Virginia Richards — The Inner Passage
Virginia Richards presents a photographic and narrative history of a southern waterway enslaved people were forced to build — and then used to escape slavery.
Date & Time at 7:00 PM EST
Location Politics and Prose Washington, US
Organizer Politics and Prose
Why we picked this
The irony at the heart of this story — enslaved people building the very waterway they would later use to escape — is the kind of detail that makes history feel like it was written by a novelist.
Virginia Richards combines photography and narrative history to tell the story of a southern waterway that enslaved people were forced to build for mercantile shipping — and which they later used as a route to freedom.
The dual nature of the waterway — instrument of commerce and path of resistance — gives Richards a powerful structural metaphor for the broader story of Black agency within systems of oppression. The photographic component adds a dimension that pure text cannot: you see the landscape as both a site of labor and a corridor of escape.