The Jefferson School African American Heritage Center shared updates on the Swords Into Plowshares project during an October 30 community engagement session. Photo: Eze Amos
Community members gathered at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center on October 30 to hear the latest on the Swords Into Plowshares project, which seeks to melt down Charlottesville’s Robert E. Lee statue and repurpose its bronze into a new public artwork.
In December, the Trevilian Station Battlefield Foundation and the Ratcliffe Foundation filed a lawsuit against the City of Charlottesville, claiming the city violated state code, the Virginia Public Procurement Act, and the Freedom of Information Act when it donated the statue to the Jefferson School. (The school was initially named as a second defendant, but was removed, and is now a party to the suit.) On October 10, Charlottesville Circuit Court ruled that the lawsuit had grounds to move forward, with a trial date set for February.
While the Jefferson School initially planned a six-month community engagement process, during which Charlottesville residents would discuss ways to represent inclusion through art and public space, the lawsuit has delayed it. But Jefferson School Executive Director Andrea Douglas remains hopeful about where the project currently stands.
“We’re still going. We’re still raising money. We’re still asking the questions,” said Douglas. “We’re still a united front against this court case.”
During the October 10 hearing, the plaintiffs pushed the Jefferson School to disclose the Lee statue’s location to the public, but the two parties later agreed to a protective order allowing only an expert and lawyers from each side to know the statue’s location, marking a victory for Swords Into Plowshares.
UVA professor Frank Dukes, who is leading the community engagement phase of the project, presented the results of a survey that asked community members for input on what should happen to the Lee statue, including the stories the resulting artwork should tell. Respondents were primarily from Charlottesville and Albemarle County, and came from various age groups, including young children.
Stories that respondents thought needed to be told included information about Vinegar Hill, the Jefferson School, McKee Row, and the lives of enslaved and Indigenous people.
Respondents also voiced fears for the project—some felt that art might be too abstract or figurative, or represent an oversimplification of a complex issue. Among those who liked the art idea, common desired themes included incorporating touch or sound, serving a function, and not honoring a single person.
Community engagement meetings have also served as a forum for residents to voice their thoughts. “We’re gonna continue to do this until there’s an opportunity for us to say, ‘Okay, we’ve heard enough from people—we can start creating,’” said Dukes.
Zyahna Bryant, a student activist who first petitioned for the removal of the Lee statue in high school, emphasized that the final product should be treated with the same degree of esteem that had been given to the Lee statue.
“I don’t think it needs to be sad or somber, but I definitely think that it should have some level of respect and honor,” Bryant said.
Other community members hoped the new artwork would provoke dialogue while reflecting a historical consciousness. One suggested incorporating some kind of theatrical form, creating a lively interactive space.
Charlottesville resident Peter Kleeman, who has frequently attended SIP’s community engagement events, said he finds the project to be the only one of its kind he has come across.
“This whole project is such a fabulous idea,” said Kleeman. “The idea of taking a Civil War memorial and making it into something new, taking something that shouldn’t be part of our memorial collection and thinking, let’s transform it into something that meets our ideas for today.”
With the trial set for February 1, the Jefferson School has no plans to slow down.
“We’re deliberately moving forward with a kind of consistency of message that says to the larger world that Charlottesville will make its own decisions about its public spaces,” said Douglas.
Dr. Andrea Douglas, executive director of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, is co-leading this summer’s civil rights tour, which will include stops at former plantations, museums, memorials, and sites of slave revolts in the Deep South. Photo: Eze Amos
In 1808, the trans-Atlantic slave trade was abolished in the United States, but the horrors of slavery raged on for nearly six more decades. Between 1810 and 1860, approximately 1 million enslaved people in the Upper South were forcibly relocated to newly established plantations in the Deep South, fueled by the booming cotton industry.
This summer, the Charlottesville Civil Rights Tour will take participants along the route of this lesser-known domestic slave trade, stopping at an array of former plantations, historic civil rights sites, museums, memorials, and locations of slave revolts in the Deep South. The eight-day trip—hosted by the UVA Democracy Initiative’s Memory Project and the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center—will examine how Southern communities are reshaping the narrative surrounding slavery and white supremacy, and elevating the voices and stories of enslaved people and their descendants.
“There are people from here who were trafficked down there, [and] members of the community who hold the torch of the Lost Cause narrative whose families made money off of [the slave trade],” explains tour co-leader Jalane Schmidt, director of the Memory Project. “We’re connected in every way. We’re not special—we’re part of this narrative.”
On June 19, a 100-person delegation—including high school students, teachers, activists, descendants of enslaved people, and other community members—will fly to Alabama, where Charlottesville’s 2018 civil rights tour culminated. Following the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally, Jefferson School Executive Director Dr. Andrea Douglas and Schmidt led a pilgrimage to Montgomery to commemorate the 1898 lynching of John Henry James in Albemarle County. On the 120th anniversary of James’ murder, the group delivered soil from the site of his lynching, land now owned by Farmington Country Club, to the Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which features jars of dirt from over 4,000 documented lynching locations.
“When [participants] came back, they talked at public forums, like the public library, or their Sunday school group, or at work, and in classrooms. There was a ripple effect from that as people talked to their friends, neighbors, co-workers about what they’ve learned,” says Schmidt of the pilgrimage.
“That is the goal of these tours, and why we want to do it again this summer—to keep that ripple effect going,” she says.
In Alabama, the delegation will visit Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church, where four Black girls were killed when it was bombed by the Ku Klux Klan in 1963. They will also walk across Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge, where over 600 civil rights marchers—led by then 25-year-old activist John Lewis—were brutally attacked by police in 1965.
The trip also includes a stop in Africatown, home to the descendants of the enslaved people smuggled on the Clotilda, the last last-known slave ship to arrive in the United States in 1860.
The ship was immediately burned and sunk on the Mobile River to hide the illegal activity, and its remains were not found until 2019. After the Civil War, the Clotilda’s survivors wanted to return to Africa, but didn’t have enough money to do so. Instead, they pooled their wages to purchase land they called Africatown.
Activist Myra Anderson, whose ancestors were enslaved at the University of Virginia, says she is most looking forward to meeting fellow descendants at Africatown, and visiting the wreckage site of Clotilda this summer. From participating in the 2018 pilgrimage, she learned that engaging with such violent, brutal history first-hand is “not easy”—she was often brought to tears—but incredibly eye-opening and life-changing.
“I saw so many parallels between what happened back then and what happened in Charlottesville [in 2017],” says Anderson, reflecting on the 2018 pilgrimage. “There was nothing more powerful than to just have the opportunity to be able to interpret history in the exact places where it happened.”
“As an activist, it inspired me in so many ways to not take my foot off the gas and stay the course, and understand that all of those who were there before me and the things that they did, they laid the framework,” she says.
Other notable stops on this summer’s trip include the Whitney Plantation in Wallace, Louisiana, one of the few former plantations in the country focused solely on educating visitors about slavery; the Emmett Till Interpretive Center in Sumner, Mississippi, where the 1955 murder trial of 14-year-old Till took place; and the Lorraine Motel National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee, where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968. The group will also participate in a variety of cultural activities, like a jazz tour of New Orleans, before returning home on June 26.
Thanks to a large number of donors, over two dozen participants have received scholarships that cover the $2,750 price tag. Most of the trip spots have been reserved, but a few remain for people who can pay full price.
As Charlottesville continues to grapple with its own racist history, Schmidt hopes the trip will help the city reimagine public spaces with ties to slavery and white supremacy—most notably the former sites of the Lee and Jackson statues—and make them welcoming and inclusive of the entire community.
“It’s about learning together as a community, [and] how we fit in with this larger narrative,” she says. “And being able to come back to teach others.”
For more information, or to book a ticket for the tour, go to insiderexpeditions.com/charlottesville-civil-rights-tour.
Robert Reed’s “San Romano (Hip Strut)” explodes off the wall of the Jefferson School’s gallery. The bright colors and bold shapes are both abstract and representational—in one corner it’s all color and form, and in another corner there’s a chessboard, a gift from Reed’s son.
Reed attended the Jefferson School as a child in the age of segregation before finding success as an artist and academic. He taught at the Yale School of Art from 1969 until his death in 2014, but he maintained ties to the community throughout his life, keeping a studio here and sitting on the advisory board of Second Street Gallery. Now, his work is on display as part of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center’s “Charlottesville Collects African American Art” exhibit.
“This exhibition shows what African American artists have been thinking about, and how they’ve been approaching their work, over the last 70 years,” says JSAAHC Executive Director Andrea Douglas. The show’s 18 works provide a surprisingly in-depth survey, revealing what Douglas calls “a dramatic shift in America post-civil rights movement, when Black artists, and Americans in general, began to exist in a more racialized space.”
Reed’s work shows the tension at the heart of that evolution, as Black artists struggled to find success in the world of abstract art. Though the art establishment in the late 20th century sought abstract work, it also sidelined Black modernists because of their race. Meanwhile, these artists were repudiated by members of their own community for their emphasis on aesthetics rather than narrative.
“At the heart of this exhibition is the discourse of aesthetics versus race,” says Douglas. “It began with Alain Locke and W.E.B. Du Bois in the 1920s, James Porter in the ’40s, and then, in terms of the visual arts, it came to a head in 1971, with a show entitled ‘Contemporary African American Art’ at the Whitney Museum in New York City, and a second show in Houston, Texas, called ‘The DeLuxe Show.’” The early ’70s saw Black artists “articulating what it is that they understand to be their role and place in the larger American conversation,” says Douglas.
The Whitney mounted “Contemporary African American Art” in response to calls for more representation in museums from a group of artists called the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition. But as the exhibit went up, two points of contention emerged. The BECC were upset that the show had been scheduled for the spring, rather than the more prestigious winter months. The coalition also felt The Whitney hadn’t consulted enough experts in Black art about the selection of works. The BECC called for a boycott of the show, and 15 of the 75 artists on display withdrew their work.
Meanwhile, down in Texas, “The DeLuxe Show” was formed and presented in a remodeled movie theater as the first fully integrated show of its kind. The exhibition featured exclusively aesthetically based abstract art. The artists, regardless of their race, were presented on equal footing.
Standing next to Reed’s work at the Jefferson School is a sculptural work by renowned abstract artist Sam Gilliam, one of the artists who was in “The DeLuxe Show,” and one of the 15 who withdrew from the Whitney following the BECC boycott.
In the Charlottesville exhibition, his “Concrete (Tall #7)” creeps up on you, revealing its power incrementally. Gilliam uses concrete as his surface, silk screening the ink onto the overlapping, wafer-thin planes. It’s an interesting pairing—the obdurate weightiness of the concrete contrasting to the color, which at the upper part of the work, appears almost vaporous. Down below, three-dimensional drips and ridges of pigment add additional materiality, and impart visual heft. Gilliam uses copper wire to stitch together the planes, the copper is dull, so it doesn’t scream at you, but the chain-like stitches are so beautifully done, it’s clear they transcend their function to become a player within the composition. Jazz inspires Gilliam, and there’s a musical quality to the rhythm of the work with its varied passages of quiet and clamor.
Placing Gilliam’s piece next to Reed’s was “a really important gesture,” says Douglas. The two were friends and their approach to color and strong geometric forms is similar.
Reed isn’t the only artist featured in the show who attended the Jefferson School. Brothers Henderson “Bo” Walker and Frank Walker, and their friend Gerry Mitchell, were students there too, making the exhibition a reunion of sorts.
Moving around the room, two lithographs by Richard Hunt also stand out. Hunt is a prolific sculptor with over 125 public commissions to his name. His affinity for working in three dimensions is obvious here in the assemblage of bone-like objects, some flat, some rendered with volume, producing a striking sculptural effect. The earthy browns and grays punctuated by a pop of yellow strikes just the right note of stylish restraint.
Alison Saar’s “Black Bottom Stomp” draws on West African art and imagery. The title references Jelly Roll Morton’s 1925 jazz composition of the same name, so there’s a back and forth going on between West Africa and America. Saar’s images—the female figure, the moon, and also the title and the colors—present clues that resonate with the viewer.
If you’ve been to the Times Square subway station, you might recognize Jacob Lawrence’s “Transit I and II.” The sketches are the silkscreen models for a mosaic mural commissioned by the New York City Transit Authority for the busy station. “Transit I” depicts a subway car with riders holding onto poles. In “Transit II,” the subject shifts to a bus crowded with riders.
Lawrence uses a reduced palette of handsome earth tones that resemble collaged pieces of paper. With his jerky, jangly shapes and figures, he conveys the movement of train and bus and the press of humanity within them. He also adds recognizable touches—a briefcase, a long strand of sausages links, rosary beads for a potential subway proselytizer—to point out the range of transit patrons. With their flattened space and flat blocks of color, the compositions come across as abstract/figurative hybrids.
“We could write a very good history of photography between a Gordon Parks, a Carrie Mae Weems, and a Hank Willis Thomas, in terms of developing a conceptual idea about what photography has the potential to speak about,” says Douglas, referring to three photographs in the show. “Gordon Parks was sent to Alabama right after the bus boycott with the intention of documenting life in the South for Black people. He went to one of the poorest areas, met a sharecropper, Willie Causey and his family, and then documented that family in a series that appeared in Time magazine. Parks was approaching it from an aesthetic position, but he was also interested in describing Black poverty in the midst of the civil rights movement as a way of creating empathy for these people.”
The Weems’ photograph is from her “Kitchen Table Series,” which consists of 20 images of Weems, her romantic partner, her child, and her mother positioned around her kitchen table. Below an ever-present and distinctive overhead light fixture, the people in the photographs are caught in the ordinary moments of a woman’s life. Dating to 1990, the “Kitchen Table Series” established Weems’ reputation. The series is remarkable because it focused on a Black family at a time when so much contemporary art exhibited in museums and galleries did not. And while the subject of the series is a Black woman, the images also possess a universality that transcends race and gender.
Hank Willis Thomas’ haunting color photograph, “Strange Fruit,” depicts a muscular Black man wearing shorts and Nike sneakers in midair, slam dunking a basketball through a noose. “Looking at the image, you can see Thomas is thinking about the role of commodity and Black bodies,” says Douglas. “Embedded within the image also is the history of violence against Black bodies, the ways in which sports has become a road out of poverty, the importance of Nike as a brand and, therefore, the branding of that body with the racist, capitalist discourse that that can engender. …All of those things are there.”
The University of Virginia Art Museum, where Douglas was once a curator, used to mount a recurring show, “Charlottesville Collects,” which focused on local collections. Those collections overwhelmingly belonged to white people and featured white artists. So it was important for Douglas to present a show that shifted the emphasis to Black artists. “Charlottesville Collects African American Art” reveals a wealth of that art in this community.
In an ongoing effort to atone for its racist history, the University of Virginia could provide scholarships to descendants of enslaved laborers as soon as 2022. PC: Stephen Barling
Elijah. Julia. Sam. I took in every name, and let each resonate within me, as I quietly examined the granite slabs. I saw the name of my brother, then I saw it several more times. If he had been born just over 150 years ago, he could have been enslaved at the University of Virginia, alongside the rest of our family.
But what struck me even more were the unnamed. Of the 4,000 deep gashes inscribed into the memorial walls—each representing a person enslaved at the university—only 578 have names resting above them. Because they were viewed as property, and treated as such, the identities of more than 3,000 men, women, and children remain lost to history, and may never be discovered.
With its compelling symbolism and innovative design, the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers urges its visitors to confront these cruel realities of slavery, and honor the countless contributions enslaved people made to UVA, left unacknowledged for nearly two centuries. It is a site for learning, mourning, and remembering, as the university works to heal from its violent past.
As recent protests against systemic racism held at the memorial show, it also serves as a call for change. The painful effects of slavery can still be felt and seen around UVA today, and the school has a long way to go to achieve racial equity. But for many, paying respect to the Black people who built the university is the first step in the right direction, and offers a glimpse of a better future.
Long time coming
In 1619, the White Lion landed in Point Comfort, Virginia. The “20 and odd” Angolans aboard the ship were sold to Governor Sir George Yeardley, and brought to Jamestown—becoming the first enslaved Africans in England’s colonies in the Americas.
Nearly 400 years later, in 2007, the Virginia General Assembly issued an apology for the state’s role in the institution of slavery. UVA’s Board of Visitors followed suittwo months later, expressing “profound regret” for the university’s use of enslaved people.
Earlier that year, the board also voted to place a small gray stone marker in the ground near the Rotunda, honoring the “several hundred women and men, both free and enslaved, whose labor between 1817 and 1826 helped to realize Thomas Jefferson’s design for the University of Virginia.”
Marcus Martin PC: Dan Addison/UVA Communications
“Most people step over it all of the time,” says Marcus Martin, MD, former vice president and chief officer for diversity and equity at UVA. The low stone “falls short in that it’s not very visible, and only talks about the period of 1817 to 1826. …Slavery didn’t end until 1865, and there were more than several hundred free and enslaved men and women [who] helped erect the university and maintain it.”
“The university, at that point, didn’t have the tradition of telling the full story about its history. Everything was focused on Jefferson,” says UVA history professor and associate dean Kirt von Daacke. “There was sort of a sense that Jefferson’s hand was in everything—he built it, he designed it. That was a vague myth.”
In 2010, two students—one an intern for University and Community Action for Racial Equity, the other a co-chair of the Student Council Diversity Initiatives Committee—took the controversy surrounding the marker as a chance to raise greater awareness about slavery at UVA, forming a group called Memorial to Enslaved Laborers.
The group organized community discussions on the creation of a memorial, among other initiatives. And the following year, it held a design competition.
“There were some neat concepts, but they were not of the quality to withstand the environment and test of time, [and] to be approved and erected on Grounds,” says Martin.
Accompanied by his assistant Meghan Faulkner and IDEA Fund chair Tierney Fairchild, as well as student leaders, Martin met with then-president Teresa Sullivan’s cabinet in 2013, proposing the university create a commission entirely dedicated to studying the university’s history of slavery, and recommending ways to commemorate the contributions of enslaved people—including a memorial.
According to von Daacke, it was not easy getting everyone on the Board of Visitors to agree to build the memorial “sooner rather than later.”
“When you start with projects like this, running counter to how you’ve done things before, there’s often a sort of fear-based perspective about it. That if we do this, it will bring protests. …That it’s talking about an unpleasant reality of the university’s past, and will be bad for the university, ” he explains.
“Our job [as the PCSU] was to convince everybody that no that’s not true. …Embracing difficult history is beneficial to us in a multitude of ways,” he says. “That takes some time. You have to do the research and public talks, where everyone gets used to hearing these stories, and you have to talk to people one-on-one. [But] protests aren’t going to come unless you do nothing.”
Kirt von Daacke PC: Supplied photo
In 2016, after years of lobbying, the BOV finally commissioned the memorial, and put together a design team: architecture firm Höweler + Yoon; alumna and architectural historian Dr. Mabel O. Wilson; landscape architect and professor Gregg Bleam; polymedia Nigerian-American artist Eto Otitigbe, and community facilitator Dr. Frank Dukes, co-founder of University and Community Action for Racial Equity and past director of the Institute for Environmental Negotiation at the UVA School of Architecture.
The design team immediately sought input from the community, sending out surveys and hosting public forums for students, staff, faculty, alumni, local residents, and descendants of the enslaved both inside and outside of Charlottesville, with the support of the PCSU.
In 2017, the BOV approved a final design and location for the memorial, and allocated funding toward its $7 million price tag the next year, alongside private donations.
After about a year of construction, the project was completed this April. Though its dedication ceremony had to be rescheduled for next April—during Black Alumni Weekend—due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the memorial is now open, “demanding you pay attention and interact with it,” says von Daacke.
The memorial “is really a reflection of the community in Charlottesville,” says Otitigbe, who is based in Brooklyn, New York. “[We] had a lot of interesting conversations with different community members and descendants…I am really thankful they all welcomed me and allowed me to do this, because I was essentially working with, in some way, the remains of their ancestors.”
Stone and symbols
The memorial’s stone was quarried nearby—it’s a variety of granite called Virginia Mist. The name fits: The memorial’s designers hope this stone can provide a physical representation of a murky and poorly documented past.
PC: Stephen Barling
“One of the first things we heard [from the community] was you can’t build a memorial that is meant to humanize the enslaved without picturing humanity in some way,” says von Daacke. “This was sometimes interpreted as a call for a figurative sculpture of an enslaved person,” like Isabella Gibbons, who was enslaved at UVA and became an educator in Charlottesville after emancipation, he explains.
“But of course at UVA, we can’t do that. We have no images of enslaved people at UVA. We have post-emancipation photos, [which are] probably not good images to use to capture what life was like in slavery,” he adds. “Or there are pictures of people who continued to work for the university during Jim Crow, and were treated by white Charlottesville and UVA as the faithful slave. Their picture and story were told by [whites], and is not reflective of who these people were.”
Instead, architectural historian Wilson proposed a more abstract, circular structure for the memorial, symbolizing the broken chains of slavery. It’s also a nod to the ring shout, a dance rooted in West African traditions celebrating spiritual liberation practiced by enslaved people, during which they clapped, prayed aloud, sang hymns, and shuffled their feet in a counterclockwise direction. The ring is 80 feet in diameter—the same as the Rotunda.
“It’s nice that [the memorial is] visible from town and not within the enclosure of the university, on the Lawn or on Grounds, where these people were forced to work,” says Jalane Schmidt, a UVA religious studies professor and community activist. “They had complete lives. They did not define themselves solely as laborers. …They were members of a community.”
The design team says the horizontal slashes that are spread across the interior wall of the memorial’s larger ring are reminiscent of scars from brutal whippings that once covered the enslaved peoples’ bodies. After years of examining historical records, researchers were able to find the names of 578 people enslaved at the university to add to the wall above the memory marks, along with 311 people known by their occupation or kinship relation. However, the rest of the marks remain nameless, laying bare the violent dehumanization of slavery.
PC: Stephen Barling
This wall “extends the narrative about who this African American community is…[and] allows us to have distinct conversations about what their service looked like,” says Andrea Douglas, executive director of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, and a member of the PCSU. “It really gives a better agency to people who were at some point largely dismissed.”
Every inch of the memorial was designed purposefully, and every detail is symbolic.
The eyes of Isabella Gibbons are inscribed on the outside of the wall. Otitigbe used a post-Emancipation photo of her to lightly carve her eyes into the rough-hewn granite, so they are only clearly discernible in early morning or late day.
“Her eyes are looking out to the community, and that can represent many things,” says Dukes. “To me, it’s asking ‘What are you doing? We’re here—what are you doing about it?’”
A second, smaller ring inside the larger circle contains a shallow water fixture, symbolizing the rivers used as pathways to freedom, as well as African libation rituals, baptismal ceremonies, and the Middle Passage. Once the fixture is turned on, water will flow over a historical timeline etched into the ring detailing the everyday experiences of enslaved people at UVA, beginning with the first enslaved Africans arriving in Virginia in 1619 and concluding with Gibbons’ death in 1889.
PC: Stephen Barling
Stepping stones adjacent to the memorial point to the North Star, which led enslaved people to freedom. And the brick walkway visitors use to enter the memorial will align with sunset on March 3, or Liberation and Freedom Day, when Union troops emancipated enslaved people in Charlottesville at the close of the Civil War.
The smaller ring encircles a fresh cut lawn, a space for gatherings, celebrations, performances, classes, and protests centered around topics of racial justice.
An excerpt of one of Gibbon’s writings from 1867 appears at end of the timeline: “Can we forget the crack of the whip, cowhide, whipping-post, the auction-block, the hand-cuffs, the spaniels, the iron collar, the negro-trader tearing the young child from its mother’s breast as a whelp from the lioness? … No, we have not, or ever will.”
In view
Douglas arrived at UVA as a graduate student in the ’90s. Confederate flags flapped from fraternity house windows, and students regularly popped up at parties wearing blackface. (Those things still happen, but with a little less frequency.)
Andrea Douglas PC: Eze Amos
“White supremacy was very much inculcated into the culture of the school,” she says. “Going to a university with that much blatant anti-Black racism, to have this [memorial] as prominent as it is [and] know there is a movement towards a kind of respect for the community the university sits in…It feels much different from when I got here.”
For activist Don Gathers, seeing the names—or lack of names—on the memorial for the first time was “incredibly powerful,” bringing him to tears, he says.
“To stand there and take it all in—it speaks volumes to you. You realize the struggle and sacrifice that those individuals made, and were forced to make, to bring us to the point we are now.”
Though the memorial is effective, Gathers believes the location could have been better chosen.
“Where it is, it still has the semblance of…the Rotunda and Jefferson himself looking down upon the enslaved,” he says.
“Community members told us that they don’t go on Grounds,” explains Dukes. “We don’t feel welcome. So if you build it on the Grounds…we’re not going to come. It’s not going to be for us.”
Third-year Black student activist Sarandon Elliott believes the location of the memorial makes it much more visible, especially to students.
“When people walk towards UVA, they’re going to have to see that. And I also like that it’s near the Corner, a really busy area. People walking past it can stop and reflect upon it,” says Elliott, president of the school’s Young Democratic Socialists of America.
It remains to be seen if the memorial’s current location—technically off Grounds but still very much amidst the UVA bubble, tucked between the hospital and the Rotunda, just across the street from the student-swarmed Corner—will attract a lot of Charlottesville residents.
Though it’s just about impossible to identify every enslaved person, von Daacke and other researchers continue to search for names, occupations, and kinships to engrave on the monument’s inner wall. (A handful have already been found since it was completed, he says.)
Jalane Schmidt PC: Eze Amos
Last year, UVA also began discovering the names of enslaved people through its new descendant outreach project, spearheaded by renowned genealogist Shelley Murphy, which will continue for at least the next two years.
The descendants have formed a leadership group, but are still getting themselves organized, according to UVA employee and descendant DeTeasa Gathers. They plan to conduct educational tours and talks at the memorial, when the pandemic finally comes to an end.
“We consider this very vital, because the history books in Virginia are not inclusive and not very detailed [on] the quandary of slavery,” says Cauline Yates, who is also a descendant. “[Students] are our up-and-coming leaders of the future. We’re trying to make sure that they understand what even happened in their very own backyard.”
“This is not completely about us. This is more about telling the unvarnished truth about what happened going forward,” says DeTeasa Gathers. “We see this memorial as people who were enslaved…but it did last for generations past. It’s important to not forget the generations behind it who have been affected.”
Structural change
Shortly after the murder of George Floyd, dozens of UVA Health employees gathered at the memorial, kneeling for eight minutes and 46 seconds, the amount of time Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin dug his knee into Floyd’s neck.
In addition to raising awareness about police violence against Black people, the group called attention to systemic inequality and racism in the health care system—bringing a crucial purpose of the memorial to fruition.
PC: Stephen Barling
Now that the memorial is finished, the university needs to answer its call to action, and implement real changes, says Schmidt.
The Memorial to Enslaved Laborers “is the sculptural, African American version of institutions’ spoken indigenous land acknowledgments, both now made with fanfare and solemnity: It’s a nice gesture,” she says. “But absent concrete material actions of repair, it remains just a gesture.”
Martin echoes Schmidt’s calls for sweeping structural change, pointing to the detailed list of recommendations the PCSU made in its final report to Teresa Sullivan in 2018.
For Martin, one of the most crucial issues facing UVA is its small population of Black students. While the state of Virginia is nearly 20 percent Black, only about 7 percent—a little over 1,000—of the university’s undergraduate students are Black.
UVA doesn’t just need to admit more Black students, but figure out how to attract and keep them here, explains Martin. He says the university offers admission to around 1,000 Black students each year, but only 35 percent of them accept.
A solution, he says, would be to offer more scholarships through the Ridley Scholarship Fund, minimizing the student debt for a demographic that statistically already has less wealth. The university could also explore ways to create a need-based scholarship fund for descendants of its enslaved laborers through the fund.
Martin also calls for the creation of more fellowships related to Black studies, so the school can attract more Black faculty—4 percent of the faculty of the state’s flagship university is Black.
Schmidt is all for more scholarships, but she believes UVA needs to include reparations in its admissions practices, like Georgetown University, which, since 2016, has given preferred admissions, or “legacy” status, to the descendants of those enslaved there.
UVA should not just aim to get more Black students, but also make them feel included and valued once they are on Grounds, says Elliott. This includes following up on the range ofrecommendations issued by the university’s Racial Equity Task Force last month, and removing racist symbols and names—from Alderman Library to the George Rogers Clark statue.
UVA student activist Sarandon Elliott believes the memorial must be accompanied by structural reforms. PC: John Robinson
“If we are not actively fighting racial and economic inequity, we are not properly honoring enslaved peoples,” she adds.
After spending an hour or so at the memorial, I left feeling pained. Black people at UVA, in Charlottesville, and across the country have endured so much violence and oppression. The memorial is here, but the violence has yet to cease.
But I also left with a sense of hope. Now more than ever, radical student leaders and activists of color like Elliott are holding the university accountable for its racism—without the initial push from students, it’s likely the memorial wouldn’t exist today. Through their efforts, and the efforts of the next generation, and the next, UVA may someday atone for its troubled past.
Andrea Douglas, executive director of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, thinks Juneteenth should be a national holiday. PC: Eze Amos
Since press time, Governor Ralph Northam has proposed legislation to make Juneteenth a paid state holiday. If it passes, all state employees would get the day off.
With additional reporting by Erin O’Hare
Every July 4, people across the country don their red, white, and blue; pull out their grills; and watch fireworks with family and friends, in celebration of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. But there is another independence day that’s often overlooked: Juneteenth.
Also known as Freedom Day or Jubilee Day, Juneteenth commemorates the day—June 19, 1865—that Union General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, to inform enslaved people there that the Emancipation Proclamation had freed them, and the Civil War was over. Though President Abraham Lincoln signed the document two and a half years earlier, slave owners had to free their slaves themselves, and some did not until Union troops forced them to. Union troops in Texas, the most remote slave state, were not strong enough to enforce the order until Granger’s arrival—marking an effective end to slavery in the United States.
This year marks the 20th anniversary of Charlottesville’s first known public Juneteenth celebration, which was held in a recreation center on Ninth Street, and hosted by Tamyra Turner, a professor at Piedmont Virginia Community College, and Maxine Holland.
PVCC hosted Juneteenth celebrations for 15 years, but in 2016, in an effort to boost waning attendance, the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center took over, and brought the events to a more central location in town.
Bringing the holiday to downtown Charlottesville “has really revitalized it,” with attendance in the hundreds year after year, says the school’s Executive Director Andrea Douglas.
For the past few years, the JSAAHC’s Juneteenth party has included a ceremony honoring black community elders, music and dance from black artists, and educational programming. Douglas hoped to have a parade this year as well. But due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there won’t be “the kinds of events that we have had in the past,” says Douglas, who refused to “waste this anniversary.”
The Emancipation Proclamation was informed by the ideas of black people, especially Frederick Douglass. PC: File photo
Friday evening, in lieu of its in-person celebrations, the JSAAHC will host an online lecture centered around the Emancipation Proclamation. Holland, with assistance from C.R. Gibbs, Richelle Claiborne, and Ti Ames, will explore the document and the history of Juneteenth, as well as its various components and deeper meaning.
“We had always wanted to focus on the Emancipation Proclamation, because [it] is such an important document,” says Douglas. “In some ways, we think about it as Lincoln’s document, but it was a document that was worked on, and informed, by the ideas of black people—Frederick Douglass in particular.”
And in light of the ongoing protests demanding an end to police brutality and justice for the murders of black people across the country, Douglas says there will be opportunity to discuss “the nuances of what it means to be free,” including the conceptof freedom for black people in America today, and how, in many ways, they are still fighting for it.
Historian Hari Jones, former assistant director and curator at the African American Civil War Freedom Foundation and Museum, will also give a video presentation that dives into the history of Juneteenth and how the Lost Cause myth has impacted how it’s celebrated today.
Though Juneteenth at the JSAAHC will look a bit different this year, the spirit remains the same. And Douglas and others will continue to advocate for Juneteenth to become a national holiday.
Douglas wonders why, as a country, we celebrate July 4, one of the first big moments in American history, but we skip over Juneteenth, the “next main event.” It’s “the very thing that suggests that America made a huge shift…the shift that says that the confederacy, the secession, the papers of secession, those states that seceded, now lost the war,” she says.
While Charlottesville has taken steps towards acknowledging its troubled past by creating Liberation and Freedom Day, the U.S. cannot “fully engage in the truth of our history” until it officially recognizes Juneteenth, she adds. “It should be equally a national holiday as July 4—because it’s the same thing. It’s just how you want to see it.”
Some Charlottesville residents find the new mural on the side of Six Hundred West Main to be tone-deaf. Photo Credit: Staff Photo
The developers of Six Hundred West Main, a luxury apartment building that opened in September, promised the city a “gift” in the form of a public mural from internationally acclaimed artist Faith XLVII.
But some residents may want to give it back.
The mural, which was unveiled during the week of September 23, features a horse and the word “LIBERATE” against a dark green background. Working with the Charlottesville Mural Project, the artist, a white South African, designed the piece to pay “homage to the equine history of the area while subtly harkening to both historical and contemporary notions of Freedom that are tied strongly to Charlottesville’s identity,” according to the proposal.
“Looking at this mural, I’m guessing that maybe they meant residents could ‘LIBERATE’ themselves out of $2,200 for a 1BR,” tweeted Charlottesville journalist Jordy Yager, who posted a thread on the mural on September 25. Others chimed in to criticize the building, where rents range from $1,240 to more than $4,300, and which is set to expand to the University Tire site next door.
In an email, Yager pointed out that Six Hundred West Main is surrounded by two historically black neighborhoods, yet their residents were not invited to participate in the mural creation process.
“[This is] another example of integral voices being left out of the conversations that shape the city around us. Not only are key people being left out of the actual building, in terms of being able to afford to live there, but they’re also being left out of the art that they have to walk past every day,” says Yager.
To Charlottesville native Niya Bates, the horse image recalls the Confederate statues, and she finds it offensive and tone-deaf. On Twitter, Bates had previously called attention to the building’s “neighborhood guide,” which featured upscale spots like Purvelo and IX Art Park but excluded black businesses and institutions, calling it “a cheat code to gentrification 2.0.” She said the mural was also “a missed opportunity to elevate and work with someone in our own community.”
FaithXLVII, one of the most famous female street artists in South Africa, originally agreed to speak with C-VILLE for this story. But she later requested questions be sent by email, after which her publicist Kassia Rico responded by declaring that the submitted questions, which asked for Faith’s response to the controversy, were “biased,” and that the artist would not respond to them.
“Faith is an artist that is actively involved in promoting Human Rights, issues of LGBTQ, and Gender Equality. In her studio practice, the horse is a symbol that she is currently working with that stands for the freeing of oneself from various forms of oppression and it is about personal and social liberation,” Rico wrote.
“We hope the residents of Charlotsville [sic] can understand this artwork in this manner, and not the overtly political manner that you are suggesting.”
Faith later replied herself, saying “if anything, the artwork stands in direct opposition” to the Confederate monuments. She then sent a 172-word statement on the mural’s symbolism, featured below.
The issue, says resident and art historian Andrea Douglas, is that the mural “has nothing to do with the kinds of issues that Charlottesville is living with today…. In some ways it’s emblematic and correct. And in other areas it is absolutely in discord with the space that it wants to occupy.”
Artist’s statement:
“The imagery of a rearing horse, sometimes bridled but with reigns flying loose, signifies a powerful animal which has been subjugated by humankind, and has finally broken free. The image of the horse carries with it the weight of nationalism and patriotism, and is associated with memorials and statues of statesmen and war “heroes”. Historically, they were the creatures men took to war, to fight and die alongside them with unrelenting loyalty. Inescapably majestic and elegant in their powerful and muscular form, horses have an inherent sense of nobility.
Within this discrepancy between their physical power and their subservience, they become archetypal symbols for notions of human power struggles, war, nationalism and blind loyalty to leadership. By unleashing or freeing these dignified creatures through these images, we understand their own sense of agency, independent from human quests, ultimately expressing their own innate power.
Shedding their shackles, the figures in this series conjure sentiments of resistance, revolution, and our individual, innate strength and ability to stand up to fascist rule and totalitarian power.” – FAITH XLVII
Updated 10/9/19 to provide complete quote from Andrea Douglas.
Map of the downtown Confederate monument tour. Courtesy WTJU
Tour de force
For the past couple of years, Jalane Schmidt, UVA professor and activist, and Andrea Douglas, Jefferson School African American Heritage Center director, have been conducting tours of our downtown monuments, providing new context for the Confederate statues that have long dominated Court Square and Market Street parks.
Now, those who haven’t seen the tour in person can experience it online, thanks to WTJU. The local radio station recorded the tour and will be airing short excerpts over the next two weeks, along with putting a web version on its site.
The tour offers history from a perspective that challenges the Lost Cause narrative most Southerners were taught.
“Virginia has the largest number of Confederate monuments in the country,” says Douglas. “Seventy-five exist in front of courthouses.”
Noting that founding fathers Thomas Jefferson and James Madison frequented Court Square, Schmidt says “It does beg the question why the people who tried to overthrow the U.S. Constitution are here on this ground.” Schmidt notes that the Johnny Reb statue in front of the Albemarle Circuit Court was installed after Reconstruction in 1909, when the Confederates who had been barred from office slipped back into government “to re-establish white supremacy—and they use those words,” she says. “They were not embarrassed by it.”
Jalane Schmidt and Andrea Douglas lead a tour that challenges the Lost Cause narrative of Confederate monuments. Photos Eze Amos
Quote of the week
“Like everyone else—sick to the stomach, very angry about our elected officials doing nothing to change anything. We are so long past ‘thoughts and prayers’ and we are so overdue gun reform.” Priya Mahadevan, leader of Moms Demand Action in Charlottesville, responding to the latest mass shootings.
In brief
Riggleman rebuked
Denver Wriggleman. file photo
On July 27, the 5th District Congressional Committee tried, and failed, to muster a censure of U.S. Representative Denver Riggleman for marrying two men who had volunteered for his campaign. The determined anti-gay marriage chair of the Cumberland County Republican Committee, Diana Shores, then tried another tack: On July 29, she pushed through a unanimous vote of no confidence for Riggleman for failing to represent her values, the Washington Post reports.
Filmmaker dies
Courtesy Paladin Media Group
Paladin Media Group founder Kent Williamson, 52, was on the way to the movies when an alleged drunk driver crashed into the car in which he was a passenger August 2 in Berrien County, Michigan, the Progress reports. The father of six was with three extended family members, who also died in the crash.
Fiancée killer
Cardian Omar Eubanks was sentenced August 5 to life plus eight years for the murder of his estranged fiancée, Amanda Bates, 34, whom he shot while she was seated in her car in her driveway March 24, 2018. At the time, her two sons were inside the house on Richmond Road. Bates’ family has spoken out about the tragedy to raise awareness of domestic violence.
Crozet commuter
JAUNT launched its Crozet Connect August 5, with two routes from east and west Crozet, each with three morning departures to UVA and downtown Charlottesville. The rides are free for UVA faculty, staff, and students, and free for other riders until October 1, after which the commute will cost $2 each way.
Nydia Lee. Photo Charlottesville police
Mother indicted
Nydia Lee, 26, was arrested August 5 for second-degree murder in the January 10 death of her 20-month-old child, according to Charlottesville police. A multi-jurisdictional grand jury returned the indictment and Lee is being held without bond.
Garden director
The McIntire Botanical Garden, in the works since 2013, announced the hiring of its first executive director. Landscape architect Jill Trischman-Marks, who has served on the botanical garden’s board of directors and multiple committees, was selected through a competitive process, according to a release, and starts September 1.
Topping the agenda
It was a packed house Monday night at City Hall, where Char- lottesville City Council returned from its summer hiatus to vote on several issues that had been at the forefront of discussion over the past few months.
The rezoning proposal for the Hinton Avenue United Methodist Church was passed unanimously, paving the way for the church to construct 15 apartments with at least four affordable housing units for the intellectually disabled. The type of rezoning received pushback from Belmont neighbors worried about increased traffic on the road and fewer parking spots.
Charlottesville City Schools Superintendent Rosa Atkins laid out a new model for Quest, the city’s gifted program that’s seeing
changes in how students are selected and will no longer be separating kids from the rest of their classmates. The plan, which was approved in a 5-0 vote, includes $468,000 in funding for city elementary schools to hire eight new instructors to help implement the revamped program for the 2019-20 school year.
After a year of research, the Police Civilian Review Board outlined proposed bylaws for a permanent CRB (to include two full-time employees). Council will hold private discussions with staff, including Police Chief RaShall Brackney, before drafting a final proposal in October.
And Unity Days organizer Tanesha Hudson asked for an additional $35,000 to bring D.C. rapper Wale to the Made in Charlottesville Concert at Tonsler Park on August 18, but the motion, supported only by Councilor Wes Bellamy, never made it to a vote.
“Simply: The Black Towns” is Jamelle Bouie’s first-ever photography exhibition, on view at The Jefferson School through July 13. Photo: Eze Amos
An all-black town.
An all-black town? It was a stray mention in a book on the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, but Jamelle Bouie was intrigued.
An all-black town. “It got stuck in my craw,” says Bouie.
He found a few local news articles, a mini documentary film, and a couple books on the subject—the dozens of towns founded in Oklahoma by free blacks who’d migrated west after Emancipation—but that was it. For Bouie, a journalist whose work focuses on, among other things, politics and race in America, that wasn’t enough. He needed to know more.
In March of this year, he flew to Oklahoma to see these towns for himself.
Over the course of 72 hours, Bouie visited 12 of the 13 surviving all-black towns and photographed 10 of them. Fourteen of those photos are on view at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center through July 13.
“Simply: The Black Towns” is Bouie’s first-ever photography exhibition, and his own contribution to the awareness of a history that’s largely unknown.
Rosenwald School in Lima, Oklahoma. Photo: Jamelle Bouie.
Bouie himself is pretty well-known as a writer. After fellowships at The Nation magazine and The American Prospect, he was a staff writer at The Daily Beast and later chief political correspondent for Slate. Currently, he’s a political analyst for CBS News (perhaps you’ve seen him on the “Face the Nation” roundtable) and an opinion columnist for The New York Times. As he puts it, he’s written most days of most weeks for nearly 10 years.
Hundreds of thousands of people read his columns, and the Columbia Journalism Review, in a story by David Uberti published earlier this year, called him “one of the defining commentators on politics and race in the Trump era.”
Bouie is very active on Twitter (@jbouie), where his more than 266,000 followers get a regular dose of his thoughtful perspective on political and social issues national, international, and local (he lives in Charlottesville), mixed in with opinions about books, TV, and cereal (he recently opined that Cinnamon Toast Crunch Churros cereal is superior to regular Cinnamon Toast Crunch. They don’t get soggy right away, he says. “Because they have more surface area, they don’t take in milk as quickly”). Occasionally, he shares a photograph.
Bouie is a much more active photographer than his Twitter—or his Instagram profile, “New York Times columnist. Sometimes photographer”—would suggest. When Andrea Douglas, executive director of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, came across Bouie’s photography on Instagram, she was struck by his interest in landscape and curious about “the relationship of that visual language” in the larger context of his critical thinking and writing. Douglas sees Bouie’s photography as allowing his audience “a way to move into another sphere of engaging with his mind.”
When Douglas texted Bouie with an exhibition offer, Bouie agreed right away, though he wasn’t sure what photos he’d show. He’d been pursuing photography for years, but he hadn’t yet thought of it as something that could, or would, be seen beyond social media. “I don’t necessarily think of myself as an artist, in that way,” he says. “Even though I share lots of photos and every so often I think, ‘hey, that’s a strong image.’”
Being asked to exhibit his photography was “intimidating…which is a funny thing to say, because my day job is writing opinion pieces for The New York Times,” says Bouie. “A shocking number of people read these things. But for whatever reason, I can deal with that psychologically. Presenting my photographs to people? Much more intimidating.”
He says his writing, which focuses on “American history and the history of racism and class,” has “been described as a little opaque, and not entirely scrutable. And the photography is, in a real way, something that is much more personal.”
Of course it is. Photography shows where the artist has been, what he concerns himself with, what catches his eye, what he’s thinking about. It can say a lot about the person who stopped in his tracks, raised the camera to one eye, squinted through the viewfinder, and clicked the button. That’s not nothing.
A hotel in Boley, Oklahoma, one of the images from Bouie’s exhibit, “Simply: The Black Towns.”
Like most people, Bouie first encountered photography casually, using point-and-shoot and disposable cameras. He started pointing and shooting with more intention after graduating from UVA in 2009 with a degree in government and political and social thought, while working odd jobs at the Miller Center of Public Affairs. One of those odd jobs was taking photos at the center’s events, and Bouie was allowed to take the digital SLR camera and lens home to play with after-hours.
Not long after, Bouie started working as a journalist. He bought his own slick digital camera and used it, again, as most people would: to take snapshots on personal and work trips, “nothing very serious,” he says. And then his now mother-in-law gave him a film SLR camera.
Shooting film on an all-manual camera got Bouie thinking about the art of photography. Bouie says the “finiteness” of having, say, 36 exposures in a single roll of 35-millimeter film, made him contemplate what he wanted to photograph: If he had just 36 exposures, which 36 did he want to capture? And why? Photography was no longer just pointing and shooting.
Bouie was living in Washington, D.C., at the time, and he started the habit of taking his camera everywhere he went. He’d wander around downtown D.C. to practice framing shots, spotting interesting portrait subjects and getting comfortable asking complete strangers if he could take their picture. In 2017, he signed up for darkroom classes at Capitol Hill Arts Workshop to learn how to develop film and make his own prints.
His teacher, Katherine Akey, was immediately struck by his “passion for the medium. He constantly wanted to try new things, new ways of framing, new cameras, new darkroom applications. That kind of enthusiasm allows for a really fast pace of growth and exploration, like compost on a garden,” says Akey.
Soon, Bouie was spending eight hours a week in the darkroom, developing not just film but his eye.
“I still have a hard time saying that I have any subject,” says Bouie, who, at 32, is young, still new to the medium, and therefore in the process of defining his perspective as a photographer. But he has noticed that there are a few things that always catch his attention: geometries (particularly man-made geometries), symmetry, interplay of light and shadow. He shoots almost exclusively with normal lenses, “something that captures what the human eye sees or focuses on,” says Bouie.
He likes “old stuff.” Maybe that’s cliché, he says—lots of people like old stuff—but he totally gets why. Old stuff is undeniably compelling. For Bouie, the draw is two-fold: it’s the architecture itself and “trying to imagine what something would have looked like when it was loved. When people were doing the best they [could] to maintain it.” He likes thinking about how (and why) a building or an object that was once so lovingly created and maintained, has fallen into disrepair.
“This is a little morbid,” he adds, but there’s something fascinating about thinking about that cycle of care and neglect, of moving on, “as an inevitable thing. And there’s some beauty in that inevitability.”
He prefers to shoot in black and white, in part because he finds color film distracting, but also because, in his opinion, black and white film helps him better emphasize all those aspects that catch his eye: shape, shadow, story.
Bouie’s growing desire to create an intentional body of photographic works collided, “fortuitously,” he says, with his curiosity about the black towns and Douglas’ suggestion for an exhibition.
It was also a chance to combine, in a very concrete way, his journalistic interests with his photographic ones.
At first glance, these photographs might look and feel familiar: black and white images of buildings in various states of disrepair. But the viewer almost certainly has not seen these places, and has not heard the story Bouie’s photographs tell.
After the Civil War, tens of thousands of free blacks migrated to Kansas, which was known for being an anti-slavery state during the war, and “relatively friendlier to free blacks,” says Bouie. And when the Oklahoma Territory opened up in the 1890s (the federal government confiscated some 2 million acres of land from Native American tribes there in 1866), a new wave of black settlers moved there, too, fleeing the oppression and racial terror of the post-Reconstruction South.
The movement was led by two of the black men who had spearheaded the migration to Kansas—William Eagleton, a newspaperman, and Edward P. McCabe, a politician and businessman. Bouie purposefully said their names during his May 11 artist talk for the opening of “Simply: The Black Towns” at the JSAAHC, and read from one of the advertisements in Eagleton’s paper: “Give yourself a new start. Give yourselves and children new chances in a new land, where you will not be molested. Where you will be able to think and vote as you please.”
Bouie also read one of McCabe’s—“Here in Oklahoma, the negro can rest from mob law. He can be secure from every ill of Southern policies”—and a comment from an ordinary person, made in the 1890s: “We as a people believed that Africa is the place. But to get from under bondage, we are thinking Oklahoma, as this is our nearest place to safety.”
Black Southerners were willing to set out for a new land to attain some measure of freedom. What’s interesting, said Bouie during his artist talk, is “that this is the story of Western settlement of the United States in general.”
By 1900, black farmers owned and farmed many thousands of acres of land in the Midwest, and settlers founded more than 30 towns in Oklahoma alone, most of them scattered around the eastern part of the territory. They built homes, churches, schools, hotels, businesses, all with the hope that if they proved themselves hard workers who had attained an amount of political and economic freedom, white people would take notice and extend full rights to black people.
“Think about the people who made the decision to leave the South” and move west, says Douglas. Tens of thousands of people. “The quality and the quantity of that aspiration, it cannot be missed.”
The towns themselves were (and still are) very tidy and orderly, intentionally laid out on grids and full of “beautiful, stately buildings that were showcasing the ability of the people who came here to prosper and survive, and to make something out of what was really nothing,” says Bouie.
The prosperity wouldn’t last. In 1907, Oklahoma became a state, Jim Crow became law of the land, and the racism these people tried to escape in the South caught up to them. Poor weather conditions in the late 1900s meant crop failures for the farmers, and, because of Jim Crow, black farmers couldn’t get the government assistance they needed to weather the economic and literal storm. When the Great Depression hit in the late 1920s and ’30s, black business owners faced extraordinary hardship for similar reasons, and it was “game over for most of these places,” explains Bouie, as many people left the all-black towns for bigger cities like Tulsa and Oklahoma City, once again in search of a better life.
By the 1950s, just 20 of the black towns remained; today, 13. Boley is the largest of them, with an estimated 1,183 residents, and the others have a few hundred residents apiece, mostly older folks, says Bouie, who spoke with a few people in each town he visited: fire chiefs, pastors, people standing near him on the sidewalk.
Boley’s Country Store. Photo: Jamelle Bouie
Bouie sees his photographs of these towns as his contribution, however large or small, to public awareness of them, the people, their history. He sees it as nothing more.
“My conception of myself and what I’m doing [with these photos] is not nearly grand enough to think that I’m preserving this in any sense,” says Bouie, who is also working on an essay about his Oklahoma trip for the Times. He wants people to look at the photograph of Pearlie’s gravestone in Lima, Oklahoma, and see that she died rather young, that she was the wife of Edwards, and maybe think about who Pearlie was and what her life would have been like.
He wants people to look at the photo of Lima’s Rosenwald School, and understand that in the middle of Oklahoma, people once built, with their own hands, a beautiful school in which to educate their children, in a town that they themselves created with the hope of building a better, more prosperous life for themselves and their children. He wants people to think about what it means that the structures he’s photographed are still standing, and that people still live in these towns.
Bouie says that in this way, his photography is not necessarily unlike his writing: he approached this exhibition much as he approaches his New York Times opinion pieces, as works of “considered perspective.” In “Simply: The Black Towns,” he says he is “clearly an observer” offering his own perspective on these towns, a perspective that he says the viewer “should not necessarily take as the perspective on these places.”
Jamelle Bouie. Photo by Eze Amos
Photography teacher Akey still follows (via Instagram) Bouie’s lens, its view encompassing more than the black towns of Oklahoma, and including the built landscapes of Charlottesville, Richmond, Asheville, Seattle, and elsewhere. Akey says of Bouie’s overall body of work: “I think his gaze—and that of his camera—is often very loving and lingering while not giving in to the dark mysticism of Southern landscapes wholesale. I think Southern artists’ relationships to our heritage, land, and mythology is ripe for this kind of change, a change that is evident in Jamelle’s work.”
In hanging the exhibition, Douglas and Bouie chose to present the photographs unframed. Together, the pictures “tell a really meaningful and poignant story,” says Douglas, one that should not be glazed over by frame glass, or anything else. The photos present “a discourse about African American space, a discourse about the past, and what remains,” she adds. “You want that feel to be unobstructed.”
In tracking down this history, these places, says Douglas, Bouie “causes us to understand what it means to reclaim an African American story, the importance and the implication of that work in this moment,” in creating for everyone “a more complete narrative.” And, she adds, this is just the beginning for him as a photographer.
Bouie chose to tell a simplified version of the history on the exhibition tag that introduces the show, and has labeled each photograph with a concise marker of what we’re looking at: “A now-defunct general store for Boley,” or “A resident of Tatums rides his bike down one of the pathways leading to the highway.”
He gives bits and pieces of the history, perhaps so that the viewer can practice seeing what was, and what is. And maybe in that process, they too will get something stuck in their craw.
The exhibition is a different way of presenting the themes Bouie explores in his writing, Douglas says, “this sort of interesting, nuanced, American narrative. And [he is] trying to bring ideas to the [forefront], and a perspective that is not mainstream. And so these places are not mainstream places. They’re off the beaten path. And in some ways, their survival is heroic.”
The story Bouie tells with “Simply: The Black Towns,” with his careful attention to those landscapes, is a “testament to the hope people brought to this, and the story of how these places declined, which is an economic story,” he says. “But also, it’s a story about racism, which says something about the difficulty of trying to build a stable life for oneself in a racist society when you ultimately cannot really escape that.”
That is a story, he says, that’s “extremely American.”
The story Charlottesville tells through its most prominent public monuments was largely written by one man: Paul Goodloe McIntire.
“C’ville is awash with monuments. Why no statues to women besides a cowering Sacajawea (who happened to be pregnant but still led the white guys through the wilderness)?” – Donna Lucey
“We do have three statues of women, you know,” says former mayor Virginia Daugherty, her soft Southern voice a bit sly. She’s referring to Sacagawea, crouching at the foot of Lewis and Clark on West Main Street; an angel at the foot of the Jackson statue; and the head of an anonymous woman that appears, along with a man’s, on an abstract statue called “Family” in front of the old jail.
That’s what passes for female representation in Charlottesville’s dozens of monuments, from Homer and multiple likenesses of Thomas Jefferson scattered across Grounds at the University of Virginia, past explorers George Rogers Clark on University Avenue and Lewis and Clark on West Main, and over to the most prominent statues in town: Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Johnny Reb.
“When you look around, you just think it’s not right, the way that it is,” says Daugherty.
So why hasn’t the city, which is 51.6 percent female, honored any women?
In part, this is a national problem. “Statues of women never get names,” notes journalist Kriston Capps in a CityLab story called “The Gender Gap in Public Sculpture.” “They’re archetypes, symbols, muses, forces.” Of the hundreds of statues in New York City and Washington, D.C., he writes, each city has just five statues that depict historic women. “There are 22 statues of men in Central Park alone, but not one (non-fictional) woman.”
The explanation has to do with who, historically, has commissioned the building of monuments, and for what reasons.
In Charlottesville, the story we tell through our most prominent public monuments was largely written by one man: Paul Goodloe McIntire. As a 5-year-old boy, McIntire reputedly shook his fist at Union troops as they marched past his house in 1865, marking the end of the Confederacy. Decades later, McIntire got his revenge by gifting the city a series of segregated parks and installing the now-infamous statue of Lee, along with Stonewall Jackson, Lewis and Clark, and George Rogers Clark. (McIntire himself is memorialized in a bust behind the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society).
On a recent chilly Saturday morning, roughly 50 people turned out for a Confederate monument tour led by Dr. Andrea Douglas, director of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, and Dr. Jalane Schmidt, associate professor of religion at UVA.
Beginning at the barely legible plaque commemorating black history at the site where slaves were bought and sold, and ending at the graceful, imposing statue of Lee on his pedestal, Schmidt noted that our monuments show “whose history matters in the community.”
Defenders of our current Confederate monuments often express the desire to “preserve history.” But much of our local history is buried, Schmidt and Douglas said. Court Square Park, for instance, was once the site of a multiracial community called McKee’s Row. Fifty years before the more famous destruction of Vinegar Hill, McKee’s Row was demolished to make way for McIntire’s whites-only park, anchored by the statue of Stonewall Jackson. “You’d never know it,” Schmidt said. “You’re not supposed to know it.”
The Jackson statue, she also pointed out, was erected in 1921, the same year the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan was founded.
The Johnny Reb statue, one of hundreds of similar statues planted in front of courthouses throughout the South after the end of Reconstruction, was erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy but paid for in part by city and county funds. Among those on the statue committee, said Schmidt, was the prosecutor who declined to charge anyone in the lynching of John Henry James, which was attended by 150 unmasked white men.
“These are monuments to Jim Crow,” she said.
Other Southern cities have found ways to broadcast new values through their choice of monuments. “What they’ve done in Richmond is really great,” Daugherty says, referring to the way that city has balanced its boulevard of white male Confederate leaders with more recent monuments to female African American heroes like Maggie Walker, a teacher and the first African American woman to charter a bank, and Barbara Johns, who, as a high school student in Farmville, led a student strike to protest separate and unequal schools. Here in Charlottesville, she suggests, the city could recognize a local writer, like Amélie Rives or Julia Magruder, or an activist like Grace Tinsley or Otelia Love Jackson.
“There’s lots of good ideas,” Daugherty concludes. “I think it just takes a little organization.”
Some local women have been recognized in other ways—for instance, Jackson-Via Elementary in the city and Greer Elementary in the county are both named for female educators (Nannie Cox Jackson, Betty Davis Via, and Mary Carr Greer). And in 2011, UVA dedicated a memorial to Kitty Foster, a free black woman who worked as a laundress at the university. (A metal “shadow catcher” sculpture now demarcates the family’s graveyard.)
In 2009, after several protests, the city added a plaque to the Lewis and Clark statue commemorating Sacagawea’s contributions. Performance artist Jennifer Hoyt Tidwell, who organized a “theatrical protest” there in 2007 and started a petition that garnered 500 signatures, says the plaque was “a very minor concession to our protest,” and that she had hoped the city would make a bigger gesture.
As for new monuments to women, she says, “I would say I’m ignorant, like a lot of people, about what that would look like.”
But she’s not so sure about statues.
“I think a living way where you have artists who are paid to keep these things alive,” she suggests. For instance, she and other female artists were commissioned by UVA last spring to perform pieces at the Lee and George Rogers Clark statues, in response to August 12.
“In terms of countering a lot of the male statues I guess it’s important,” she says of the idea of women monuments. “But putting a lot of land into memorializing people…I don’t know if that’s the way to go.”
While Jackson and Lee never set foot in Charlottesville, there are plenty of notable women who actually lived here whose stories are largely unknown. Here are just a few:
Nancy Astor
1. Nancy Astor Nancy Witcher Langhorne was born in Danville and moved, at age 13, to an estate in Albemarle County. After an early, unhappy marriage to socialite Robert Gould Shaw II, Nancy moved to England, married fellow expat Waldorf Astor, and became the first woman to serve in Parliament.
Sarah Patton Boyle
2. Sarah Patton BoyleBoyle was born on a former plantation in Albemarle County, the granddaughter of Confederate veterans. She attended the Corcoran School of Art, married, and raised two sons. As she got older, she began questioning the views she was raised with and became an outspoken advocate for desegregation, writing hundreds of articles and speeches for the cause, and drawing attention from both Martin Luther King, Jr., who mentioned her by name in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, and the Ku Klux Klan, which burned a cross on her yard. The first white person to serve on the board of Charlottesville’s NAACP, Boyle was later recognized by the city as a “Bridge Builder,” with her name on the Drewary Brown Bridge.
Frances Brand
3. Frances Brand An artist and activist once known around town as “the purple lady,” Brand was born at West Point and attained the rank of Army major, doing liaison and intelligence work. In later life she became an activist for peace, women’s rights, civil rights, and other causes. Her “First” series of paintings commemorate more than 150 notable but under-recognized local citizens, many of them women or African Americans. (The paintings were bought by the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society, but are not currently displayed, and were removed from the organization’s website after a recent redesign).
Queen Charlotte
4. Queen Charlotte There are two statues of Queen Charlotte in one of her other namesake cities, Charlotte, North Carolina, but none here in Charlottesville. Legend has it that the German monarch, who married the British “mad King George,” wrote a widely circulated anti-war letter to Prussian king Frederick the Great, and was committed to social welfare. But in recent years, especially after Meghan Markle’s wedding to Prince Harry, Queen Charlotte is perhaps best known for being (possibly) the first black British monarch.
Isabella Gibbons
5. Isabella Gibbons Born into slavery, Gibbons managed to learn to read and write, and taught her children to do so as well. After the Civil War, she established a school for freed blacks, earned her own diploma, and then taught in the newly established (segregated) public school system for more than 15 years.
Alice Carlotta Jackson
6. Alice Carlotta Jackson Jackson was the first African American to apply to UVA, in 1935. After earning a BA in English and taking additional courses at Smith College, Jackson applied to UVA for a master’s in French, which was not offered at any of the black colleges and universities in Virginia. The Board of Visitors denied her application, but it set off a series of public arguments, and the threat of a future lawsuit led the Virginia General Assembly to pass the Dovell Act, which paid qualified black students the additional money required to attend schools out of state. Jackson used her grant money to earn a master’s degree from Columbia University, and taught at a Florida college for 45 years.
Grace Tinsley
7. Grace Tinsley Tinsely was the first African American woman elected to the Charlottesville School Board. “[She] used her voice on the board to make sure that people were treated fairly,” her daughter told Charlottesville Tomorrow. She was also the first nurse to work at Charlottesville High School. After her retirement, Tinsley successfully lobbied to establish a public defender’s office in Charlottesville. The Charlottesville Democratic Party named a scholarship in her honor, which is awarded to Charlottesville High School seniors from low- or middle-income households, and her name is on the Drewary Brown Memorial Bridge.
Amélie Rives Troubetzkoy
8. Amélie Rives Troubetzkoy The goddaughter of Robert E. Lee, Rives was born in Richmond and grew up at Castle Hill, in Albemarle County. She began writing as a young girl, and her bestselling first novel scandalized many for its portrayal of a woman who experienced sexual feelings. She went on to write more novels and, later, Broadway plays. After divorcing her first husband, she married Prince Pierre Troubetzkoy, an artist and aristocrat, and the couple moved back to Rives’ childhood home.
