Wednesday, November 29, 2023 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM EST
Hybrid Event in Horizon Hall 6325 and on Zoom
This project examines the history of the creation of a local city park in Richmond, Virginia, in the 1870s that displaced an entire community of free African Americans who lived on site. I argue that the creation of the park, and subsequent displacement of the Black community, reflected the larger Southern trend of “White backlash” in the late Reconstruction era, the period after the American Civil War.
Today, the Chimborazo site in Richmond remains a city park that houses the Confederate Medical Museum, which was established by the National Park Service in 1959. The history of this park during the 1870s is only one part of a larger story that demonstrates how Richmond’s Black freed community was displaced, or “disposed of,” and ultimately “forgotten” on the Chimborazo site over time, while White residents and city officials selectively remembered the Confederacy by establishing the NPS museum. This project is an intentional, much-needed remembering, recovering, and archival “repair” of the history of the freed community who once lived on Chimborazo Hill.
The Zoom link is the same for all CHR Residential Fellow Talks and will be circulated weekly on Mondays and the day before each fellows' talk in the CHR newsletter.
To receive the newsletter, please email chr@gmu.edu.
