his year, the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center marks its 10th anniversary. Since 2013, it has provided educational programs, cultural events, and commemorations for Charlottesville’s Black community—and revived the role of the original Jefferson School.
“From its founding, the Jefferson School held the cultural practices—the gatherings, performances, the festivals—of the African American Community,” says Andrea Douglas, who has been executive director of JSAAHC since its founding. “The Center came [into being] to connect the history of that institution to the modern space.”
Part of Charlottesville’s past
Following emancipation, Charlottesville’s Black community began creating the institutions it had long been denied. One of the first was the Jefferson School, a Freedmen’s Bureau school offering both elementary education and teacher training. The school was opened in 1865, in the building at Seventh and Main streets shared with the First Baptist Church, one of the city’s first independent Black congregations.
Thirty years later, the Jefferson Graded School (for grades one through eight) moved into its own building at Commerce and Fourth streets in Starr Hill. But under Jim Crow, there was no requirement for Charlottesville to provide a high school for Black students. It wasn’t until 1926, after the African American community petitioned City Council, that the first Black high school in Charlottesville opened in a new building (the one that is now the home of the JSAAHC), constructed adjacent to the Jefferson Graded School.
For the next 25 years, the Jefferson School (by this point grades one through 12) was home to a wide range of activities—from athletic teams and clubs to music and theater groups—that supported the culture and cohesiveness of the Black community. Its auditorium hosted school and public events at a time when venues like the Jefferson Theater and the Paramount, while open to Blacks, were restricted spaces. In 1934, the city opened a Colored Branch library in the school; municipal libraries were segregated until 1948.
In 1951, to accommodate the city’s growing African American population, Burley High School was built for Black students; the Jefferson School continued to teach Black students in grades one through eight. Seven years later, after Brown v. Board of Education, the Charlottesville 12 (Black students from Jefferson and Burley) petitioned to attend white schools, and forced the city’s schools to integrate.
While the city grappled with how to integrate its existing schools, the Jefferson School offered grades seven and eight for Black students. In 1966, when integration was finalized, the Jefferson School taught sixth grade for both white and Black students—a first in the city’s history. But, as Douglas points out, “When the school [stopped being] an all-Black institution, you ended that [community] space. What we’re trying to do is redress that loss of the cultural practices of Charlottesville’s African American community.”
“It’s really important and unusual that we have in our community a descendant organization of the original Freedmen’s School,” says Jalane Schmidt, a UVA professor and director of the Memory Project at the UVA Karsh Institute of Democracy. “It’s a direct link to the community’s Reconstruction history.”
Reinventing the Jefferson School’s role
In 2002, a group of Jefferson School alumni, Starr Hill residents, and figures from local businesses, government, and nonprofits began talking about restoring the Jefferson School as a mixed-use community center. In 2006, the school building was added to the National Register of Historic Places; in 2013, it reopened as the Jefferson School City Center, housing a range of community services and the newly formed Jefferson School African American Heritage Center.
“We think of ourselves as a bridge from history out,” says Douglas. “We’re not a museum. We’re an event-driven cultural space, a place to celebrate the arts, the festivals, the gatherings—a place where the Black community feels at home.”
But Douglas emphasizes that JSAAHC is a resource for the wider community as well. “Our mission is not ‘We just do things for Black people.’ White people need our programming as much or more than Blacks do—we know our history.”
Supporting the Black community
To fulfill that mission, JSAAHC’s programming over the last 10 years has been wide-ranging. Its permanent exhibition, “Pride Overcomes Prejudice,” tells the history of the local Black community from emancipation through the late 20th century, often through the voices of Jefferson School alumni and community members. Rotating exhibits focus on community history and on the works of contemporary Black/diaspora artists.
JSAAHC’s Isabella Gibbons Local History Center, named for the Jefferson School’s first Black teacher, offers resources for researching family and area history. In 2017, local journalist and social historian Jordy Yager worked with JSAAHC and others to launch the African American Oral History Project. Now at JSAAHC, Yager’s current undertaking, called Mapping Cville, documents Black land ownership and racist housing policies in Charlottesville and Albemarle County; its findings will be hosted online for use by researchers and local schools.
The center also provides space for community meetings, presentations, guest speakers, and activities ranging from Kwanzaa and Juneteenth celebrations to book discussions and the annual Greens Cook Off. The former school auditorium now hosts the Charlottesville Players Guild, a reincarnation of a Black troupe that performed there in the 1950s; the Players Guild presents a full range of productions, from Shakespeare to contemporary Black/diaspora theater.
Driving change
In addition to promoting Black history and culture, JSAAHC was intended to be a forum for addressing racial inequities past and present. “We believe what we do should help drive cultural change,” Douglas says. “This city is not this city without the truth and authenticity of fact.”
To that end, Douglas served on the Blue Ribbon Commission for Race, Memorials and Public Spaces, which met at JSAAHC in 2016. In the 2017 lead-up to the Unite the Right rally, City Council asked the center to host response planning and preparations. “We had 400 people here to be educated about the Proud Boys, and why it was important to be on the streets that day,” says Douglas. “This is the place that Charlottesville came to understand what was happening and why.”
When the statue of Robert E. Lee was finally taken down in 2021, JSAAHC led the development of Swords Into Plowshares, a project to re-use the statue’s bronze to create an artwork symbolizing the city’s commitment to racial inclusivity and healing.
But telling the city’s Black history encompasses far more than contextualizing the statues. JSAAHC has developed a Black history walking tour of the city, from the Court Square slave auction block to the Daughters of Zion Cemetery; worked with area schools to help teachers incorporate local Black history into their curricula; and advocated for March 3 (the day Union soldiers arrived in Charlottesville in 1865) as Freedom and Liberation Day. The Center helped locate and memorialize the site where John Henry James was lynched in 1898—and raised the money to take 100 people to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, to deliver soil from where James was killed.
“JSAAHC plays a singular role of promoting and hosting the very difficult discussions about race and justice,” says Schmidt, who as an activist and public historian has worked on many of JSAAHC’s public education programs. “The public knows that the center holds a place for these discussions—and it’s trusted by the community at large.”
The work continues
JSAAHC marked its 10th anniversary in January with a social event—and two days later held a facilitated discussion on race, politics, and the Black community. The Players Guild performances and exhibitions highlighting Black artists; the ongoing work of Swords Into Plowshares and Mapping Cville; Trailblazers, a program that trains African American youth to be community guides; the 2023 Civil Rights Bus Tour with the Memory Project—the center’s commitment to convene, educate, support, and lead continues.
“The Jefferson School, and now the Heritage Center, was and is a touchstone for the African American community,” says Douglas. “We have taken the idea of Blackness in Charlottesville and made it tangible.”
AUGUST WILSON’S CENTURY CYCLE COMES FULL CIRCLE
Perhaps no one has presented the African American experience with more perception, passion, and depth than Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson. In 2017, the Charlottesville Players Guild, under the leadership of Artistic Director and writer/director/actor Leslie M. Scott-Jones, staged Wilson’s Fences, and launched the troupe’s commitment to stage the playwright’s complete American Century Cycle—10 plays examining the changes and challenges affecting Black Americans in each decade of the 20th century. Only a handful of theater companies in the nation have taken on this challenge.
In 2023, the guild will complete the cycle with productions of Seven Guitars, based in the 1940s (February 23-March 5); Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, covering the 1920s (June 15-25); and King Hedley II, set in the 1980s (October 12-22). The week following the cycle’s completion, the JSAAHC will host “Wilsonian Soldiers,” a five-day symposium with panel discussions and master classes from four noted national Black theater practitioners and several local theater artists. The symposium will culminate in a performance of How I Learned What I Learned, Wilson’s theatrical memoir. Visit jeffschoolheritagecenter.org for tickets and season subscription information.