Pari Passu — Richmond Black Business & Heritage

Richmond’s Black business history helped build the city. It is a record of people creating institutions, livelihoods, culture, and places of belonging even when access to capital, political power, property, and public life was deliberately restricted.

Pari Passu is the Black heritage identity within Davinci Couture—representing culture, history, ownership, memory, and equal footing. Through Pari Passu, Davinci Couture is documenting the people, businesses, places, and histories that shaped Black enterprise in Richmond and the people creating its next chapters today.

On equal footing

Pari passu means “on equal footing.” Within Davinci Couture, the phrase expresses a commitment to Black heritage, culture, history, ownership, and the right to be represented with depth and authority.

That commitment shapes this editorial initiative. We will approach Richmond’s history and its living business community as connected subjects, while never claiming a direct lineage that the evidence does not establish. The past deserves precision. The present deserves to be documented in its own voice.

Why Richmond matters

At the turn of the twentieth century, Richmond had one of the nation’s most consequential Black business communities. Jackson Ward became a center of Black banking, insurance, commerce, professional life, mutual aid, politics, and entertainment. The neighborhood’s institutions included the True Reformers Bank and Maggie L. Walker’s St. Luke Penny Savings Bank, while Second Street developed into an unusually concentrated corridor of Black enterprise. The Virginia Department of Historic Resources describes Jackson Ward as the hub of one of the country’s most thriving Black business communities of its era. Virginia Department of Historic Resources

This history is also a history of constraint and disruption. Segregation made independent institutions necessary. Discriminatory lending and housing practices restricted opportunity. Urban renewal and construction of the Richmond-Petersburg Turnpike—later incorporated into Interstate 95—divided Jackson Ward and displaced residents. What remains is not simply a story of triumph or loss, but evidence of how ownership, place, policy, and memory shape one another. Encyclopedia Virginia

What we will document

History

We will revisit the institutions, movements, and decisions that formed Richmond’s Black commercial life. Historical claims will be grounded in archives, public records, preservation research, and credible scholarship.

Business

We will document living Black-owned businesses across Richmond: how they began, what they make possible, how they navigate the city, and what ownership means to the people building them. No business will be presented as a participant before direct engagement and editorial confirmation.

People

Enterprise is personal. Our work will center founders, craftspeople, workers, customers, organizers, historians, and community stewards—not as symbols, but as people with distinct experiences and points of view.

Places

Storefronts, workrooms, blocks, homes, financial institutions, entertainment venues, and gathering spaces hold memory. We will examine how Richmond’s built environment has supported Black life, and how development, demolition, preservation, and reuse continue to change it.

Then / Now

We will place archival history beside present-day reporting to show continuities, differences, and unanswered questions. “Then / Now” will not flatten separate generations into one story. It will create room to understand what has changed, what has endured, and what must still be recorded.

Help us find the stories

Own a Black-owned business in Richmond—or know a story we should be paying attention to? We want to hear from business owners, residents, historians, families, archivists, artists, and community members.

Tell us about a business, person, collection, building, tradition, or overlooked chapter that deserves to be documented. Participation begins with a conversation. Every story is researched and considered editorially before publication.

All published research will be sourced and editorially reviewed. Interviews will be identified as interviews, historical interpretation will be distinguished from documented fact, and corrections will be made transparently when necessary.

Pari Passu exists within Davinci Couture because culture is not an accessory to design. It is knowledge, authorship, inheritance, and ownership. In Richmond, we begin by listening closely—and by building a public record worthy of the people whose work gives the city its character.