On May 21, 2022 artist Sandy Williams IV worked with a skywriting crew to trace the dimensions of a 40-acre plot in the sky over what is now known as Chimborazo Park in Richmond, Virginia. University of Richmond student Ryan Doherty conducted months of research prior to this event, in collaboration with Williams, in order to develop pamphlets and a speech, which Doherty delivered at the event prior to the skywriting. This research was also used to justify the creation of a permanent land acknowledgment to the history of the Chimborazo Freedmen Community, approved by the State of Virginia in 2022, set to be installed and unveiled in 2023. This project was made with support from 1708 Gallery, Reynolds Gallery, Oakwood Arts, CultureWorks, Afrikana Film Festival, The University of Richmond, Arts & Letters Creative Co, the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation, Trilobite Arts, and many other contributors.
“If the archive is a remnant, it is one that keeps whispering to me, insisting on its place in my everyday life.’” – Julietta Singh
The meaning of land shifts along a complex vector that includes our measures of time, our markers of space, our embodied knowledge, external impositions of ownership, and marked and unmarked memory. When an imposition is made atop the existing wealth of cultural, interpersonal, and interspecies webs of a territory, its memory and preservation is threatened. It is threatened by ideas of ownership, of administrative erasure, of claim, and of the simplification of a territory into square footage that can be extracted and molded in the shape of controlled gain.
Chimborazo Park is a territory fraught with such complexities. The park, located on the occupied Powhatan lands colonially known as Richmond, Virginia, briefly held a Confederate Hospital as well as a Freedman community that lived on the land for a year before being violently displaced by the city’s government. Along its topography and its soil lies the memory of a collective promise of renewed agency and reparations following a still incomplete abolition that was tied to the formation of Freedmen communities. That promise continues to whisper to us through layers of mediated displacement and forceful removal.
As our understanding of Chimborazo Park has become abstracted and mediated by the governing bodies that maintain it, 40 ACRES: Chimborazo Park offers an antidote to that. 40 ACRES: Chimborazo Park consisted of an ephemeral performance where a skywriter traced the dimensions of a 40-acre plot in the sky above Chimborazo Park. The piece served as a public acknowledgement, briefly visible for miles. It functioned as a physical metaphor of the legend of reparations, "40 Acres and a Mule," which still holds an invisible presence in our atmosphere.
40 ACRES insists that those remnants of memory and promise are always already here. Claiming us, shaping us, and beckoning us to hold them. Asking us to shape an alternative future with them. 40 ACRES looks upwards to the sky, in an ephemeral act of elevating instead of excavating history. In an act of connecting us to an archive of memory while allowing us to refigure what a promise of reparations can look like. 40 Acres and a Mule. A protected piece of sky. A flourishing piece of land. An existence outside of colonial ownership. A commons.
– text by agustine zegers
Indigenous people lived in the land now known as Virginia for over 12,000 before the Europeans first arrived on the continent. Chief Powhatan inherited six tribes that made up what became known as the Powhatan Chiefdom, and the Powhatan Chiefdom encompassed all of the tidewater Virginia area, from the south side of the James River north to the Potomac River, and parts of the Eastern Shore. Its span was approximately 100 miles by 100 miles, and it is estimated that at least 25,000 Powhatan people lived in this area. - National Park Service[1]
Before colonization, Richmond was one of the capitals of the Powhatan, known as Powhatan, Shocquohocan, or Shockoe. The primary language of the Powhatan was Algonquian, which was solely a spoken language without a written system. Powhatan histories thus were mainly passed down through the oral tradition, which was lost in the ensuing colonial genocide after the arrival of the British in 1609.[2]
Can you imagine the importance that land held over the course of 12,000 years?
The British settlement of Richmond was laid out in April of 1737. Enslaved laborers played a major role in shaping the physical appearance and moral structure of this settlement, as they furnished much of the unskilled labor that dug Richmond’s canals, constructed buildings, and manned the growing number of heavy industries clustered along the banks of the James River. - (“Built by Blacks: African-American Architecture and Neighborhoods in Richmond,” by Selden Richardson and Maurice Duke)
Richmond became a US city in 1782, after much of it was burned by the British during the US Revolutionary War. Slave labor allowed tobacco manufacturing to become the backbone of Richmond’s antebellum economy, and by 1860, this multimilliondollar industry greatly contributed to the range and growth of Richmond’s other infrastructures and industries. - (“Rearing Wolves to Our Own Destruction: Slavery in Richmond, Virginia, 1782-1865,” Midori Takagi)
Chimborazo Hill was so named in 1802, and from 1862 - 1865, this hill functioned as Chimborazo Hospital, the Confederacy’s largest military hospital. With the end of the Civil War, the Union army began establishing refugee camps, also called Freedmen Communities, across the country, and here in Richmond. On April 3rd, 1865, The Freedmen’s Bureau established a Freedmen Community at Chimborazo Hill. Newly free people converted the roughly 100 abandoned hospital barracks into ramshackle homes and schools for newly free people. Dubbed the "Nation's poorest poor," it is estimated that around 2,571 emancipated people were housed at Chimborazo, and at certain times, only 34% of the populace received rations from the Bureau.[3]
The Freedmen’s Bureau commissioned six teachers from New England to open schools at the camp. Over 300 children gathered to receive their education, all of whom were previously enslaved. The Freedmen were eager to learn, and around 200 adults at the camp also enrolled in a night school. While limited, this public education was one of the few opportunities for advancement made available to Black people in the post-Civil War United States.[4]
The Freedmen at Chimborazo faced many barriers to building new lives for themselves in the post-slavery United States. The city of Richmond, under the leadership of the Union army and Mayor Joseph Mayo, introduced various Black codes that were transparent reincarnations of laws enforced during slavery. Amongst other things, these codes banished free Black people caught without passes or housing to the countryside, and back onto plantations at whatever price planters offered.[5] This type of race-based harassment was one of many oppressive factors surrounding life for Freedmen at Chimborazo, which white locals nicknamed "Chimpanzeetown.”[6]
Left unprotected by police and vulnerable to the white gangs that formed in the surrounding neighborhoods, the Freedmen of Chimborazo had no choice but to create a militia to defend themselves. In March of 1866, a gang of white men came to the camp to harass and threaten the residents; and in turn, ten Freedmen retaliated against the white gang, resulting in violence at the camp.[7] Many Freedmen were arrested. Local newspapers published damning articles condemning the Freedmen, and citied that a hundred armed freedmen conducted an "insurrection" against the local white citizens nearby. Days later it was proven that the incident had been started by a white gang, which led to the release of the Freedmen, and the arrest of the white men. However, after these events, and despite this revelation, the Freedmen's Bureau ordered all able-bodied men to leave the refugee camp by April 1st, 1866.[8]
Can you imagine what Chimborazo Hill would be like if a free Black community had been able to persist and build here for 150 years?
[1] [12/30/1865] The National Freedman, Vol. 2,
No. 1 (January 1866), pp. 15-16
[1] The National Freedman, Vol. 1, No. 11(December 1865)
[1] O'Brien, John Thomas. “First Restoration and theFreedmen, May-June 1865.” Essay. In From Bondage to Citizenship: TheRichmond Black Community, 1865-1867, 148–86. New York, NY: Garland, 1990.
[1] The Richmond Whig, 11/30/1866, p. 3, c. 1
[1] [3/6/1866] The Richmond Dispatch, p.1, c. 3
[1][3/24/1866] The Richmond Dispatch, p. 1, c. 3
This tragic eviction came two days before the Freedmen of Richmond planned to hold a celebration commemorating the first anniversary of their emancipation, April 3rd, 1866.[9] The Freedmen planned to celebrate their emancipation by organizing a parade towards the capitol that would mark their deliverance from slavery. Many white Richmonders were offended by the proposed celebration. They saw it as a commemoration of the Confederacy’s defeat and a humiliation of the white populace. In response to these concerns, the Freedmen released a broadside a day before the parade that declared their intention was to celebrate their emancipation, and not the downfall of the Confederacy. Unfortunately, the Baptist African Church on Byrd Street, which was supposed to be used as a fairground for the celebration, was burned down that same evening.[10] Despite this loss, and the protests, fear, and anger expressed by white Richmond residents, the celebration still occurred on April 3rd, 1866. Northern newspapers estimated that over 20,000 people participated in the celebration, while certain Richmond newspapers estimated that only around 500 to 800 people participated.[11] Regardless of the disputed numbers, the event sparked massive white outrage, and spurred white employers to fire any Black employees that had participated in the celebration. The backlash and resistance against this celebration serves as yet another example of the ways that everyday racism continued to shape the lives of Black people in the years following their Emancipation.
How should we celebrate this emancipation today?
[1] [3/7/1866] The Richmond Dispatch, p. 1, c. 4
[1] [4/3/1866] The Norfolk Day Book, p. 2
[1][4/10/1866] Richmond Whig
Speech Transcript:
Chimborazo Heights, this small 40 acres of land on top of a hill observing the James River, is a space, to me, that serves as one of the best demonstrations of the failures of Reconstruction and the erasure of Black history. Deriving its name from explorer Alexander von Humboldt’s failed attempt to scale Chimborazo volcano in Ecuador, Chimborazo Hill is known to many as the site where the Confederacy built one of the largest military hospitals in the world that treated over 70,000 soldiers during the Civil War. However, to me, this forty acre space is a land of false promises where dreams go to die– or better said, are executed. I speak in front of you to tell the silenced and forgotten history of the Freedmen community at this hill– a story that this park, as it stands today, does not tell.
On April 2nd, 1865, the Union Army invaded and captured the capital of the Confederacy, Richmond. The army established refugee camps for formerly enslaved people, including one on this hill at the Confederacy’s largest military hospital. Records from the Freedmen’s Bureau suggest that over 2,500 formerly enslaved people made this land their home. The locals referred to the Chimborazo’s freedmen camp as “Chimpanzeetown,” and the Richmond whig described the populace as “male and females, old and young, the children of Africa abound there, for the most part taking their ease, without apparent concern for the future, lolling and loafing, lazzaroni-like, all the day long.” Racist descriptions such as these could not have been further from the truth. By reclaiming their bodies from a life of property, the emancipated people of Richmond saw education and labor as a form of liberation. They embodied this mantra their entire stay at Chimborazo. The Freedmen’s Bureau commissioned six teachers from New England to open schools at the camp and over 300 children gathered to receive their education, all of which used to be enslaved. Around 200 adults at the camp also enrolled in a night school, indicating how eager all of the emancipated people were to learn. For the emancipated people of Chimborazo, education was one of the powers they had for removing themselves from slavery and exerting their new status as citizens of the reunited Union. The emancipated people saw Chimborazo as a beacon of hope– an area where they would be liberated from the chains of slavery and create a new life for themselves. Yet the occupying military force and the old Southern regime would soon squander all of these hopes.
Rebuilding the Union meant reestablishing the white brotherhood between the North and the South. The occupying military government of Richmond took this mentality head-on and introduced a Black code that eventually became a reincarnation of enslavement itself. Beginning in the middle of May in 1865 the army imposed traditional pass and curfew regulations upon the Richmond black community in an effort to forcibly remove large numbers of freedmen from the city and into the country. Soldiers swept through black neighborhoods, roughly rounded up hundreds of freedmen, and delivered them to plantations at whatever prices the planters offered. These codes were intended to bring the freedmen under the “paternal” care of the state– which essentially meant reasserting white supremacy over emancipated people and limiting their upward mobility to the greatest extent. In June of 1865, the army restored the previous mayor of Richmond, Joseph Mayo, back into the office, which became an ominous sign of the Southern elite’s return. Upon his return to the office, Mayo declared his intent to close black schools and churches and bring back the public whipping post. Even more, freedmen were not allowed to receive rations unless they worked, which was not the case for white residents of Richmond. As such, the organization of Chimborazo labor was indentured servitude. The freedmen were constantly subjected to a life of intense regulation, where their entire manner of living was put in the hands of the white government.
Under the influence of the returning white social order, the freedmen community at Chimborazo began to deteriorate. An inspection from the Freedmen’s Bureau discovered these devastating sights at the camp: an elderly woman lived in a dark cabin without fire, and her only clothes were rags. She had eaten nothing but a few cabbage leaves for two days. A family of five children was in another cabin, with their mother holding a dying child in her arms before a tiny fire. Four hungry, ragged children, stood in one corner without a bed, with only one ragged blanket to provide them comfort.
The emancipated people of Richmond and Chimborazo refused to accept their desolate conditions and racist harassment from the government and white gangs. On June 22, 1865, a delegation of free African Americans met with President Andrew Johnson to appeal their grievances and advocate for better treatment. In their address, they stated that the position of the emancipated people of Richmond was worse than what it was when they were slaves. They state that their old masters have become their enemies, and are seeking not only to oppress them but to thwart the designs of the Federal government. They also remarked that the restored Richmond police is composed of the same people who used to inflict stripes on their quivering flesh. In response to the many grievances aired by the Freedmen delegates, this is what president Andrew Johnson said: “While you are in this state of transition, there are many things which we might prefer to be different– that we should like altered– that yet must be submitted to till they can be remedied.” Perhaps there is no better quote that embodies the failures of Reconstruction and the false promise of reparations.
Eventually, the community at Chimborazo resorted to creating and arming their own militia to defend themselves from targeted harassment from the local white community. Eventually, in March of 1866, a group of five white men came to Chimborazo to racially harass its residents. Ten freedmen retaliated against the men out of self-defense, resulting in a violent outbreak at the refugee camp. The local newspapers published damning articles condemning the freedmen, citing that a hundred armed freedmen conducted an "insurrection" against the local white citizens nearby. Days later, the truth came out that the "insurrection" was started by the white gang, leading to the release of the freedmen and the arrest of the white men. Yet regardless of this revelation, and motivated by the racist conditions of post-war Richmond, the Freedmen's Bureau ordered all able-bodied men to leave the refugee camp by April 1st, 1866.
When that day came, only around 200 Freedmen remained in the camp. Left abandoned with no place to call home, the freedmen of Chimborazo took to the streets of Richmond to find employment. As of now, there are no found records that indicate what happened to them when they left. However, we can speculate, based on the conditions of post-war Richmond, that the world they entered was an unfair one, meant to subjugate them and re-establish the social order before the Civil War. Some of the freedmen actually stayed at the camp and turned it into a squatter's settlement. There is a story of an old man named Broxton Harwood who refused to leave his home at Chimborazo, and literally picked up his house and moved it across the street to a vacant lot so he could stay here. But the story of where the others went remains unknown. Perhaps some of them were found without passes and were transported out of the city and into a plantation, or perhaps some of them found housing at one of the Freedmen’s Bureau's other refugee camps around the city.
We also know that two days after the Chimborazo eviction, the Freedmen community of Richmond organized a celebration of their emancipation at the Capitol, much to the outrage of the white Richmond populace. Yet despite all the protests, burning of a Black Church, and a supposed military intervention, the celebration still occurred on April 3rd, 1866, with Northern newspapers reporting as many as 20,000 people participating, and Richmond newspapers reporting only between 500 and 800 participants. Perhaps some of the freedmen from Chimborazo were in that crowd celebrating their emancipation, despite just being taken away from their homes once again.
The answer to what happened to the freedmen of Chimborazo is unclear and becomes even more unclear starting in 1874 when the city of Richmond gradually began buying up the land of Chimborazo hill. The city started removing all of the structures and began constructing Chimborazo park, where we find ourselves today. The demolition of the freedmen’s camp is a clear attempt to erase the painful legacies of enslavement and bury Reconstruction's painful truths. This silence within history remains today, as there is presently no acknowledgment about the freedmen’s camp here, despite the year's worth of research and archive of the camp.
There are countless testimonies proving the existence of this camp, yet no current public indication that it ever existed. This silence is indicative of a larger problem of American history and public memory– and how the white establishment has determined to keep it buried. But this history cannot be silenced forever. While the records show the squalid conditions of the camp, Chimborazo, however, was a place filled with life and hope. We can imagine the laughter of formerly enslaved children running and playing through these beautiful fields. We can imagine the emancipated people studying and reading for the first time at their schools. We can imagine the relief of emancipated people as they get to sleep in their own beds for the first time, and not worry about having their family stolen from them at any given moment. We can imagine families gathering around a table for the first time in their lives knowing that they are safe from being separated at the auction block. We can imagine elderly freedmen observing the James River, which once carried their ancestors to this land, watching the horizon of a free world.
These silenced stories are part of a larger theme of American history. The same powers that have suppressed Black history are the same ones that have suppressed Indigenous history, Asian-American history, Queer history, and so many more. The land that we are in now once belonged to the Powhatan Confederacy, and went by the name of Powhatan, Shocquohocan, and Shockoe. It should never be forgotten that the blood and slaughter of Native Americans birthed this land. It also should never be forgotten that the enslavement and systemic destruction and dehumanization of African captives built this land, and as many as two million million enslaved people were transported and sold through Richmond. Indigenous people held onto this land for 12,000 years before the first Africans were kidnapped onto this land in 1619. It can not be stated enough that Black oppression is white history. Indigenous oppression is white history. This is what American history is, and we can never let it be erased or forgotten. With this in mind, I ask that you all take a moment of silence to acknowledge the stolen land and enslaved labor that created this city and nation.
Thank you for taking that moment. The history of Chimborazo has not ended and will not end. It continues. Their lives continue with you all. Their dreams continue with you all. I ask that you let this event serve as a reminder of how the hopes of emancipated people have been stolen. We must always make sure that our stories are told and heard by all. Reparations cannot come without recognition– and only when our stories are understood by all, can we finally receive our true liberation. Thank you.
[1]
[2] Julia Ruth Beckley, “How Cultural Factors Hastened the Population Decline of the Powhatan Indians” (dissertation, Graduate School at VCU Scholars Compass, 2008), pp. 9-11.
[3] [12/30/1865] The National Freedman, Vol. 2,
No. 1 (January 1866), pp. 15-16
[4] The National Freedman, Vol. 1, No. 11 (December 1865)
[5] O'Brien, John Thomas. “First Restoration and the Freedmen, May-June 1865.” Essay. In From Bondage to Citizenship: The Richmond Black Community, 1865-1867, 148–86. New York, NY: Garland, 1990.
[6] The Richmond Whig, 11/30/1866, p. 3, c. 1
[7] [3/6/1866] The Richmond Dispatch, p.1, c. 3
[8] [3/24/1866] The Richmond Dispatch, p. 1, c. 3
[9] [3/7/1866] The Richmond Dispatch, p. 1, c. 4
[10] [4/3/1866] The Norfolk Day Book, p. 2
[11] [4/10/1866] Richmond Whig
