with Hope in the Cities at the American Association for State and Local History conference earlier this month.

Read Sandra McMillian's poem, Where I Walked, that is a personal reflection on her experience of walking the historic Slave Trail in Richmond, VA.

Related stories:

A Pilgrimage of Pain and Hope

Richmond Announces Plans For Slavery Museum

Liverpool, Slavery Remembrance and the Reconciliation Triangle

'Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Effects Still Felt Today'

Reconciliation Triangle Takes Giant Step

Ground Broken for Reconciliation Sculpture

Northern Ireland Group Studies Reconciliation in Richmond

Reconciliation Triangle: Liverpool Takes Another Step