Richmond’s political and business elite are lining up behind Mayor Dwight C. Jones’s new plan for a $200 million multiuse development project that would include a new minor league baseball stadium in the historic downtown area of Shockoe Bottom.

Jones’s plan was announced only yesterday, but it is already touching many sensitive nerves in this city, where history can be cruel.

The scheme would put a stadium for the AA minor league club the Flying Squirrels adjacent to one of the most notorious slave trading sites in U.S. history, a slave cemetery and Lumpkin’s Jail, which specialized in imprisoning slaves....