Sal Orlando, Assistant News Editor
The VCU Board of Visitors will consider approving a new memorial for the East Marshall Street Well Project as part of the university’s efforts to recognize those whose bodies were posthumously stolen by what is now the VCU School of Medicine.
The board will consider the over $3 million project during meetings on March 23 and 24, according to their agenda.
Plans are for the structure to be built between the Kontos Building and Egyptian Building on the MCV campus, near the location of the well where at least 44 adults and nine children, primarily of African descent, were found during a 1994 construction project.
The bodies were initially robbed from their graves by the former Medical Department of Hampden-Sydney College between 1848 and 1860.
The memorial is a part of the East Marshall Street Well Project, an initiative by VCU to ensure the remains of the victims receive appropriate study, memorialization and reburial. It would be funded by MCV Foundation support, VCU non-education & general funds and VCU Health System funds.
If approved, the project will be another of the 17 recommendations made by the project’s planning committee in 2018. The completed recommendations include the returning of the ancestral remains to Richmond, the establishment of the Implementation Committees in 2019 and the Kontos Building memorialization panel’s unveilment in 2021.
African-American Studies Department chair Shawn Utsey stated he is happy the project is moving forward.
“The designs are appropriate and will give voice to those formerly enslaved and free African Americans whose bodies were stolen in the name of science,” Utsey stated.
As for further steps, Utsey pointed to the existence of other remains used for similar purposes that were never recovered from their respective trash pits. He wants the university to address the issue and “do right by the community that has done so much for it.”
“We cannot rest until all of our ancestors are freed from the wells at the bottom of MCV’s campus,” Utsey stated.