Richmond's Slavery to Emancipation Walking Tour

• Libby Prison and Virginia Holocaust Museum

A Confederate prison where 109 officers pulled off the war's greatest escape—and a Holocaust museum placed deliberately in the heart of Richmond's old slave-trading district, because the questions it asks land harder here than anywhere else.

• The Early Quakers Marker and The Poe Museum

A Quaker meetinghouse that held prayer services on a street lined with slave traders—and across the street, the museum of a writer who grew up in this city and never once wrote about what defined it.

• The Slave Trail Auction Marker and Reconciliation Triangle Statue

The site of one of the most active slave-trading firms in the Upper South, and a sculpture that is one of three identical figures in the world—the others standing in Liverpool and Benin, completing the triangle of the transatlantic trade.

• The Shockoe Bottom African Burial Ground

Richmond's first municipal cemetery for enslaved and free Black people, built over and buried under parking lots for nearly two centuries—and the ground where Gabriel Prosser and twenty-five co-conspirators were hanged.

• Lumpkin's Slave Jail—The Devil's Half Acre

The most notorious slave jail in the Upper South, where a girl named Mary was held and survived—and where she eventually turned the site into a school for freed people that became Virginia Union University.

• The First African Baptist Church Historic Site

One of the largest Protestant congregations in America, made up primarily of enslaved people, operating under state-mandated white surveillance every single week—and refusing to be stopped by any of it.

• Monumental Church and the Egyptian Building

A church built over the site of Richmond's deadliest urban disaster, where Black and white victims share the same crypt—and a medical school next door that robbed African American cemeteries for dissection cadavers for decades.

• Capitol Square Monuments

Five monuments in one walk: the Virginia Civil Rights Memorial honoring Barbara Johns, Hunter Holmes McGuire, a Stonewall Jackson statue whose future is genuinely uncertain, Old City Hall, and Extra Billy Smith—Richmond's ongoing argument with its own history, in bronze.

• The Virginia Washington Monument and Zero Milestone

The starting point of the 1863 Richmond Bread Riot, where working-class women marched while Jefferson Davis came out to throw money at them—and the quiet stone marker behind it that every Virginia road counts its miles from.

• The Virginia State Capitol

Where Thomas Jefferson's Roman temple design still stands, where Robert E. Lee accepted command of Virginia's forces in 1861, and where the oldest continuous lawmaking body in the Western Hemisphere still meets today. Free to enter.