Descendants Of People Enslaved By Virginia’s Governors Are Reframing History

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For more than 50 years, enslaved people served governors from the kitchen quarter in a small building near the Executive Mansion in Richmond, Va. Descendants of the enslaved are now leading an effort to tell the complete history of the property.





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Justin Reid is the director of community initiatives for Virginia Humanities, the state office of the National Endowment for the Humanities.





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Historian Lauranett Lee teaches at the University of Richmond and works alongside Virginia’s first lady, a key backer of the executive mansion project.





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Historian Lauranett Lee teaches at the University of Richmond and works alongside Virginia’s first lady, a key backer of the executive mansion project.


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While politicians have largely moved on from the scandals, some Black activists say Northam hasn’t shown enough leadership on issues like criminal justice reform. Historian Lauranett Lee speaks highly of the governor but gets the critics’ point.

«I can understand the frustration because there is so much that needs to be done, she says.

Lee teaches at the University of Richmond and works alongside the first lady, a key backer of the executive mansion project. Lee says she wants to connect their work at the mansion to modern Richmond, which was once a center of the domestic slave trade. A large slave jail sat down the hill from the Executive Mansion. Until this summer’s protests, Confederate statues dotted the city.

For Lee, monuments tell the story of who society looks up to. The enslaved people who built Richmond, who powered Virginia’s economy, didn’t get statues. But Justin Reid sees their mark everywhere.

«In many parts of this country, but especially in Virginia, you really can’t go anywhere and not enter a landscape of slavery, Reid says.

It’s a history Reid says is best told by the ancestors of the people who lived it.