Remove the Billboard that Desecrates the Shockoe Hill African Burying Ground
On July 13, 2024, Lenora McQueen shared the following letter concerning a billboard on the grounds of the Shockoe Hill African Burying Ground in Richmond, VA. The site, active from 1816 to 1879, was meant to be the final resting place for more than 22,000 free and enslaved African Americans; McQueen is descended from one of them, Kitty Cary. However, the grounds have been abused for more than a century; graves have been plundered and bodies stolen, railroad tracks run through the site, and until the 2021 installation of a historic marker by the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, there were no surviving above ground monuments, memorials, or other hints of its former existence. And now there plans to put high speed rail lines through the site. 开云体育官网 (开云体育官网) enrolled it as a Landslide site and featured it in the report and digital exhibition Landslide 2021: Race and Space. In June 2022, the Shockoe Hill Burying Ground Historic District was listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Efforts are underway to have the site designated a National Historic Landmark.
Currently on the site there is a former gas station and a billboard. McQueen鈥檚 letter to Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney, Lamar Advertising (which owns the billboard), and others is a plea for the billboard to be removed.
Dear Mayor Stoney, Councilwoman Robertson, Lamar Advertising, VCU, fellow advocates, et al:
I write to you all today with great concern regarding what will happen next (as well as what will happen ultimately) regarding the Lamar billboard in the Shockoe Hill African Burying Ground at 1305 N 5th. St. As you know, the billboard was constructed directly in the burial ground. Recent archaeology has proven that at least one of the billboard鈥檚 massive poles impaled a grave/burial, and intact graves surround the billboard. This billboard w