Doug Wilder’s dream of building a slavery museum in Richmond is dying

Here in the onetime capital of the Confederacy, at the end of the city’s Slave Trail, stands the latest repository for the long-aborning dream of L. Douglas Wilder.

The 19th-century red-brick building, with Greek Doric columns flanking the entrance, was once the home of Richmond’s first African-American Baptist church. For the trailblazing Mr. Wilder, the nation’s first elected African-American governor, it represents the ideal setting for the United States National Slavery Museum, an institution he has struggled to create for nearly two and a half decades.

The building is only an hour’s drive from the Fredericksburg site where Mr. Wilder’s first vision for the project, a $100 million museum designed by one of the world’s leading architecture firms, collapsed amid a welter of debt and recriminations.