Alexandria, VA Freedom House Museum Reopens, Making Key Site of Slave Trade a Center for Black History

On this site humans were penned like livestock.

“It was like a farmer’s barnyard in most respects, save it was so constructed that the outside world could never see the human cattle that were herded there.”

Families obliterated.

Children–10, 12, 15-years old; 2-years-old, 3-months-old–torn from their mothers, never to be reunited.

People chained at the neck.

Freezing. Sweltering. Starving. Naked.

“Tell me citizens, where, under the sun, you can witness a spectacle more fiendish and shocking.”

This site is not a death camp in Germany, it’s 1315 Duke Street, Alexandria, VA, in the shadow of the nation’s capital. The Capitol Dome is visible with the naked eye from the waterfront less than a mile away.

The Freedom House Museum is what remains of a large complex dedicated to trafficking thousands of Black men, women and children between 1828 and 1861. The museum honors the lives and experiences of the enslaved and free Black people who lived in–and were trafficked through–Alexandria, once America’s busiest domestic slave market. The museum seeks to reframe white supremacist history and provide visitors opportunities to learn, reflect and advocate for change.

Visitors to the Freedom House are confronted and left astonished by what they didn’t know regarding slavery in the United States of America, land of the free, home of the brave. What details have been suppressed by their popular textbooks, teachers, documentaries and mythologies.