This story was reported and written by VPM News.
The University of Richmond held a dedication ceremony this week for a new memorial honoring enslaved people who labored on the university’s land.
The memorial is located on what is believed to have been a burial ground for enslaved people.
“There is much that we do not know,” said the Rev. Craig Kocher during Wednesday’s ceremony. “We do not know exactly how the people who lie here came to be here. We do not know the specifics of their life stories. We do not even know their exact names. Yet, there is much that we do know. We know that they were human beings, people of sacred worth, who loved and grieved and dreamed and hoped as we do.”
While the overall number of graves on Richmond’s campus is unknown, records show the university knew in 1912 of at least 20 graves that were part of a burial ground.
Even with that knowledge, the school paved over the graves during road construction of a road —in violation of a state law. The road is at the location of what’s now Richmond Way.
When the road was widened in 1947, two graves were broken into by workers on the project; the remains were reburied by the university nearby. And in the mid-1950s, U of R encountered a “series of graves” while upgrading steam tunnels at the site.
Those remains were later reburied at an unknown location by the school.
“Clearly, there was a level of disrespect there,” said Devon Henry, CEO of Team Henry Enterprises, the firm that oversaw the memorial’s construction. “So to see that move forward today, where you have this beautiful symbol of remembrance and reflection — and for that to be done in a very thoughtful and meaningful way — it just means so much for me and my team to be the people to be able to bring it to life.”
It’s not Henry’s first time assisting with the reclamation of Black history: He oversaw the removal of Confederate monuments in Richmond in recent years.
U of R’s memorial acknowledges that the burial ground’s existence was largely forgotten by the university until Shelby Driskill’s research in 2018 returned attention to the site’s history.
In 2020, U of R began engaging the community in discussions about what memorializing the burying ground should look like.
Author Brenda Dabney Nichols, chair of the Enslaved Burying Ground Descendants Council, helped connect the university to descendants of families known to have had relatives enslaved on and around what is now the campus as part of the memorialization process.
Nichols’ own family is connected: She began genealogical research in the 1970s on her mother’s family, the Pryors, and learned how they were related to other local descendants like the Lewis and Carter families.
“I found out so many things, discovered so many people,” Nichols said.
For over 150 years starting in 1702, land that is now part of the University of Richmond’s campus was a series of plantations, including Westham. Between the mid-1840s and 1865, more than 200 children and adults were enslaved on the property.
Following emancipation, many formerly enslaved people stayed in the area in communities such as Westwood, where Nichols’s mother grew up. Her great-great- grandfather, Henry Pryor, founded another similar community called Ziontown.
The descendants helped with the selection of specific materials and design elements for the memorial — like a water feature to symbolize liberation.
Sandra Taylor was on the descendants’ council; she said her ancestors were in the Leecost and Warden families. The Wardens are also connected to the Westwood neighborhood, like Nichols’ family, while the Leecost family has ties to Newtowne in Richmond.
Taylor said her maternal great-grandparents, John and Phyllis Leecost, were members of the First Union Baptist Church, and two of the founders of St. Paul’s Baptist Church.
“We have a lot of history and roots in this area,” Taylor told VPM News. “To grapple with the whole history of slavery is difficult, but as a Black woman, it’s not new to me. I’ve been dealing with it and trying to understand it for years.”
She said walking Richmond’s Slave Trail helped her understand and reflect on what her ancestors must’ve endured.
“They instill in us to do better and make this world a better place, despite what may have happened in the past,” Taylor added. “Remember the past, but don’t focus on the past.”
Ann-Frances Lambert, former Richmond City Council member, is also a descendant of the Warden family.
“It’s great to have a destination landmark to tell the history of the family,” Lambert said. “It’s an emotional time, but it’s very surreal that from an idea — we’re now here. So it’s beautiful.”
Yamir Chapman, a senior at U of R, said the memorial “demonstrates a huge step in the right direction for our institution” as it works to reconcile with its past and history.
Other University of Richmond students like Tsion Maru, who stopped by the memorial Wednesday, said they’d like to see the school do more to ensure all students and visitors are aware of its history.
Maru, who heard about the consecration ceremony in an Africana Studies class, told VPM News that the event shouldn’t be “where it ends.”
“I don’t think conversations about this should be secluded to just Africana Studies classes,” Maru said. “Because that’s often what it becomes: only if you’re taking a class that’s super niche and super specific, that’s the only way you find out about it.”
According to Sunni Brown, the school’s senior director of media relations, several disciplines across the university have been teaching about the Burying Ground through a variety of lenses.
Brown added that several spring semester classes are visiting the Burying Ground Memorial this week as part of their course content.
Between 1897 and 1909, the Grand Fountain of the United Order of the True Reformers — an African American mutual benefit association — owned the land containing the burial ground. The group planned to build a home for the elderly as well as 130 individual homesites on the land.
As the memorial itself points out, the location for Richmond College’s relocation to the area that is now the University of Richmond was chosen in the early 1900s to attract white residents to purchase homes in a planned nearby neighborhood of “villa sites” that excluded Black people through restrictive covenants.
“To entice home buyers and anchor the community,” the memorial plaque reads, 251 acres of property were sold to the college for $10 from a group of wealthy developers who purchased the land from the True Reformers in 1909.
Copyright 2025 VPM
