This is a national appeal for your help in the effort to save one of this country’s most important Black History sites — an effort that has now reached a critical stage.

Richmond’s Shockoe Bottom was once the site of the second largest slave market in the United States. In the three decades before the Civil War, most of the 300,000 and 350,000 Black people sold from Virginia passed through its auction houses. By 1860, there were 4.5 million people of African descent in the U.S., so just do the math: today, the majority of Black people in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico can probably trace some ancestry to Shockoe Bottom. Read More