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COLORED RICHMOND By E. D. Caffee. RICHMOND, VIRGINIA, lies 115 miles south of Washington, and ninety miles from the mouth of the James River at Chesapeake Bay. Originally this modern Rome was "delightfully situated on seven hills overhanging the James River." The city site was founded September 19, 1735, by Colonel William Byrd and seven years later it was formally established as a town by a special act of the Virginia As- sembly, in 1742. But soon the white set- tlers drove back the Indian savages to far beyond the tidewater settlement. Hence, in 1779, the seat of the State Gov- ernment was moved from Williamsburg to Richmond, which was incorporated as a uty in 1782. In 1781, the forty-eighth year after Rich- mond was founded, its population was only 1800, over 900 of whom where Negro slaves. In 1916, when the city was 181 years old, the total population numbered 156,687, of which 62,676 were Negroes. It is evident, then, that Negroes were in Richmond before and at the time of its founding, many of them having worked on the farm of Nathaniel Bacon, the rebel. If the truth had been written, we would be able to say that Negroes cleared the forest on which the city is founded. An inscription cornerstone of the old Bacon foundation stands near Hancock and Broad Streets. As Richmond, located at the foot of the falls, became the head of commerce and industries, it also became the chief mart of the slave traders' traffic-"The sum of all villainies." As early as March 29, 1779, in the Virginia Gazette appeared the follow- ing notice of the sale of slaves: "Five like- ly Virginia-born Negroes will be sold for cash, loan certificate or tobacco." Lum- kins' slave jail, in which reopened in 1857 what is now Virginia Union University, was the "old slave pen," in which Negroes were kept for sale and safety and from which they were transported to Virginia, the Caro- linas, Georgia, and far south as Ala- bama. Could it have been conceived that a place like this could be so completely trans- formed? Facts, surely in this case, become stranger than fiction after fifty years. Sunday, April 2, 1865, General Lee dis- patched the following message to Jefferson Davis, who was found in church: "My line is broken in three places and Richmond must be evacuated."" Mr. Lumkin, the keep- er of the slave-traders' jail, and whose wife, Mary Jane Lumkins, was colored, heard of Mr. Davis' order of evacuation and "made up a coffle of fifty men, women, and chil- dren in his jail yard, within pistol shot of Davis' parlor window and a stone's throw from the monumental church," and hurried them to the Danville depot. This sad and weeping fifty, in handcuffs and chains, was the last slave coffle to tread the soil of America. As the Confederate government was on the move from the doomed city, there was a jumble of boxes, chests, trunks, valises, carpet bags, a crowd of excited men sweating as never before, women with disheveled hair, unmindful of their ward- robes and wringing their hands, children crying in the crowd, and sentinels guarding each entrance to the train, pushing back at the point of the bayonet the panic-stick- en multitude." But there was no room for Mr. Lumkin and his slaves on the train nor in the world. At the fall of Richmond, therefore, fell the auction block of human traffic. While Negroes of the West celbrate Emancipa- ion Day as September 22, 1862, the date when the preliminary proclamation was is- sued; and others of the South and North, the first day of January, 1863, the day of its majority; Richmonders celebrate the third day of April, when richmond fell. Negro emancipation not only freed Ne- groes, but it also freed the white man, for it was not until 1870 that a public school system was established in the state. One year later there were 1915 Negro children enrolled, with 72 teachers, 12 of whom were Negroes. Even unto this day, with but one or two exceptions, all the prin- cipal's of the Negro schools have been white. Since the inception of the public school law, a rare change has taken place. The 1915 enrollment increased to 9,911 pupils with 225 Negro teachers. From the church buildings to old dilapidated rooms, the school property for Negro education has in- creased until it is now valued at $256,- 685.23. In spite of the enlarged oppor- [[1 image top of page]] 125 ONE OF THE BUILDINGS OF VIRGINIA UNION UNIVERSITY tunity, all the buildings are overcrowded. To instance a case: Valley School, the ca- parity is 746, the attendance is 880. It was a strange situation when the cradle of the white man's independence be- came the market of Negro bondage. It was here in Richmond that Patrick Henry de- livered his deathless speech and closed with the words: "Is life so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death." It is difficult how the place that gave birth to such immortality should hold as chattle in chains a slave of any color. But in spite of this anomaly, the relations of the races in the Confed- erase capital have remained very amicable, a fact just as strange as the other. A friendship has grown up here between man- ters and servants such as is found nowhere else in all the South. This love or friend- liness is an indefinable subtle sentiment. The spirit of the old "master" is still marching on and the old Negro is still marching on, too. In spite of this friendliness between the two races, Richmond, so far as the Negro population is concerned, is still charac- termed by lack of municipal protection. This probably is the gravest problem the Ne- gro citizens here face. In addition to the "Jim Crow" transportation system and seg- regated residential sections, municipal dis- criminations in the most glaring form ex- tend from the educational system through- out the field of sanitation as seen in dry closets, lack of city water and sewerage, in- adequate public protection in poorly lighted streets, badly constructed streets and houses, etc. There are seven dumps and crema- tories in the segregated Negro residential sections. The legal segregation of the races only makes more grievous this sanitary eye- sore of colored Richmond. The assessed value of Negro property is four million dollars. When the question of organization is raised, it is said that Richmond is super- organized--there are wheels in wheels, fra- ternities, and societies, and yet Richmond seems unnecessarily divisible. It sNegroes do not unite themselves solidly enough to fight segregation nor anything else effect-