MARY LUMPKIN TURNS A SLAVE JAIL INTO VIRGINIA UNION UNIVERSITY

Life for an enslaved black woman in the early 19th century South was especially harsh. It was typically so for Mary, who was born in 1832 of an enslaved black woman and her enslaver and then sold into slavery herself at the age of 8 to a brutal man, Robert Lumpkin, who turned out to be a rapist. He forced five or more children upon her, the first of whom was born when she was only 13.

When Lumpkin bought a slave jail in Richmond, Va., in 1844, Mary was forced to work in it—an awful task, as it turned out. Lumpkin’s Jail, or the “Devil’s Half Acre” as it became known, was a place of unspeakable cruelty. It was a place of torture on a daily basis for enslaved men, women and children who had tried to escape to free states, were being punished, or were waiting to be sold or transported. (The same hellish treatment did not apply to Robert Lumpkin’s illegitimate daughters, however, who were all educated in Massachusetts; Lumpkin moved his slave family to Philadelphia for fear that they would be taken in slavery.)

One prisoner, Anthony Burns, a recaptured slave who had escaped to the North, was so violently abused that his health collapsed and he died at age 28, a few years after his release. Mary, a slave herself, was powerless to provide more than a little comfort on occasion, until 1866, when she inherited the jail in Lumpkin’s will when he died. Mary despised the jail so much that she leased it to Nathaniel Colver, an abolitionist minister who wanted to establish a seminary for formerly enslaved people. It was remodeled as the Richmond Theological School for Freedmen—the first step on the road to becoming Virginia Union University, one of the nation’s oldest continuing HBCUs.

Mary sold the property in 1873, and three years later, the jail was demolished. She died in 1905 and was buried in Ohio. Her story is told in a book, The Devil’s Half Acre (2022, Seal Press), by Kristen Green.

The hell-hole of the South that later became known as “God’s Half Acre” and then a premier institution of higher learning owes it existence to Mary Lumpkin, a formerly enslaved person. In 2022, VUU’s president, Hakim J. Lukas, said it best: “For Virginia Union to have a forming story rooted in black womanness … it’s a story of its own.”