From a Los Angeles Times story: "The place called Lumpkin's Jail was indeed a jail, but it was much more than that. It was a holding pen for human chattel.
"In Richmond's Shockoe Bottom river district, the notorious slave trader Robert Lumpkin ran the city's largest slave-holding facility in the 1840s and 1850s. Tens of thousands of blacks were held in the cramped brick building while they waited to be sold."
Earlier this month the Lumpkin Jail was excavated in Richmond, Virginia, and this week "black and white Richmond residents walked together across the rain-slicked cobblestones . . . that mark the outlines of the old slave jail." Upon his death Lumpkin left the jail to his widow, Mary Lumpkin, a black woman and former slave. She in turn "gave the property to a minister who established a school for freed slaves. Over the years, the school evolved into what is now Virginia Union University, a historically black college."
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