Event Dime

A Terrible Intimacy: Interracial Life in the Slaveholding South

When:

June 23, 2026 · 12:00 PM

Where:

Virginia Museum of History & Culture, 428 N Boulevard, Richmond, VA

Source:

6AM City Richmond – Events

Fully half the enslaved people in the South lived not on sprawling plantations but on small properties; this pattern prevailed in much of Virginia. Testimony from criminal trials in Prince Edward County reveals that cruelty was baked into the system, but also that in households of five, ten, fifteen, or twenty people, exploiters and exploited knew each other well. The enslaved, enslavers, overseers, and poor whites drank, played, slept, and even committed crimes together. Yet whippings happened