Recently, my dad came to visit, and us being from Chicago, we wanted to learn more about Richmond and its history. We went to this museum and went to all of the exhibits. I learned a lot of cool stuff and I think that a class just about Richmond history would be really cool to have here at UR.
One thing I found particularly interesting was the split of the Virginias. I knew that there were two, but I didn’t know that it happened that recently, in the beginning of the Civil War; when the northern part didn’t want to secede, they split and formed West Virginia, while the other part wanted to secede, so they stayed and made it the capital of the Confederacy. Another interesting, yet disappointing, fact I learned was that Virginia rejected the women’s right to vote in 1919, which angered a lot of progressives during the time (they didn’t know that 1920 legislature for women to vote was going to occur, so they were angered and saddened at this).
Another exhibit I particularly enjoyed was the one room full of paintings from the Civil War, slave trade, and historically racially segregated times. The paintings were just elegant and the people they were portrayed were all types of people. They had people who were enslaved and working in the fields, slaves coming off the boats from their homelands, white people on horseback with guns, and so many others. One that got me was a painting, maybe the smallest in the room and in the far corner, was of an African-American man standing solo right in front of a boat. He obviously looked distraught and lost, but his eyes also faintly showed hope – in my opinion, maybe that he would find his family or friends that he had lost in the chaos of being captured and being brought here.
I recommend this museum to everyone because it’s so informative and also just really cool in its exhibits and how its really pushing for equality and for everyone to be aware of history and how brutal/mean it was to certain groups of people.
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