[Micheal Paul] Williams says that instead of a major, $330 million ballpark and assorted retail, office and condos in Richmond's Shockoe Bottom, Doug Wilder's failed National Slavery Museum should be built there.And, since Galuszka went on to say he thinks baseball seems to still make more sense on The Boulevard than it does in The Bottom, his reasoning drew comments from the busiest voice of the Shockoe Bottom Secret Baseball Society.
That makes sense. The area was the second largest slave market int he U.S. next to New Orleans. Thousands of black Africans were shipped in in chains and then auctioned off to plantations in spots farther South such as Alabama and Mississippi. Families were broken. Marriages dissolved as overseers stood by with guns and whips.
This sorry chapter in Virginia's and Richmond's history needs to be remembered and commemorated every bit as much as Confederate history is on Monument Avenue, at the museum near VCU's Medical Center and by the stars and bars hanging next to the Virginia Museum of Art.
It has been the habit of the anonymous SBSBS membership to jump into the comments sections at blogs and online magazines, etc., to attack anyone who says professional baseball should stay in the area The Diamond is now, and to spread disinformation that puts the neighborhood surrounding it in a bad light. And, the SBSBS routinely heaps all manner of praise on the plan to build a stadium in Shockoe Bottom.
How many members are in the cloaked SBSBS? Good question, but one can only guess. Click here for more about this topic.
Anyway, it seems the revelations from the Lumpkin’s slave jail dig and other recently discovered photographic evidence of the locations of other such jails is sparking new interest in building a museum to tell the story of what really happened in the business of buying and selling human beings in Richmond, Virginia, before the fall of the Confederacy.
Click here to read "Why Shockoe's a Good Spot for a Slavery Museum," at Bacon's Rebellion.
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