Historian Audrey Davis stands in front of the restored Freedom House Museum in Alexandria, Virginia. The brick building is all that remains of the largest domestic slave trading firm in the United States. Davis oversees the Freedom House Museum and the city’s Black History Museum. Photo by Scott Suchman

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Two hundred years ago, Alexandria, Virginia, was a hotbed for human trafficking. In fact, one of America’s largest slave trading companies operated on Duke Street, seizing and selling people from 1828 until 1861.

Now that brick building has been restored as the Freedom House Museum, thanks in part to historian Audrey Davis, who oversees the city’s preservation and interpretation of what’s now a National Historic Landmark.

“African American history is not a minor part of our history. It is American history,” Davis said in an interview with the Beacon.

“So much was built on the backs of enslaved men and women, including food and architecture, things we take for granted — the contributions of African Americans.”

Since 1993, Davis has worked to highlight the contributions of African Americans in Alexandria, which has one of the most robust museum systems in the state. She’s the longtime director of the Alexandria Black History Museum and, in 2023, was appointed to a newly created position: director of the Office of Historic Alexandria’s African American History Division.

“Audrey is the dean of Alexandria Black History,” former Mayor Justin Wilson said when he announced that Davis would lead the new division. “Elevating her role reflects the reality of how Alexandria has broadened the history we interpret.”

Smithsonian’s youngest intern

Davis got interested in history early in life. Her grandfather, Arthur P. Davis, gave her an autobiography of Frederick Douglass, signed by Douglass himself. Grandfather Davis, an English professor at Howard University, co-authored an anthology of writing by Black authors in 1941, long before African American literature classes were common.

He introduced Davis to the works of historian Henry Louis Gates Jr., novelist Toni Morrison, poet Phillis Wheatley and musician Fats Waller, who was his neighbor in New York in the 1920s.

When she was just 13 years old, Davis was the youngest intern at Washington, D.C.’s Smithsonian Museum of Natural History.

“My mother, a teacher, got me out of the house,” Davis said. She interned at the Smithsonian for several summers, securing a paid internship at a time when most interns worked for free.

A career as a curator

After Davis graduated from the University of Virginia with a degree in art history, she got her start with Historic Alexandria as a part-time curator.

Davis soon made a name for herself. Twenty years ago, she teamed up with two Alexandria women who wanted to create a memorial for the Freedmen’s Cemetery. Located next to the I-95/495 Beltway, the site was formerly a Mobil gas station built on the graves of at least 1,711 African Americans.

Today, thanks to Davis’ efforts, a park-like memorial on the site includes a Mario Chiodo sculpture titled “The Path of Thorns and Roses” and plaques noting the names of people buried there. In 2008, the city gave her a special merit award for helping design that memorial.

The following year, the Commission on Women awarded her the Salute to Women Vola Lawson Award for improving opportunities for Alexandria’s women and girls.

That award meant a lot to Davis, who started working for the city when Lawson was city manager.

“I admired her strength and the way she ran Alexandria,” Davis said. “It was an honor to receive this award for my work with women and girls, as it is crucial that women have role models in positions of power. I hope one day I can be the inspiration for someone in the museum or preservation field.”

She’s gained statewide recognition for her work: Two Virginia governors appointed Davis to the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

Davis is so passionate about historic preservation that she has served as volunteer president of the Alexandria Historical Society and in leadership roles of other groups, like the Virginia Association of Museums.

She spent nights and weekends, along with four other authors, writing a book. African Americans of Alexandria, Virginia: Beacons of Light in the Twentieth Century, which chronicles the lives of 63 Black Alexandrians between 1920 and 1965, was the fourth-largest seller for History Press in 2013.

America’s slave trade

One of Davis’ current priorities is the Freedom House Museum, a former slave trade complex of a three-story building and 14-foot, walled holding pens for companies that trafficked thousands of men, women and children until the Civil War began.

The most notorious company, Franklin and Armfield, brought African Americans from Virginia plantations and shipped them to New Orleans, Louisiana, and Natchez, Mississippi, to be sold there. Its agents both captured runaways and purchased enslaved people to sell.

Last November, the city completed the restoration of the remaining building’s exterior, returning it to its mid-19th-century look, with dark brown walls and green shutters. It’s open to the public from Thursday through Sunday.

Davis is doing research to develop interpretative programs to tell the site’s full story, combing through manifests, other documents and reports from abolitionists who visited in 1830.

Some documents describe walking slaves to the Potomac River to be shipped away, crowded into a ship’s holds; others mention marching groups of people south, chained in coffles.

“More people need to know the history of the domestic slave trade, which was America’s internal slave trade,” said Davis.

“Most people think about the transatlantic slave trade when they think about slavery and not this period in America’s history,” she said. “With the Freedom House Museum, we have the chance to share insights on slavery and its aftermath in America and how it impacts our lives today.”

In telling the city’s stories in museums, exhibits and programs, Davis does not shy away from the city’s ugly chapters, like its two known lynchings. In 1897 and 1899 two young men were denied a fair trial and murdered by mobs in Alexandria.

Today the city’s Community Remembrance Project, inspired by the Equal Justice Initiative and the work of Bryan Stevenson, hosts an annual walk to the city’s lynching sites. The city also offers two $3,000 scholarships named after its lynching victims.

From library to museum

For the past 10 years, Davis has been the director of the Alexandria Black History Museum, housed in the former Robert H. Robinson Library.

“Audrey Davis has been the face of the Alexandria Black History Museum for most of her career,” said Gretchen Bulova, director of Historic Alexandria. “She has drawn increased visibility to the importance of engaging descendant groups and interpreting Alexandria’s full history.”

The Robinson Library was the city’s perfunctory response to a sit-in led in 1939 by Samuel Tucker. After the “public” library refused to give library cards to five Black residents, Tucker organized a peaceful protest, one of the nation’s first civil rights sit-ins. The city acquiesced and built a one-room library for its Black citizens a year later.

Davis manages the museum’s collection of books, videos and other artifacts, including the Moss H. Kendrix collection. Kendrix, known as “The Father of Black P.R.,” founded a public relations firm in 1948.

“I have always found Moss Kendrix a fascinating man. He thrived on little sleep…and was always coming up with new ideas for ads, radio shows and ways to improve the image and lives of Black Americans,” Davis said.

Kendrix broke down stereotypes, reframing the Black image for clients like Coca-Cola and Carnation.

The collection, Davis said, is relevant beyond Virginia. The museum she oversees, she said, “gives us insight into what was happening in America from the 1940s to the 1970s.”

For more information, visit alexandriava.gov/BlackHistory.