UVA professor Frank Dukes points out the Confederate memorabilia for sale at Appomattox, a national park.
Photo Eze Amos
A month ago, around 100 locals set off on two buses to Montgomery, Alabama, carrying soil from the site where John Henry James was lynched in 1898 in Albemarle County. On August 5, nearly 200 people gathered at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center to hear the pilgrims’ report back to the community about what they experienced, what they learned and where they go next with what they brought back from the historic journey.
A common theme emerged: The violent events from last summer’s Unite the Right rally were not isolated events, but part of a continuum of white supremacy dating back to this country’s founding, say pilgrimage participants and organizers.
“Charlottesville has a long history of violent white supremacy,” said Jalane Schmidt, UVA religious studies professor and pilgrimage co-organizer. Along with James’ lynching, she listed the KKK in the 1920s—active at the same time controversial monuments of Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson were erected—sit-ins in the ‘60s to integrate restaurants, and August 11 and 12 last year. “And in all of these cases, police were complicit,” she added.
The journey began on July 8, the anniversary of the KKK rally last year, but Andrea Douglas, executive director of the heritage center and the pilgrimage’s other organizer, pointed out that July 9 was a more significant anniversary—the 150th of the ratification of the 14th Amendment that gave African Americans citizenship, due process and equal protection.
“Those are the same things we’re talking about today,” she said.
The six-day pilgrimage hit civil rights landmarks and museums between Charlottesville and Montgomery, and included Danville, Greensboro, Charlotte, Atlanta and Birmingham. It began with a stop at Appomattox, where a national park depicts the surrender of the Confederacy with remarkably little information about slavery, the issue that had sparked the Civil War, the pilgrims noted.
“They were selling Confederate memorabilia” at a taxpayer-funded national park, reported Frank Dukes, UVA Institute for Environmental Negotiation professor.
Dukes identified the Sweet Auburn district in Atlanta, a historic African American community that has been preserved and works to remain affordable, as a model for Charlottesville. He also mentioned memorials to the legacy of racial terrorism and the civil rights struggle, such as the Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial to Peace and Justice and the Edmund Pettus Bridge. “We don’t have enough of that,” he said.
Multiple people reporting to the community said school curricula is an issue.
Cauline Yates reports back for the Seasoned Saints, the demographic with the most years. Eze Amos
“We’d like to see schools do a better job of teaching black history—and not just at Black History Month,” said Cauline Yates.
Rising Charlottesville High senior Zyahna Bryant echoed the call for “more comprehensive black history” in schools. She, too, pointed out that the lynching of John Henry James “was not one singled-out event,” but is part of a history of white supremacy seen today in mass incarceration and “students of color failed over and over again.”
Bryant said the Real Justice PAC lobbies prosecutors. “I met with [Charlottesville Commonwealth’s Attorney] Joe Platania about how we can get people of color out of the criminal justice system,” she said.
Zyahna Bryant was one of the high school students who made the pilgrimage. Eze Amos
DeTeasa Gathers and Patsy Goolsby were among the 21 faculty and staff UVA sent on the pilgrimage, which they describe as transformative and enlightening, while evoking feelings of anger, pain and shame, empathy and gratitude. “The pilgrimage was hard,” said Goolsby.
“Did I really miss all of this in history?” Gathers asked. “Did I miss what happened to my people?”
“The original sin was not slavery, but the narrative of white supremacy,” said Goolsby. She says European-Americans have a “moral obligation” to work with other white people to understand this history.
The message they bring back to UVA: “Acknowledge people of color’s ability to serve in leadership roles,” said Gathers, to applause from the audience. Blacks have to work twice as hard as whites and “this is UVA’s reality.”
Civil rights is an ongoing effort, she added, and “make sure everyone votes.”
Her husband Don Gathers, chair of the city’s Blue Ribbon Commission on Race, Memorials and Public Spaces and member of the newly formed Charlottesville Police Civilian Review Board, says he was struck by the interactions among the people sharing a journey that affected them “spiritually, psychologically and emotionally.”
The pilgrims visited places where they experienced joy, sorrow, lamentations and anger, “all fueled with clear recognition of the persistence of white supremacy over our history,” he says.
Gathers was moved by “sacred moments”: seeing the struggle for justice, standing in front of August 12 victim Heather Heyer’s picture at the Southern Poverty Law Center, standing in the pulpit at Dexter Baptist Church in Montgomery where Dr. Martin Luther King preached and marching across the Pettus bridge. “We don’t get this kind of learning in schools,” he said.
“The future is long and the work is never done,” said Gathers. “Those on the pilgrimage can no longer sit on the periphery. We are forever changed.”
CHS student Zyahna Bryant and Mayor Nikuyah Walker dig up soil from where John Henry James is believed to have died. It will be taken in a pilgrimage to Montgomery to join that of other African Americans who died from lynching around the South.
staff photo
About 50 people gathered in the woods beside the train tracks running west of Charlottesville early July 7. The morning was cool and birds could be heard chirping in the quiet—a scene nothing like the one 120 years ago, when a mob yanked John Henry James off a train there at Wood’s Crossing and strung him up on a locust tree.
“Soon I will be done with the troubles of the world.” The Reverend Brenda Brown-Grooms sang the Mahalia Jackson spiritual as participants contemplated the violence that had taken place on the site.
The occasion was to gather soil from property now owned by Farmington Country Club, the first step of a pilgrimage in which approximately 100 Charlottesville citizens will transport it to the recently opened lynching memorial in Montgomery, Alabama—the Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial to Peace and Justice.
“We are embarking on an important journey,” said Andrea Douglas, executive director of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center and one of the pilgrimage organizers. “Today we recognize a murder. We, in doing so, are returning humanity to a dehumanizing act.”
The journey is a way to “commemorate, understand and recognize this act and incorporate it into our DNA and bodies as wrong,” said Douglas.
City and county officials were present for the ceremony, including Mayor Nikuyah Walker, Vice Mayor Heather Hill, councilors Wes Bellamy and Kathy Galvin and police Chief RaShall Brackney, as well Albemarle supervisors Diantha McKeel, Ned Gallaway, Norman Dill, Rick Randolph and Chair Ann Mallek.
UVA professor and pilgrimage organizer Jalane Schmidt recounted the details of James’ slaying. He’d been accused of assaulting a white woman, arrested and taken to spend the night in jail in Staunton because of fears of a lynching. On the train ride back, accompanied by the Albemarle sheriff, a group of around 150 unmasked men boarded the train.
After James was hanged, his body was riddled with 75 bullets, according to the Shenandoah Herald. “Hundreds of people visited the scene with many snatching souvenirs, such as pieces of his clothing,” said Schmidt. No arrests were made.
Walker and Charlottesville High student Zyahna Bryant dug up dirt from the site, and Walker asked all the black people there to come closer, to close their eyes and “yell out a name you’d like to share this moment with.”
Said Walker, “There is no explanation for the violence black bodies have endured in this country. There are no amount of sorry that can make up for the amount of turmoil black people and black families have endured in this country.”
She pointed out the volume of the violence inflicted on James with 75 shots into his body. “Somebody’s son, somebody’s brother, maybe somebody’s father.” She said those same injustices and hate happen every day in this country and in Charlottesville.
“We take this journey to gamble on the ancient notion that the truth will set us free,” said the Reverend Susan Minasian, who is one of three clergy going on the pilgrimage.
Schmidt concluded the ceremony by pouring “a libation for the dead”—Virginia distilled whiskey from a flask—onto the ground where James is believed to have perished.
The mood of participants afterward was somber, with some relief.
“It’s rehumanizing,” says April Burns, whose mother, Joan Burton, grew up across the street at Ednam Farm and had played around the “hanging tree.”
“This was for somebody who never had a funeral,” said Burns.
“In my opinion, slavery was this country’s original sin and we can’t get past it,” said Supervisor McKeel. “It’s haunting us to this day.”
Chief Brackney acknowledged being torn between her race and her job as a cop. “I’m saddened my profession is still part of that,” she said. “I’m also feeling hope that we’re standing on rich soil that allows us to plant our findings forward.”
She added, “We start to own and change the narrative.”
“It was very emotional, being able to be in the spot as a black man,” said Bellamy, who has family members who have been lynched. “I was thinking about the mob and what [James’] feelings must have been to feel the train slow down, and the state of shock and fear he must have felt.”
The murderers took 20 minutes for prayer, “making a ritual of hanging and shooting this man,” said Bellamy.
And he thought of two years ago, when he created a firestorm by saying the city’s Confederate statues should come down. “I wonder if [people] knew this story,” he said.
Being at the lynching site couldn’t help but feel very close to home. “I get letters all the time about how they want to hang me on a tree,” said Bellamy. “My daughters—they send letters to my daughters and want to hang them on a tree.”
One thing Bellamy said he’s seen is the “evolution” of white people. “A lot of white people just didn’t understand how painful this was for us.”
He said, “People’s minds are a lot more open from March 2016 until now.”
Following the Farmington ceremony, the heritage center held a community conversation on lynching and screened “An Outrage,” a documentary by Lance Walker and Charlottesville native Hannah Ayers, who didn’t have Charlottesville on her radar when they started work on a film about lynching. Like a lot of people, Ayers was unaware of James’ murder.
But lynching was much more a part of history than “what we’d been taught,” said Walker.
Supervisor Randolph got a standing ovation for his talk on race—”truly America’s disgrace”—and declared July 12, the day of the lynching, John Henry James Day. “Here we repudiate the vile murder of John Henry James.”
Many of the 100 people who will be leaving on the July 8 pilgrimage were present in the historic African American Jefferson School.
Said Douglas, “I believe this is nothing short of monumental. We’re taking hold of history. We’re examining it critically and rewriting the narrative that’s been incomplete.”
Frank Walker’s studio is full of artwork, art supplies, frames and hundreds of military models: soldiers, guns, ammunition, tanks and uniforms. A historian of both African American history and American military history, the Army veteran is a stickler for accuracy. This week, he’ll build a window display in honor of the June 6, 1944, D-Day invasion. Photo by Sanjay Suchak
It’s a humid but not hot Saturday evening in early May. Jazz floats through the auditorium of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, filling in the spaces between laughter, delighted gasps and conversational murmurs in the next room.
Dressed in brown slip-on shoes, relaxed fit jeans, a short-sleeved chambray shirt and a dark blue Kangol cap, local artist and lifelong Charlottesville resident Frank Walker can’t take two steps without someone congratulating him on his newest paintings and drawings.
As individual conversations quiet before his “Frank Walker: New Work” artist talk begins, Walker bends down and picks up a sizable wooden disc that’s been sitting on the floor at the gallery entrance.
A painted brown eye peers through a rectangle cut out of the center of the disc. Around the rectangle, an outline of the continental United States burned into the wood, surrounded by barbed wire and a hangman’s noose. “I Seen What U Done” is burned in above it all. Walker hoists it up and hangs it around his neck, letting it dangle near his abdomen from a rope.
“This is my wearable art,” Walker announces to the group, grinning. Andrea Douglas, director of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center and the show’s curator, wouldn’t let him put it in the show so he’s wearing it instead. The crowd of a few dozen laughs at his act of loose defiance and Walker looks pleased.
He explains that the piece is a commentary on how, if America were to be tried in the World Court, it would be found guilty of many crimes against its people: for slavery, peonage, Jim Crow laws and more. America condemned the Nazis’ mass killing of Jewish people in the early 20th century, but America refuses to see its own history of genocide, beginning (but not ending) with the American Indians, he says.
As the artist describes each of the 13 works in the show—the lynching of Bootjack McDaniels, the faces drawn on crumpled paper bags, a bow tie-wearing Ku Klux Klansman—the eye watches the people watching Walker and his art, making them aware of their place among these works, these ideas, this history…and how some of this history has been obscured.
“There is always a witness” to your actions, Walker wants his viewers to know. Either someone else sees you, or God sees you, and, at the very least, you yourself know what you’ve done.
It goes back to a Bible parable about hypocrisy, he says: “Why do you look at the splinter in your brother’s eye but don’t notice the beam of wood in your own eye?”
Seeing history
Eyes are all over Walker’s Starr Hill studio—they’re drawn on scraps of paper strewn among books, magazines, newspapers and at least one Bible, and scattered atop the drafting table he uses as a desk. Family photos cover the walls—of his three children and nine grandchildren, his wife, his mother, his brother, photos of Walker as a younger man, his blue eyes even more striking beneath dark, curly hair.
“All my favorite junk is in here,” says Walker, who now wears dark, round-framed glasses, referring to his Redskins football helmets, manila folders full of family photos, his model soldiers and military paraphernalia—there’s a huge model tank in the front window of the studio, complete with soldiers and their gear.
X-acto knives rest on a blue pad, not far from a jelly jar one quarter full of brown liquid, a pickle jar with brushes, tips up, in another. There are easels, empty frames, half-painted canvases and fully rendered figures as well as paintings Walker’s exhibited in previous shows. Fluorescent tube lights buzz quietly overhead.
“This is my element,” Walker says, sitting back in his desk chair. “This is my dream since I was a child, to have a studio and do artwork. I have worked for 40-something years to get to this place, and when I’m here, if I want to burp, I don’t have to say ‘Excuse me’ to nobody! This is a great place to be,” he says, laughing.
Photos by Sanjay Suchak
“Most people know Frank from hangin’ in the street, because he’s just a regular guy who likes to hang with his friends,” says Douglas, who got to know Walker while curating two of his previous art shows. Others know his family’s legacy—Jackson-Via Elementary School is named in part for his great-grandmother, longtime public school teacher Nannie Cox Jackson; another relative, Cox Jackson, built what would become one of the largest advertising companies in Charlottesville in the first half of the 20th century, doing the playbills for the Jefferson Theater and more.
Known for his sense of humor—Douglas says “he’s funny as hell”—Walker cracks up when telling stories of how he and his brother, Bo, used to take flying leaps into a sand pit at the end of Fifth and Sixth streets, and jokes about how his work will never be as valuable as Picasso’s but it might make it onto “Antiques Roadshow.” He nearly loses it when describing an anatomically correct genitalia door knocker that Bo, who grew up to become a sculptor, once made. When he finds out this article publishes just a few days after his 65th birthday and on D-Day, to boot, he can’t stop smiling. “I love it. I love it,” he says, slapping his desk with his hand. “I love it!”
“Frank lets you be whomever you feel like being in the moment, when you’re talking to him,” adds Douglas.
That sort of relationship has been particularly important to Jae Jae Johnson, Walker’s nephew by marriage and a fellow artist who considers Walker his mentor. When Walker told Johnson he had “an eye” for portraiture, he started taking his work more seriously.
“The idea that we can be whatever we want to be in this world is a powerful thing…no artist really becomes something unless they are nurtured in that way.” Andrea Douglas
It’s hard to drop by Walker’s studio for a quick visit, says Johnson. Stop in to say hello and it’s likely you’ll stay for three hours, perhaps talking about the U.S. Army’s Red Ball Express, a trucking outfit of predominantly black soldiers that moved supplies during the Battle of the Bulge in World War II, making sure American troops didn’t run out of food, ammunition and gasoline (and yet, they’re rarely mentioned in Hollywood movies). “It doesn’t infuriate me” that these stories are left out of the narrative, Walker says, “but it makes me want to go find these stories and tell them even more, because I know what had happened.”
Walker’s knowledge of the history of Charlottesville is “unrivaled,” says Johnson, 30, who also grew up in the city. “I haven’t met anybody else who knows the inner workings of Charlottesville from the past 50 years” like Walker does, he says. “It makes his art stand out more, because he actually knows a lot of the people” he paints and draws.
Walker’s seen the history himself, and he wants us to see it, too.
A mighty pencil
Franklin Walker was born June 3, 1953, in the basement of the University of Virginia hospital to Henderson “Kat” Walker and Teresa Jackson Walker (now Teresa Price). “That’s where colored folks were born,” says Walker. He grew up in the Starr Hill neighborhood, and he and Bo played “all over,” in their own neighborhood, up and down West Main Street and Vinegar Hill
As a boy, Walker loved comic books, especially “Sgt. Rock” and “The Haunted Tank,” both of which eventually included black characters in their storylines, which Walker found exciting. He copied scenes from the comic books with paper and pencils, drawing the figures and weaponry in great detail.
He had his first art show in the summer of 1967, in the Nalle Street backyard of local folk artist and civil rights activist Frances Brand. “We called her The Purple Lady, because everything she wore was purple,” Walker recalls. Walker, Bo and their friends Earl Gordon and Gerald Mitchell all pinned their artwork to a clothesline stretched across the yard: Altogether, they earned a little more than $23 and spent it on candy (Walker choose Mary Janes).
All four grew up to have art-related careers: Bo became a sculptor, Gordon a collage artist and art teacher, Mitchell an artist and gallery owner.“We all chose that career because someone thought enough of some black children to expose them to things of that nature,” says Walker, the only one of the four who is still alive.
“Frank’s mother, to keep him quiet, gave him paper and pencil so that she could get on with her stuff,” says Douglas. “The idea that we can be whatever we want to be in this world is a powerful thing…no artist really becomes something unless they are nurtured in that way.”
Shown here in a photo taken by local photographer Kenneth Allen, Bo (left) and Frank Walker would both grow up to be artists.
After graduating from Lane High School in 1971, Walker earned a bachelor of fine arts degree in painting and printmaking at Virginia Commonwealth University before enlisting in the U.S. Army.
“In my lifetime, it’s like everywhere I’ve been I’ve had an art-related experience that got me from one place to another,” says Walker. As a small arms repairman stationed at Hohenfels, Germany, he drew weapons in his downtime and hung the pictures up in his bunk. One day, the colonel came through, saw the work and reassigned Walker to an engineering unit as a draftsman.
Walker later worked in the graphics department at Fort McPherson in Atlanta before returning to Charlottesville in the late 1970s. A retired Marine hired Walker as a medical illustrator in the department of art, photography and television at the University of Virginia Medical Center. There, his attention to detail continued to serve him well. “You can’t mistakenly illustrate a body part” for medical students, for practicing physicians, surgeons and anesthetists, Walker says; the consequences can be deadly.
He enjoyed the work, strange as it was, though the job wasn’t always easy. Once, he and another artist had to go to the morgue, snap on gloves and with the smell of formaldehyde in their noses, look through bags of legs to find an example of compartment syndrome.
Walker was the only person of color in the department, and he remembers arriving one morning to a group of white women crying. “What in the world happened?” Walker asked.
“Nigger got hit by a car,” one teary-eyed woman replied.
Walker didn’t quite believe what he was seeing, and hearing. “What? Nigger got hit by a car?” he asked to clarify. He hadn’t seen white folks so upset over the death of a black person.
Turns out, “Nigger” was the name of someone’s black cocker spaniel.
“I guess that was supposed to slide off my back,” Walker says, adding that he never mentioned the incident—or his feelings about it—to anyone at the time. “It felt [like] I didn’t mean much, maybe, to them,” Walker says. “But it never stopped me from being aggressive in my work. I didn’t have a degree in medical illustration, but I got to do it. Sheer talent.”
Walker worked as a medical illustrator for more than 19 years, until the university closed the department. He’d been doing odd jobs painting signs for local businesses and drawing portraits for local families, so he eventually went into business for himself, opening Walker’s Ink. When computer programs like Adobe Photoshop—which Walker considers “brilliant”—made it easier for companies to do their own graphics, Walker closed his shop and went to work for a paint store, then for Northrop Grumman building computers and making detailed drawings of said computers when the digitally rendered diagrams weren’t clear enough.
Now retired, Walker paints and draws when he feels like it. He does so while taking care of his “very spirited” 92-year-old mother, a retired schoolteacher. “I paint for Frank. I don’t paint for anybody else,” he says.
And while he doesn’t paint for anybody else, it’s clear that there’s always someone on his mind when he makes art: his brother.
Bond of brothers
Henderson Day “Bo” Walker was just a year and a half older than Frank, and the two were inseparable. They played together, created together, and when both grew up to become artists, they talked art.
Bo’s work is “significant,” says Douglas, who notes that one of Bo’s sculptures, “Frederick Douglass Ikenga,” is in the collection of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and it’s impossible to not wonder what his art career would have looked like had he not died of pneumonia at age 35, in July 1986. His New York Times obituary declared him “a sculptor known for his commemorative bronzes of black political and cultural leaders.”
One of Bo Walker’s sculptures, “Frederick Douglass Ikenga,” is in the collection of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
When Bo died, Walker cleaned out his brother’s Brooklyn studio. It smelled of clay, Walker says, and he managed to keep on task until he opened a drawer full of photos of the two brothers. That was the moment Walker realized he would never see Bo again. “And then the tears came,” he says. “I howled, screamed.”
Walker lives in the home he and Bo grew up in, a house built by their grandfather. Now, he shares it with his wife, Cece, and it functions as Walker’s personal gallery, its walls covered in some of his most treasured pieces—a drawing of his oldest grandson, a black Jesus, a drawing of a woman in shattered glass that represents a battered woman, a drawing of his paternal grandmother and her sisters, and many others. His portrait of Malcolm X hangs near a corner occupied by one of Bo’s sculptures of the same subject. In the living room and dining room, the brothers’ works mingle, Walker’s paintings and drawings among his reinvigoration of Bo’s maquettes, which were done in plaster before Walker spray-painted them black and then copper.
In Walker’s studio, just one street over, there’s a black-and-white childhood photograph tacked on the side of a bookshelf—Bo on the left, Frank on the right, wearing crisp light shirts and dark shorts, their faces clean and their legs filthy. “We loved dirt,” Walker says, laughing as he remembers how his mother washed their faces and changed their shirts only, not thinking that the photographer might go for a full-length shot. Walker says the photo is evidence of what they’d become: Two men who loved getting their hands dirty.
Bodies of work
Anyone new to Walker’s work will notice that he paints and draws African American people almost exclusively, in great detail and usually (but not always) without a specific setting or a background. “I like for my figure to stand out,” he says.
When asked why he draws people, Walker replies with a smile: “I’ve always been drawn to people.”
He’s always revered the human body, how it’s at once quite powerful and quite vulnerable. What also amazes him is how some people treat bodies—black bodies, especially—as if they are nothing. And so the way in which Walker depicts in his art African American people is significant, says Douglas.
“If you spend your time looking at Frank Walker’s work, what you’d be looking at are hands and eyes,” says the Jefferson School’s Douglas. “I think that has to do with his desire to create psychology and speak to the notion of labor, simultaneously, in the body.” Douglas says that each of the pieces in Walker’s current show at the Jefferson School “do hard work, and they come from hard work.”
It’s evident perhaps most clearly in “Working Hands,” in which Walker has painted from a photograph a black woman wearing a maid’s white uniform, sitting in a chair, hands resting in her lap, hands rendered with such care that one can almost feel her pulse through her visible veins. Walker says he was compelled to paint this woman because of her hands, how strong they look and how they show all of the hard work that she’s done throughout her life.
“Frank Walker: New Work” is on view at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center contemporary gallery through July 7. The exhibit includes “Untitled (Woman in Window),” shown here.Individually, the 13 works in the show (including “Working Hands,” shown here) explore themes of labor, watchfulness, who guns and gun laws actually protect, how slavery continued by another name even after abolition and much more.“About the Recycle Bin” is another of the pieces on view in Walker’s current show. Overall, the show looks at how black bodies are treated as erasable, disposable and replaceable in America.
That notion of work, of labor, speaks to the physical labor African Americans have done for centuries, from picking cotton to cleaning houses, and to the emotional labor of, among other things, fighting for equality and civil rights. And then there’s the way that Walker himself has labored to depict this woman’s body and her story.
Over and over Douglas refers to Walker’s figures as “heroic,” because black bodies are inherently heroic, for all that they have endured, Douglas says, from the beginnings of African slavery in the Americas in the 1500s to the deadly police brutality of present day.
Walker puts all of his care and detail into the figure, into the folds of the fabric or the curve of a button. And while he sometimes includes sculptural elements, they never detract from the figure. In Walker’s work, “there’s a suggestion that we’re going somewhere,” says Douglas.
A vicious cycle
Walker’s current show in many ways represents an evolution for the artist. He’s long been known in the community as a portraitist (he and Johnson had a joint show, “Visage,” at New City Arts in April), but in recent years, his work has become more political.
Douglas chalks that up to an urge to respond to what’s happening in his world.
Walker says that’s part of it, yes, but the other part is that he’s been reading more—books like Douglas Blackmon’s Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II and Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America have helped him understand a much broader, more complete and thus more complicated narrative of race in America. He feels far more informed now than when he was a kid on a class trip to Monticello, where the tour guides told the children that the enslaved people loved what they did at Monticello and were happy working for Mr. Jefferson. “We almost bought into it,” Walker says, until they learned what slavery was really about.
A handful of the pieces in “New Work” explore the idea of African Americans as “throwaway people” through faces drawn on brown paper bags. The idea is a brown paper bag is a common item; you use one to carry your lunch, and once it’s served its purpose, the bag is crushed, thrown in the trash. The following day, the process is repeated, just with a different brown paper bag.
Walker painted the smiling face of his longtime friend Sunny (who died a few years ago) onto one of these bags for “Sunny’s Fried Chicken,” where Walker imagines Sunny as the mascot for a fried chicken joint. “He had a hard life,” Walker says, and while Sunny was a unique person, his story isn’t. Sunny was hit by a dump truck as a kid and nearly killed; at age 8, he was caught stealing from a grocery store, arrested and tossed into jail (there was no juvenile system at the time). It was the first of many such incidents for Sunny, who Walker says spent most of his life in prison, where he was stabbed and where he read voraciously. As an artist in his own right, Sunny could make pastels look like paint.
Unraveling painful threads
Walker’s images, especially the ones currently at the Jefferson School, are provocative, and each one contains a different, though related, message about how African Americans are treated in the United States. This particular show addresses the idea that in America, black bodies can be (and have been) erased in all manner of ways. “It’s blatant and it’s subtle,” says Douglas of the way in which Walker presents these ideas.
And while the pieces are serious, there’s tenderness in the way Walker has rendered the figures and the faces (an exception might be the Ku Klux Klansman, painted in an unflattering cartoony fashion).
At the exhibition opening, a young black girl stood in front of “The Lynching of Bootjack McDaniels” and asked a black woman, “What’s a lynching?” The woman explained how it might happen physically—it’s when a group of people kills someone, maybe hangs them by the neck from a tree—before the little girl asked, “Why would anyone want to do that?” The woman took a long pause, perhaps trying to figure out which thread of the complicated story to hand her. Before the woman could answer, the girl’s father called for her and she left; the woman seemed either relieved or disappointed that she didn’t have the chance to answer.
A couple stood in front of one of the “throwaway people” pictures and wiped away tears.
Across the room, three older white folks discussed the formal quality of Walker’s work, talking about the extraordinary detail paid to “Working Hands.” He’s too good to be in Charlottesville, they declared.
And while it’s true that Walker’s work could be exhibited anywhere, Douglas later says this sort of comment irks her. “He’s exactly where he’s supposed to be,” she says.
Charlottesville resident Barbara Yager, who serves as the health and wellness consultant for City of Promise, wanted her living room to be a place for conversation and contemplation, and filled it with a painting by a Japanese artist on one wall and a painting by a Nepalese artist on another. There’s a large rug depicting a fertility scene woven by a Navajo artist, and on the opposite wall, a Frank Walker painting of an African American woman dressed in aubergine, skirt and apron swinging as she walks, steadying with both hands a basket of cotton atop her head.
Yager finds it interesting how many visitors to her home don’t see the woman, even though the four-foot tall painting on board is displayed prominently and lit from beneath with a lamp. As is the case with black women in too many other settings, “she’s invisible,” says Yager. But this woman in purple, “she reminds me to get up and do something.”
Piecing it together
Walker’s not entirely sure what direction his work is taking, though he’s certain it’ll continue to be political, influenced by history with an eye to what the future might be. Picasso, Walker’s favorite artist, followed the rules until he didn’t, painting traditional figures, then pulling them apart into cubes and putting them back together in a different, but still effective, evocative way. Walker gets the sense that he, too, is ready to break some rules, and while he’s not sure what that will look like, he knows what he wants to say.
“Look at all the hyphenation we’ve been through in America,” Walker says. “Colored…negro…Afro-American, African-American. What I want everyone to feel is American.” (Not that he wants people to forget the African part; he’s not for erasing history.) “And black people have earned that right. They are part of the soil, [a physical] part of this country. Their DNA is in the soil. It’s at the bottom of the ocean. It is here; it is not going anywhere,” he says.
Walker hopes that those who view his work “will get a sense of value for human beings.” He wants people to look at Bootjack McDaniels, chained to a tree, shot and burned to death for a murder he was never tried for, and ask themselves how anybody could be cruel enough to do that to another person. How can anyone shoot a child with no gun in her hand? Ignore the hard work done by a maid’s hands? To look at Sunny, know his life story, and not feel a pang of sympathy for him?
What is it going to take for society to value black and brown lives in the same way we value white lives? This is the question Walker’s work poses to its viewer.
“I hope that peace will find everybody in America,” says Walker. “I hope that America lives up to its name,” the United States, he says. “I have already tried to do my part by doing it through art, through [military] service.”
He poses this question in his work in part for his children and grandchildren. “I want them to be educated, I want them to have a fair shot at life. I’m at the end of human life—this is the back side for me,” he says. “What I can do is tell my story and my history through art. That’s my way of fighting back. I don’t care if somebody likes what I do, or don’t like what I do. I’m gon’ tell it,” he exclaims with a laugh. “I’m gon’ tell it, and I seen what you done!”
Historic researcher Jane Smith believes the 1898 lynching of John Henry James, which took place at a place identified as Wood's Crossing, is located on a strip of land currently owned by Farmington Country Club. A 1919 plat shows the blacksmith shop near where the hanging-by-mob took place. Information courtesy Jane Smith/Google maps
As big a role as history plays in Charlottesville’s identity, some events, like an 1898 lynching, were pretty much buried or forgotten until Jane Smith was doing historical research and going through old issues of the Daily Progress in 2013.
She happened upon this July 12, 1898, headline: “He paid the awful penalty: John Henry James hanged by a mob today.”
James, who was black, was accused of sexually assaulting a young white woman near Pen Park, and had been taken to Staunton to avoid a vengeance-minded mob. When he was headed back to Charlottesville to face a grand jury, a crowd awaited at Wood’s Crossing four miles west of town, hauled him off the train and took him to a small locust tree about 40 yards away near a blacksmith shop, according to the Progress. There he was hanged and his body riddled with bullets for good measure. Sightseers took his clothes—and body parts—as mementos.
Historic researcher Jane Smith is homing in on the site where John Henry James was lynched. Photo by Eze Amos
Smith, who served on the Blue Ribbon Commission on Race, Memorials and Public Spaces, says UVA professor Frank Dukes first brought up the idea of participating in the Equal Justice Initiative, which opened a memorial to victims of lynching in April in Montgomery, Alabama.
The initiative has documented at least 4,000 lynchings in the southern United States, and its Community Remembrance Project is an effort to recognize victims by collecting soil from lynching sites and erecting historical markers.
Charlottesville City Council asked Andrea Douglas, Jefferson School African American Heritage Center executive director, and Jalane Schmidt, UVA religious studies professor, to bring back the memorial for James. They’re arranging a pilgrimage to Montgomery in July to take soil from the lynching site and bring home the coffin-sized memorial to reside in Charlottesville outside the Albemarle courthouse at Justice Park.
The problem was, nobody knew the location of Wood’s Crossing.
“We’ve been in a vortex trying to sort this out,” says Smith. “I think we’ve probably figured out what happened. The crossing is no longer on the main road [U.S. 250] and the owner changed.”
In 1898, Warner Wood owned land that is now Farmington, which was developed in 1927. Smith says in the late 1920s, Ivy Road, which used to run north of the railroad tracks, was realigned and is now south of the tracks. She’s checked maps, plats and railroad schedules, and is convinced that what was once Wood’s Crossing is at the present day Farmington Drive.
Her initial research put the site on Ivy Road three-tenths of a mile west of Farmington Drive near Charlottesville Oil, based on a British rail enthusiast’s table that listed both a Wood’s and a Farmington station. “That was just wrong,” she says. She now believes the stations are the same and changed names after Farmington Incorporated bought the land from Wood’s heirs.
She also found a 1919 plat that shows the blacksmith shop mentioned in the Progress story on a strip of land now owned by Farmington Country Club.
And she says Warner Wood’s will was the “smoking gun” in pinning down the location of Wood’s Station.
Joe Krenn, COO and general manager of Farmington Country Club, says he had a “very productive conversation” with Smith. In an email, he says he’s confident the pilgrimage project team and the club leadership “can determine the accurate site and how to proceed from there.”
The pilgrimage organizers plan a ceremonial soil gathering July 7 with local dignitaries, community members and travelers present when Charlottesville Mayor Nikuyah Walker shovels dirt into the Community Remembrance Project receptacles, which means there’s little more than a month to figure out the lynching site.
Douglas, Smith, Schmidt and a representative from Albemarle County met with Krenn May 25. Schmidt describes the Farmington response as, “We want to help the community.” Krenn will take the matter to the club’s board May 31.
And in further research, Smith found an account that may lead to a still-living person who knew where the locust tree once stood.
The office of Virginia Humanities executive director Matthew Gibson is located near Boar’s Head Inn across from Farmington. “Learning that the site of the John Henry James lynching is across the street from our Charlottesville offices makes this particularly horrific part of our nation’s history feel even more real and tangible,” he says. “As our programming seeks to demonstrate, we can’t move forward together to heal the wounds of slavery, segregation and Jim Crow without an honest acknowledgment of the past that got us here.”
“I think it’s important we get this right,” says Smith. “Something in us makes place very important in the commemoration.”
The Legacy Museum in Montgomery has a wall of clear jars of earth collected from where lynchings took place. “We need to know to join in on that national mourning and commemoration,” she says. “That’s why it’s so important to know where it happened.”
The Charlottesville pilgrimage participants will collect soil from the site where John Henry James was lynched as part of the Equal Justice Initiative’s Community Remembrance Project that will be displayed at The Legacy Museum.
Courtesy Legacy Museum
The lynching of John Henry James in Albemarle in 1898 for allegedly assaulting a white woman was both horrific—and all too common in the era of Jim Crow.
More than 4,400 black men and women were the victims of domestic racial terrorism between 1877 and 1950, according to the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, which opened a memorial to the victims of the nation’s dark history April 26.
Local scholars are organizing a pilgrimage to Montgomery in July to add soil from the site of James’ hanging to the EJI’s community remembrance project and to bring home a memorial “about the size of a coffin,” says UVA religious studies professor Jalane Schmidt.
After a judge ordered the tarpsremoved from the two statues of Confederate generals, Schmidt asked City Council to expedite the recontextualization of the former Lee and Jackson parks to“challenge the uncontested narrative of the statues,” a Lost Cause narrative that glorifies the Confederacy while minimizing the role of slavery.
Jalane Schmidt asked City Council to hurry its recontextualization of the parks with Confederate generals after a judge ordered the tarps removed. Eze Amos
At its March 19 meeting, CityCouncil asked Schmidt and Andrea Douglas, executive director of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, to proceed with plans to memorialize James’ July 12, 1898, lynching, when a mob estimated at 150 pulled him from a train stopped at Wood’s Crossing, west of town near the current Farmington subdivision. The attackers hanged James from a locust tree, then riddled his body with 75 bullets, according to the Shenandoah Herald.
The hanging “wasn’t enough to satisfy the blood lust of the crowd,” says Schmidt. “They shot him dozens of times.” News accounts say the attackers didn’t bother to cover their faces. After the murder, “the crowd cut off parts of his clothing and body parts—that was common at the time,” she says. So, too, were picnicking at the grisly events and sending postcards to “underscore white supremacy.”
The idea of memorializing the lynching came from the Blue Ribbon Commission on Race, Memorials and Public Places in 2016. UVA’s Frank Dukes brought it up to the commission, but credits Bryan Stevenson, the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, with the idea.
For Dukes, the omission of this part of the area’s history is tied to other aspects of Jim Crow brutality that intimidated and drove away African-Americans, who were 52 percent of the population during the Civil War. “Lynching was the tip of the iceberg of injustice,” he says, and its legacy is seen today in racial disparities in incarceration, education and housing.
“I heard Scottsville was a sundown town,” he says, referring to places where an African-American was expected to be gone before dark. “In our own community there was intimidation and violence.”
The pilgrimage to Montgomery is what the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center “was meant to be,” says director Andrea Douglas. Photo Eze Amos
“It’s important to be able to create a full and inclusive Charlottesville history,” says Douglas, one that includes black people. “Charlottesville didn’t become integrated because white people said it was the right thing to do.”
The pilgrimage is part of a process of discovering that history, she says. “One of the things I hear constantly from both whites and blacks is, ‘I didn’t know.’” Two buses traveling to Montgomery with more than 100 people will provide an “experience grounded in truth and fact.”
City Councilor Kathy Galvin is a supporter. “It’s very important for Charlottesville to understand its own legacy of brutality and racism against African-Americans,” she says. “I think it’s about time 120 years later that we acknowledge [James’] brutal murder.”
Galvin calls the pilgrimage a “sacred act” of recovering the soil where James was lynched and elevating the public’s understanding of what took place. By bringing the memorial back, “It’s a way to make sure we never forget.”
City Council set aside $1 million for the redesign of the parks and $500,000 to support the Blue Ribbon Commission’s recommendations, she says. It also has a discretionary fund to draw from, and at its May 21 meeting, council will decide how much of the six-day journey’s estimated $125,000 cost it will fund.
Albemarle, where the lynching actually occurred, will be discussing its involvement in June, says Board of Supervisors Chair Diantha McKeel. “I’m very supportive but I can’t speak for the board.”
“In 1898 our boundaries were really blurry,” says Galvin. “Our whole region is complicit in this.”
The Road to Montgomery
Organizers Andrea Douglas and Jalane Schmidt are seeking grants and donors to contribute through the nonprofit Jefferson School African American Heritage Center to the estimated $125,000 cost of the July 8 to 13 journey to Montgomery.
Two buses will be rented, and about 33 seats will be reserved for CHS students and teachers, and another group of seats will be available for low-income residents, who will be eligible for scholarships. City Councilor Kathy Galvin says she doesn’t want cost to be an obstacle, particularly for high school students.
Before boarding buses, participants and dignitaries will take part in a soil collection ceremony July 7 at the site of John Henry James’ 1898 murder.
The buses leave July 8, the anniversary of the KKK demonstration here last summer, and will pass through Pelham, North Carolina, headquarters of the white supremacist Loyal White Knights. Also on the agenda for the first day are Lost Cause landmarks Appomattox, where General Robert E. Lee surrendered, and Danville, where the rebel government fled and where the Confederate battle flag still flies along U.S. 29.
The pilgrimage continues to museums and civil rights landmarks in Greensboro and Charlotte, North Carolina, and Atlanta, arriving at the Equal Justice Initiative Legacy Museum and National Memorial to Peace and Justice in Montgomery July 12, the 120th anniversary of James’ lynching.
“The sites we’ll visit will open new eyes,” says Schmidt. “This is a very conscious way of taking the bull by the horns and creating our own narrative.”
The Charlottesville Players Guild is performing Joe Turner's Come and Gone through April 29. Photo by Sanjay Suchak
She’d been here before.
During a recent rehearsal of August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, a feeling of recollection overcame Brenda Brown-Grooms as she recited her lines. She was in character as Bertha Holly, wife of Seth Holly and a boarding house matron who likes to bake biscuits, make coffee and care for her tenants with warmth and laughter. But Brown-Grooms knew it was more than a line that’d tipped off her déjà vu.
She glanced down at her feet, and when Brown-Grooms looked back up and out into the auditorium, she traveled back in time to when she was a second-grader, sitting in that very spot on the very same wooden stage, pretending to sew an American flag out of construction paper, a pair of brand-new sky-blue patent leather shoes peeking out from beneath her Betsy Ross costume.
She had, indeed, been here before.
“I just knew I was gorgeous,” says Brown-Grooms, laughing as she recalls the memory of her first play. “I don’t suspect Betsy had sky-blue shoes,” she says, but that didn’t matter one bit to young Brenda. “[Betsy] looked like me that day,” like a sky-blue shoe-wearing African-American second-grader attending the Jefferson School in Charlottesville, Virginia, in the early 1960s.
“I like this,” she remembers thinking.
Brown-Grooms, who fell in love with reading out loud as soon as her teacher, Mrs. Cage, introduced her to the alphabet in the first grade, had found the play on a school bookshelf just two weeks before and asked if she could perform it for the class. “Why not the whole school?” Brown-Grooms remembered Mrs. Cage asking.
And while Brown-Grooms liked performing, she loved knowing that “you can have an idea, and all of a sudden it’s born.”
Brown-Grooms, co-pastor of New Beginnings Christian Community here in Charlottesville, describes herself as “a diva and a ham.” She’s taught New Testament Greek language and grammar at the college level, she’s preached in cities all over the country, and has joined a theater troupe in every city she’s lived in: New York, New Jersey, California and elsewhere. But when she moved back to Charlottesville in 2011, she couldn’t find a troupe that seemed more fun than competitive.
The Reverend Brenda Brown-Grooms plays the role of Bertha Holly in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, which runs through April 29 at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center. Brown-Grooms first performed on this stage in the early 1960s, as a second-grader at Jefferson Elementary School. Photo by Sanjay Suchak
Last September, Brown-Grooms caught a performance of Wilson’s Jitney, produced by the Charlottesville Players Guild on the Jefferson School stage, and she says she knew, in that moment, “I had found my peeps.”
“I am going to be in an August Wilson play,” Brown-Grooms declared after the lights went down. A few months later, she auditioned for Joe Turner’s Come and Gone and nabbed the role of Bertha Holly. And when Brown-Grooms steps onto the Jefferson School auditorium stage on opening night on April 18, she’ll again be wearing sky blue—this time, a dress.
The backstory
Built with funds raised by the African-American community and the Freedmen’s Aid Society, the Jefferson Graded School building on Fourth St. NW opened in 1895 to provide an all-grades school for black children. At that time, and for some time after, Charlottesville public schools enrolled white children only. In a 2017 article for Vinegar Hill magazine, titled “Black Theater Charlottesville,” Andrea Douglas, executive director of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, and local theater artist Leslie Scott-Jones wrote that “at the center of the new structure was a stage where students practiced elocution and presented Christmas pageants…there is ample evidence that performance was an important aspect of Charlottesville’s African American cultural life,” both at the school and in local black churches, which supported plenty of religious pageants throughout the year.
The school was rebuilt in 1926, as the city’s first high school for black students, and was expanded four times, and still, the auditorium and its stage remained a center of activity even when the school became Jefferson Elementary School in 1951. The 1941 edition of Crimson & Black, the Jefferson School yearbook, counted 59 students as members of the dramatics club, and by 1944, that number had doubled, and the group participated in the Virginia State Theater competition in Petersburg, Virginia, up until 1951, Douglas and Scott-Jones note in the Vinegar Hill article.
Many of the dramatics club students later became members of the Charlottesville Players Guild, an adult theater group that, the article notes, had as many as 40 participants at the height of its membership. Started in the mid-1950s, the all-African-American troupe performed one- and three-act plays in the Charlottesville area and throughout the region and “remained a mainstay of local community theater into the late 1960s.”
Over the years, many students from the Jefferson High School dramatics club (pictured here in 1945-46) went on to perform with the Charlottesville Players Guild, active in the Charlottesville Area through the 1960s. Photo from Crimson and Black, 1945-46 Jefferson High School Yearbook
Douglas first heard about the Charlottesville Players Guild from Mary Anderson, a Jefferson School alumna who Douglas believes is the only surviving member of the original guild. Douglas has learned a bit about the guild from Anderson, from Crimson & Black and from photography books that chronicle black life in Charlottesville through the 20th century, but says it’s been difficult to find information on which plays the troupe performed—active from the 1940s to ’60s—and when.
Douglas, who has served as executive director of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center since it opened in 2012, says that supporting artists of color is an important part of honoring the school’s heritage. In addition to spaces devoted to exhibits on local African-American history, the center has gallery rooms that regularly house the work of local African-American visual artists like Yolonda Coles Jones, Lisa Beane and Frank Walker, and Douglas says she’d long hoped to stage the plays of Wilson—America’s foremost African-American playwright who twice won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, for Fences in 1987 and for The Piano Lesson in 1990—on the Jefferson School stage.
“If you’re going to announce yourself as an institution that addresses the 20th-century African-American experience in the most interdisciplinary way, there is no other artist that does it as completely and thoroughly as August Wilson does,” Douglas says.
What’s more, she says, when one considers “the broad scope of the arts in Charlottesville and its focus on ‘Americana,’ loosely defined,” one realizes “what isn’t part of ‘Americana’ on a consistent basis,” and that which isn’t often part of that Charlottesville Americana is art that explores and depicts the African-American experience.
Douglas mentioned her desire to stage Wilson plays on an episode of “Home Grown,” an arts talk show on WPVC radio that Scott-Jones, a longtime local theater artist, often hosts.
Scott-Jones, who studied theater at VCU and has participated in various community theater productions at Live Arts, PlayOn Theatre, Gorilla Theater and elsewhere, was ready to go all-in. She wanted the chance to stage Wilson plays in Charlottesville, and the chance to give actors, directors and producers of color the opportunity to participate in theater that was written expressly for them. She wanted to do black theater.
Black theater, Scott-Jones explains, happens when a black director produces a work with black actors playing black characters written by a black playwright. Wilson’s plays fit this bill; the playwright had an unofficial condition that no white directors should direct his plays.
Black actors playing black characters does not necessarily qualify a play as black theater. Plays like Dreamgirls and The Wiz (both of which have been produced with great success at Live Arts in recent years) tell stories about black characters, but they are written by white men and thus view African-American life through that lens.
Turns out, that’s the lens through which most theater produced in America is viewed.
The November/December 2015 issue of The Dramatist published the findings of The Count, an ongoing study by the Lilly Awards in partnership with the Dramatists Guild, which analyzed three years of data from productions in regional theaters in America. It found that 78 percent of the plays produced in American community theaters are written by men (63 percent of the plays produced in American community theaters are written by American white men, 6 percent by American men of color, 22 percent are written by American women, and just 3.4 percent are written by American women of color).
And so, in Charlottesville, as is the case across all of America, there are few opportunities to perform plays not written from that American white male perspective.
And while it’s true that the race of a character is not always specified in a script, Scott-Jones says that when a play is written by a white playwright, it’s often automatically assumed that that character is white, because playwrights typically write from their own perspective.
Leslie Scott-Jones has helped revive the Charlottesville Players Guild, an all-black theater troupe that was an important part of black life and culture in Charlottesville in the early part of the 20th century. So far, the new iteration of the guild has performed three August Wilson plays on the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center stage and plans to do many more. Photo by Sanjay Suchak
Scott-Jones didn’t play a black character until she was in her 30s, when she played Esther Mills in a January 2010 production of Lynn Notage’s Intimate Apparel at Live Arts. While she’s enjoyed many of her roles, including Iago’s wife, Emilia, in a production of Shakespeare’s Othello at Live Arts, and bridesmaid Georgeann in Alan Ball’s Five Women Wearing the Same Dress at ShenanArts, Scott-Jones says she trusts African-American playwrights to write characters and experiences “that are mine,” characters where she doesn’t have to ask herself—a black woman who can “never sever” herself from being black—if she should play a character with an unspecified race “white” or “black.”
She knew the value of this as an actor and wanted to open this up to other theater artists in town who had never had this experience; actors who wanted it, or who had experienced it and wanted more.
Sometime after that episode of “Home Grown,” Scott-Jones and Douglas met with Clinton Johnston and Ike Anderson, two fellow Charlottesville theater artists of color, and talked about what it would take to stage a Wilson play at the Jefferson School. The discussion of staging one play turned into a conversation about staging all 10 plays in Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle (also called the Century Cycle) over the course of five years, and reviving the Charlottesville Players Guild.
Tiff Ames, a young theater artist from Charlottesville and current student at Oberlin College and Conservatory in Ohio, says that when the group decided to revive the troupe, they asked for, and received, Mary Anderson’s blessing to use the name.
Douglas and Scott-Jones wrote grant proposals for money to cover the costs of mounting the plays—for modest sets, costumes, lighting equipment and such—and paying the actors for their work. It’s not a lot of money, Douglas says, but she feels it’s important to pay the actors for their work to show its value.
“To even have August Wilson’s words spoken in your lifetime is valuable,” Douglas says. “His message, and what he tells you and how he describes life during Jim Crow, and moves us through that history of black people so eloquently, if you’re not experiencing those things until you’re in your 20s and 30s and moved away from here, then you’re not having the full breadth of the possibilities of what language and thought of all of those kinds of things can do for you. Those things are valuable and shouldn’t be thrown away and not considered. And the people who do the work in order to give you their best should not be thrown away in that way, either.”
Play ground
August Wilson was born Frederick August Kittel Jr. in Pittsburgh in 1945 to August Kittel, a German immigrant, and Daisy Wilson, an African-American woman from North Carolina whose mother reportedly walked from North Carolina to Pennsylvania with the hope of finding a better life.
Wilson’s father abandoned the family when Wilson was just a boy, and he was raised mainly by his mother and maternal grandmother. He fell in love with the work of Langston Hughes and Ralph Ellison when he was a teenager and at age 16 dropped out of school and worked menial jobs that allowed him to focus on reading and writing.
Playwright August Wilson.
Wilson published 16 plays throughout his life, 10 of which make up the Pittsburgh Cycle, a series of plays set mostly in Pittsburgh’s Hill district that track decade by decade the African-American experience throughout the 20th century. Each play presents a unique story, but some characters—and their offspring—appear throughout the series.
Wilson was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama five times—all for Pittsburgh Cycle plays—and won twice, for Fences in 1987 and for The Piano Lesson in 1990. Fences also won a Tony Award in 1987.
Wilson died in October 2005, just a few months after the final installment of the Pittsburgh Cycle, Radio Golf, premiered at the Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut.
A New York Times article from 2009 noted that “in life, the playwright August Wilson had an all-but-official rule: no white directors for major productions of his work.” It was important to Wilson that his plays—black characters written by a black playwright for a (mostly) black cast—be directed by black directors who themselves know firsthand the black experience in 20th century America. It’s a likely reason for why his plays haven’t been more widely produced.
The staging of Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle began at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center in April 2017 with Fences, a play about a couple of garbage men in the 1950s who wonder why they can’t be garbage truck drivers, and the theater troupe has since staged two more: Jitney, about jitney cab drivers in the 1970s, in September 2017; and, currently, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, set in a boarding house in the 1910s. Among other things, the series examines common themes of responsibility to family and community, fatherhood, intergenerational relationships, the anxiety of change and race and racism in 20th century America.
For Ike Anderson, an actor, dancer and choreographer who grew up in Charlottesville and is currently the membership coordinator at the Music Resource Center, participating in the Charlottesville Players Guild has been revelatory.
Sometime in his late 20s, Anderson, now 31, realized that after more than a decade of performing in Live Arts productions, he’d only ever had ensemble and supporting roles in plays like The Wiz (one of his earliest Live Arts efforts) and A Chorus Line. He started wondering why he wasn’t getting the roles he felt he deserved. And while he says he never felt like he missed out on parts because of his race, “I just felt like it wasn’t my place,” he says of the theater world.
He nabbed a major role in Live Arts’ 2013 production of The Motherfucker with the Hat—which Anderson remembers was described in the theater’s program as a “verbal cage match”—and that satisfied him for a while. But even still, he started looking around “to see where else I could take it,” he says of his acting career.
He suggested Live Arts mount Dreamgirls, and Anderson, who served as associate director and choreographer for the spring 2016 production, remembers that some folks at the theater wondered where they’d find a mostly black cast for the Henry Krieger and Tom Eyen-penned musical about a trio of young black female soul singers in the 1960s. Anderson knew they’d have no problem filling the roles; put them out there and the actors would show, he said. He was right. As for high-caliber black female singers? He found at least one of them, Kim Riley, who played Effie, at a karaoke night at Wild Wing Café.
While he was happy to see lines out the doors for Dreamgirls, Anderson says he knew that wasn’t an experience likely to be replicated over and over again, even though he was involved with Live Arts’ Melanin initiative, where he and other actors of color, including Scott-Jones, held staged table reads of plays like A Raisin in the Sun with the hope of increasing the visibility of actors and playwrights of color in Charlottesville theater (Melanin is no longer active).
So when Scott-Jones approached him with the opportunity to be part of the Charlottesville Players Guild and stage a Wilson play, Anderson jumped at the chance. He first played Gabriel, the pure, exuberant World War II veteran who suffered a head injury in combat that caused irreparable brain damage, in Fences. At one point in the play, Gabriel does a dance to send his brother, Troy, up to heaven. Anderson, having a hard time finding Gabriel’s dance, talked before a rehearsal with Scott-Jones, Johnston and Ames about performing on the Jefferson School stage, on hallowed ground for black families in Charlottesville, and how “the work of our ancestors comes from the ground up.”
In that rehearsal, Anderson remembers how he closed his eyes and went beyond a script that he felt a strong connection to, one that read like the stories told by his aunts, his uncles, his parents and grandparents. “I naturally found myself towards the ground, and then coming up and sending that dance up. I never felt myself do anything like that before,” Anderson says. “It was like a warmth in a place that you could not touch. It was…it was every feeling. It was love, it was anger, it was joy, it was rage. It was freedom. I’d never felt that free, like I did in that moment.”
He says that with Wilson’s plays, “there’s already that connection, because I know that story; I’ve seen my uncles, my aunts, my family dealing with the same issues. It’s pure blackness. It may be somebody else’s story, and people of other colors can connect to it, but as an actor, it makes it that much easier and that much more challenging, because you feel an immediate connection to the character, the story. When you’re already connected to those things and you don’t know why and you find out through a play, that changes you.”
Ike Anderson has acted and danced in, and choreographed for, many theater productions in Charlottesville. He makes his directorial debut with the Charlottesville Players Guild’s production of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, where he’s helped a number of new actors find their voices. Photo by Sanjay Suchak
Anderson, who took a lead role in Jitney as the play’s fast-talking moral compass, Turnbo, makes his directorial debut with Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, and feels an enormous amount of pressure with this production, both in spite of and because the Charlottesville Players Guild is telling actors of color “you can do this too. You can have your voice not only be heard, but be felt,” Anderson says. And what’s more, he says Wilson’s plays have brought him to a deeper understanding of what it means to be a black man in America.
For Ames, who fell in love with theater at age 9 while playing a sprite in a Live Arts summer camp production of The Tempest, the guild offers a place to try out some more experimental pieces of theater. Ames says that, aside from playing the title role in Cleopatra VII, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Antony & Cleopatra that Scott-Jones directed at Gorilla Theater Productions in 2016, there were few opportunities to play characters of color on Charlottesville stages, and Ames didn’t even think about that until being introduced to black theater at Oberlin. “I had no connection to blackness in that world at all,” says Ames of Charlottesville theater.
Ames stage-directed Fences, and later played the role of Rena, a young woman trying to make a good life for herself and her son in a 1970s Pittsburgh that’s being boarded up in the name of urban renewal, in last fall’s Jitney.
Ames’ directorial debut for the Charlottesville Players Guild will be the summer production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth featuring an all-black cast.
Ames’ love for Shakespeare runs deep; Ames was the first black actor to win the English-Speaking Union National Shakespeare Competition in 2012 at age 16. Ames loves the poetry, the universal themes, the way reciting iambic pentameter feels so natural, like a heartbeat in one’s mouth.
With this production, Ames wants to show how African diasporan storytelling works “so beautifully” with Shakespeare. Ames says that many productions of Macbeth focus on the blood, the gore, the tragedy. “This show is not a tragedy, in my opinion,” Ames says. Instead, it’s about learning the consequences of wanting power.
Ames has cut the script and made a few other changes, such as presenting the Weird Sisters of “double, double toil and trouble” fame not as witches but as elders of the community; when those characters are introduced into the play, they’ll be dressed in all white, like the elders in an African-American Christian church ritual. The show bends gender and age, too, and Ames hopes that the guild can stage the performance annually, almost like a ritual, using these characters to warn of the desire for power over and over again.
Douglas says that part of the Charlottesville Players Guild’s charge is to allow serious theater artists like Ames “to feel as if [they] can come back to Charlottesville and function, because there’s culture and opportunity [for them]. Ultimately, if you look at the history of this place, and what causes black flight, it is the notion of opportunity and the lack thereof,” she says.
With the Charlottesville Players Guild, “I feel like I am part of something bigger,” says Ames. It’s not just about putting on a good show; it’s about putting on a good show and adding to the tradition of black theater in the Jefferson School and in Charlottesville.
Eric Jones (right) and Will Jones (left) star in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, in production at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center through April 29.
It’s also about creating something for future generations to look to. Ames is particularly moved by the fact that young black children in Charlottesville “can see black people doing beautiful things on stage,” that the two young actors in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone are able to participate in this kind of theater from such an early age. Ames is sad to have missed out on this, but is glad it’s happening now. These plays say to young actors of color, “You are welcome here.”
The work of the Charlottesville Players Guild has sparked conversation in other community theaters in town. Bree Luck, producing artistic director at Live Arts who has worked on productions with Scott-Jones, Ames, Johnston and Anderson, says that she’s looked to what the Charlottesville Players Guild is doing as a guide to how to increase diversity and equity in Charlottesville theater, while also supporting—and not competing with— it.
“I think all of us in Charlottesville need to know where our blind spots are and how we can continue to grow,” says Luck, and that includes Live Arts and other community theaters. Luck says that the conversations she’s had with Scott-Jones, Ames, Johnston, Anderson and others inspired the 2018/2019 Live Arts season, where she’ll flip the ratio outlined in that The Count survey, and present a season of plays in which about 80 percent are written by women and people of color and 20 percent are written by white men.
Human experience
When Joe Turner’s Come and Gone opens on the Jefferson School stage, its cast and crew will be carrying on a rich tradition of African-American performance in a historically black space that they hope will shape Charlottesville’s future via an understanding of its past.
Set in a boarding house in Pittsburgh in the 1910s and chronicling the lives of a few freed formerly enslaved African-Americans, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone has much to say about racism and discrimination, about the search forfamily and oneself. “This story could not be more relevant today than if it were, truly, 1911,” says Brown-Grooms. “It’s set among primarily African-Americans, but it’s just as relevant for refugees and immigrants, and anybody who’s human. It’s relevant because it’s human. And this is a time, and an age, when it’s very important to remember how we’re human, to see what it looks like, to access what it feels like, to cry together and laugh together and to go ‘Oh, my God’ together.”
As the city undergoes a close examination of its history with racism and white supremacy, as the community attempts to heal in the wake of last year’s torch-lit rallies and the Unite the Right rally that left three dead and dozens others injured on August 12, Scott-Jones says that the revival of the Charlottesville Players Guild “happening at this moment in Charlottesville was definitely divine intervention.”
Theater is “an opportunity for you to enter a life you could never live; for you to experience something that you could, or would, never do or never be,” says Scott-Jones, and that’s true for both actors and audiences. She hopes that people of all races, religions and beliefs will come to the Charlottesville Players Guild productions “with an open mind and be open to the experience of something that you think is so far removed from you and be surprised to find that it’s not.” Because while seeing these plays on the stage might mean something different for each person in the room, they are bound to mean something, because, as Charlottesville Players Guild member David Vaughn Straughn says, “this is no light work.”
Scott-Jones agrees. “As my nana would say, we are not given something that we can’t handle. And I think a lot of people in Charlottesville think we’ve been given stuff we can’t handle, without recognizing that we’ve also been given the tools to deal with it. And black theater is one of those tools. When you can understand someone else’s perspective without overlaying your own protectiveness or defensiveness over it, then you’re actually listening. Then you’re empathizing and not sympathizing…and that’s the beginning of finding a way out of it. And there is no other art form that does that better than theater.”
“Black theater is raw and painful at times,” says Eric Jones, who plays Booster in August Wilson’s Jitney at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center September 15-24. Photo by Eze Amos
Lights go up on the wood-paneled stage in the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center auditorium to reveal the inside of a jitney cab station in Pittsburgh. It’s early fall 1977 and the Hill District, a group of neighborhoods that have long been the cultural center of black life in the city—full of black-owned homes, businesses, jazz clubs and more—has for two decades been boarded up, block by block, in the name of urban renewal.
Nine characters sit in tableau on the stage, bathed in dramatic light, and the audience is afforded a momentary look at their expressions, their presence, before the play—August Wilson’s Jitney—begins.
There’s Darnell, known to his fellow cab drivers as Youngblood, a Vietnam War veteran working a couple of jobs to build a better future for his girlfriend, Rena, and their son. There’s Philmore, a hotel doorman and frequent jitney passenger; hotheaded busybody driver Turnbo; Shealy, a numbers taker who uses the station as a base; Booster, back home after 20 years in the state penitentiary; Fielding, a jitney driver and former tailor to the stars; Rena, Youngblood’s girlfriend and mother to 2-year-old Jesse. There’s Doub, a Korean War veteran and longtime driver who’s felt invisible to white folks, and, seated behind a desk, Becker, station manager, father to Booster and father figure to many others.
David Vaughn Straughn plays Youngblood, a Vietnam War veteran who’s trying to build a better life for his family. Photo by Eze Amos
Nine black characters—played by nine black actors—in a play written by a black playwright. It’s a rare occurrence in Charlottesville theater, but one that the city will see consistently over the next few years, as a group of local actors and directors stage all 10 plays in Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle, a decade-by-decade look at the African-American experience in the 20th century. Jitney is the second play they’ve staged; the first, Fences, directed by Clinton Johnston, had a spring 2017 run.
“Doing community theater in Charlottesville as an artist of color is always challenging,” says Leslie Scott-Jones, Jitney director and one of the cycle’s producers. When Andrea Douglas, executive director of the Jefferson School, came to Scott-Jones with the idea to stage the entire Pittsburgh Cycle, Scott-Jones agreed immediately because of what it would mean for actors and directors of color.
“No one does black theater” in Charlottesville, says Scott-Jones—black theater being plays with black characters written by black playwrights for black actors. Scott-Jones says that a lot of local talent goes ignored and unmined because there aren’t many roles for actors of color. There’s been the occasional production (Live Arts did Wilson’s Seven Guitars during its 1998-1999 season), but stories by and about people of color aren’t told as often as they could—and should—be told.
“It’s important that black stories are told by those who live it rather than those who experience it third party,” says Ike Anderson, a local actor, musician and choreographer who plays Turnbo. “For the most part, any time I play a person of color on stage, it is written by someone who isn’t a person of color and thus [writes] about a character based on how they perceive blackness. I don’t have to worry about that with August Wilson.”
While there are themes and instances in the play that are particular to the minority experience—racism and gentrification, for example—the Pittsburgh Cycle plays can also clue an audience in to the fact that the black experience is not necessarily “other,” says Scott-Jones. Jitney is a rather universal story, one of navigating an uncertain future while reckoning with a painful and complicated past, viewed through the lens of black life in 1977 Pittsburgh.
“Theater, and art in general, has the ability to touch people in ways that a conversation, or going and listening to a TED Talk, just can’t do,” says Scott-Jones.
Theater can make you feel deeply, says David Vaughn Straughn, who plays Youngblood. For him, acting is more than embodying someone else on stage. “It’s empathizing with an individual and putting yourself in their shoes and being able to convey that empathy out on stage and making the audience feel it. The more I believe it, the more you believe it,” he says.
It’s been a hard summer in Charlottesville; between three white supremacist rallies, one of which brought violence and death, and questions of how to begin dealing with systemic racism, among other things, in hopes for a future of equality, there’s a lot for us to think about. And the safe, but not always comfortable, space of the theater offers a place for some of that intellectual and emotional work to be done.
“What we’re doing, especially in light of what our town is going through, and has been going through, is immensely important because it’s the humanization of people of color,” says Scott-Jones. “And there is nothing that’s more important than that in this moment.”
It’s the time of year C-VILLE editorial staffers dread most: landing on the final names for our Power Issue, followed by the inevitable complaints that the list contains a bunch of white men. Sure, there are powerful women and people of color in
Charlottesville. But when it comes down to it, it’s still mostly white men who hold the reins—and a lot of them are developers. The good news: that’s changing. (And we welcome feedback about who we missed, sent to editor@c-ville.com.)
If you’re looking for a different take on power, skip over to our Arts section, where local creative-industry leaders share their most powerful moments (grab some Kleenex!) on page 46.
1. Robert E. Lee statue
More than 150 years after General Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox, he continues to be a divisive figure—or at least his statue is. The sculpture has roiled Charlottesville since a March 2016 call (see No. 2 Wes Bellamy and Kristin Szakos) to remove the monument from the eponymously named park.
As a result, in the past year we’ve seen out-of-control City Council meetings, a Blue Ribbon Commission on Race, Memorials and Public Spaces, a City Council vote to remove the statue, a lawsuit and injunction to prevent the removal and the renaming of
the park to Emancipation.
The issue has turned Charlottesville into a national flashpoint and drawn Virginia
Flaggers, guv hopeful and former Trump campaign state chair Corey Stewart, and Richard Spencer’s tiki-torch-carrying white nationalists. Coming up next: the Loyal White Knights of the KKK July 8 rally and Jason Kessler’s “Unite the Right” March August 12.
You, General Lee, are Charlottesville’s most powerful symbol for evoking America’s unresolved conflict over its national shame of slavery and the racial inequity still present in the 21st century.
Spawn of the Lee statue
Jason Kessler
Before the statue debate—and election of Donald Trump—Charlottesville was blissfully unaware of its own, homegrown whites-righter Jason Kessler, who unearthed Vice-Mayor Wes Bellamy’s offensive tweets from before he took office and launched an unsuccessful petition drive to remove Bellamy from office, calling him a “black supremacist.” Since then, Kessler has slugged a man, filed a false complaint against his victim and aligned himself with almost every white nationalist group in the country, while denying he’s a white nationalist. The blogger formed Unity and Security in America and plans a “march on Charlottesville.” Most recently, we were treated to video of him getting punched while naming cereals in an initiation into the matching-polo-shirt-wearing Proud Boys.
SURJ
The impetus for the local Showing Up for Racial Justice was the seemingly unrelenting shootings of black men by police—and white people wanting to do something about it. But the Lee statue issue has brought SURJ into its own militant niche. Pam and Joe Starsia, who say they can’t speak for the collective, are its most well-known faces. The group showed up at Lee Park with a bullhorn to shout down GOP gubernatorial candidate Corey Stewart, interrupted U.S. Representative Tom Garrett’s town hall and surrounded Kessler at outdoor café appearances on the Downtown Mall, shouting, “Nazi go home!” and “Fuck white supremacy!”—perhaps unintentionally making some people actually feel sorry for Kessler.
2.City Council
Not all councilors are equally powerful, but together—or in alliances—they’ve kept the city fixated on issues other than the ones citizens normally care about: keeping traffic moving and good schools.
Mayor Mike Signer. Photo by Eze Amos
Mike Signer
Mayor Signer took office in January 2016 in what is widely seen as a step to higher office. He immediately riled citizens by changing the public comment procedure at City Council meetings. A judge determined part of the new rules were unconstitutional, but some council regulars say the meetings do move along much better—at least when they’re not out of control with irate citizens expressing their feelings on the Lee statue. Signer called a public rally, sans permit, to proclaim Charlottesville the capital of the resistance. And despite his vote against removing the statue, he’s not shied away from denouncing the white nationalists drawn to Charlottesville like bears to honey.
Vice-Mayor Wes Bellamy. Photo by Eze Amos
Wes Bellamy
Most politicians would be undone by the trove of racist, misogynistic and homophobic tweets Bellamy made before he was elected to City Council. As it was, they cost him his job as an Albemarle County teacher (a post from which he resigned after being placed on administrative leave) and a position on the Virginia Board of Education. But he fell on the sword, apologized and acknowledged the “disrespectful and, quite frankly, ignorant” comments he posted on Twitter. Perhaps it helped that Bellamy, at age 30, is a black male leader, has real accomplishments and has dedicated himself to helping young African-Americans. Despite his missteps, he is the voice for a sizable portion of Charlottesville’s population.
City Councilor Kristen Szakos. Photo by Elli Williams
Kristin Szakos
Szakos raised the topic of removing the city’s Confederate monuments several years before she teamed up with Bellamy, and she was soundly harassed for her trouble. When she ran for office, she called for town halls in the community and bringing council to the people, and she’s always demonstrated a concern for those who can’t afford to live in the world-class city they call home. She announced in January she won’t be seeking a third term in the fall.
City Councilor Kathy Galvin. Photo by Christian Hommel
Kathy Galvin
Galvin, an architect, envisions a strategic investment area south of the Downtown Mall, and her job will be to convince residents it’s a good deal for them. Council’s moderate voice, she, along with Signer, were the two votes against removing the Lee statue.
City Councilor Bob Fenwick. Photo by Chiara Canzi
Bob Fenwick
Even before losing the Democratic nomination June 13 with a dismal 20 percent of the vote, Fenwick was always the odd man out on council. His moment in the sun came earlier this year when he abstained from a split vote on removing the Lee statue, lobbied for pet causes among his fellow councilors and then cast his vote in the “aye” side, joining Bellamy and Szakos. That vote did not yield the groundswell of support he might have imagined from the black community. And although he leaves council at the end of the year as a one-termer, there are those who have appreciated Fenwick’s refusal to join in lockstep with the rest of council, and his willingness to call out its penchant for hiring consultants without taking action.
Coran Capshaw. Photo by Ashley Twiggs
3. Coran Capshaw
Every year we try to figure out how to do the power list without including Capshaw. But with his fingers in pies like Red Light Management (Dave Matthews, Sam Hunt); venues (the Pavilion, Jefferson, Southern and, most recently, the Brooklyn Bowl); Starr Hill Presents concert promotion and festivals such as Bonnaroo; merchandise—earlier this year, he reacquired Musictoday, which he founded in 2000; restaurants (Mas, Five Guys, Mono Loco, Ten) and of course development, with Riverbend Management, we have to acknowledge this guy’s a mogul. There’s just no escaping it.
In local real estate alone, Capshaw is a major force. Here are just a few Riverbend projects: City Walk, 5th Street Station, C&O Row, the rehabbed Coca-Cola building on Preston and Brookhill.
True, he fell from No. 7 to 11 on this year’s Billboard Power 100, but in Charlottesville, his influence is undiminished. And now he’s getting awards for his philanthropy, including Billboard’s Humanitarian of the Year in 2011, and this year, Nashville’s City of Hope medical center’s Spirit of Life Award.
UVA’s Rotunda. Photo by Karen Blaha
4. UVA
In January, UVA President Teresa Sullivan announced her summer 2018 retirement, and directed the Board of Visitors to begin the search for a new leader to rule Thomas Jefferson’s roost, the top employer in Virginia with its state-of-the-art medical center, a near-Ivy League education system and a couple of research parks teeming with innovative spirit.
Charlottesville native venture capitalist James B. Murray Jr., a former Columbia Capital partner of Senator Mark Warner, was elected vice rector of the Board of Visitors, and will take the rector-in-waiting position July 1, when Frank M. “Rusty” Connor III begins a two-year term as rector.
And lest we forget, the UVA Foundation recently purchased the university a $9 million 2015 Cessna Citation XLS—an eight-seat, multi-engine jet—to haul around its highest rollers.
Jaffray Woodriff. Photo by Eze Amos
5. Jaffray Woodriff
As the founder of Quantitative Investment Management, a futures contract and stock trading firm with experience in plataforma trading, Woodriff has landed at No. 28 on Forbes’ list of the 40 highest-earning hedge fund managers in the nation, with total earnings of $90 million. His troupe of about 35 employees manage approximately $3.5 billion in assets through a data science approach to investing.
Woodriff, an angel investor who has funded more than 30 local startups, made headlines this year when he bought the Downtown Mall’s beloved ice skating rink and announced plans to turn Main Street Arena into the Charlottesville Technology Center, which, according to a press release, “will foster talented developers and energized entrepreneurs by creating office space conducive of collaboration, mentorship and the scalability of startups.”
Demolition of the ice rink is scheduled for 2018, so there’s time yet to lace up your skates before you trade them in for a thinking cap.
Keith Woodard. Photo by Amy Jackson
6. Keith Woodard
Some might argue that Woodard’s power stems from the unrelenting complaints of people who are towed from his two downtown parking lots. But it’s the real estate those lots sit on—and more. The owner of Woodard Properties has rentals for all needs, whether residential or commercial. The latter includes part of a Downtown Mall block and McIntire Plaza. He was already rich enough to invest in a Tesla, but Woodard is about to embark on the biggest project of his life—the $50 million West2nd, the former and future site of City Market. Ground will break any time now, and by 2019, the L-shaped, 10-story building with 65 condos, office and retail space (including a restaurant and bakery/café) and a plaza will dominate Water Street.
Will Richey. Photo by Amy Jackson
7. Will Richey
When you talk about Charlottesville’s ever-growing restaurant scene, one name that seems to be on everyone’s tongue is Will Richey. The restaurateur-turned-farmer (his Red Row Farm supplies much of the produce in the summer for the two Revolutionary Soup locations) owns a fair chunk of where you eat and drink in this town: Rev Soup, The Bebedero, The Whiskey Jar, The Alley Light, The Pie Chest and the newest addition, Brasserie Saison, which he opened in March with Hunter Smith (owner of Champion Brewery, which is also on the expansion train, see. No. 9). Richey’s restaurant empire seems to know no bounds, and we’re excited to see what else he’ll add to his plate—and ours—in the coming years.
Rosa Atkins. Photo by Eze Amos
8. Rosa Atkins/Pam Moran
The superintendents for city and county schools have a long list of achievements to their names, with each division winning a number of awards under their tenures.
This month, Atkins—the city school system’s leader since 2006—was named to the State Council of Higher Education, but she’s perhaps most notably the School Superintendents Association’s 2017 runner-up for national female superintendent of the year.
Pam Moran. Photo by Amy Jackson
Moran, who has ruled county schools since 2005, held a similar title in late 2015, when the Virginia Association of School Superintendents named her State Superintendent of the Year, which placed her in the running for the American Association of School Administrators’ National Superintendent of the Year award, for which she was one of four finalists. This year, she requested the School Board continue to fund enrollment increases for at-risk students, making closing learning opportunity gaps a high priority.
Hunter Smith. Photo by Amy Jackson
9. Local beer
Throw a rock in this area and you’ll hit a brewery. For one thing, the Brew Ridge Trail is continually dotted with more stops. And new breweries in the city just keep popping up: Reason Brewery, founded by Charlottesville natives and set to open next month on Route 29 near Costco, is the latest. Other local additions include Random Row Brewery, which opened last fall on Preston Avenue, and Hardywood, based out of Richmond, which opened a pilot brewery and taproom on West Main Street in April.
And local breweries are not just opening but they’re expanding: Three Notch’d and Champion both opened Richmond satellite locations within the last year (that marks Three Notch’d’s third location, with another in Harrisonburg). And what pairs better with good drinks than good eats? Champion is adding food to its Charlottesville menu, and its brewers are enjoying a Belgian-focused playground at the joint restaurant venture Brasserie Saison.
Another sure sign that craft beer is thriving is the Virginia Craft Brewers Guild’s annual beer competition, the Virginia Craft Beer Cup Awards, which is the largest state competition of its kind; this year, 356 beers in 24 categories were entered. And Charlottesville is the new home of the organization’s annual beer showcase, the Virginia Craft Brewers Fest, which is moving from Devils Backbone Brewing Company to the IX Art Park in August. Host of the event, featuring more than 100 Virginia breweries, will be Three Notch’d Brewing Company, which is expanding its brewing operations from Grady Avenue into a space at IX, set to open in 2018.
Amy Laufer. Publicity photo
10. Amy Laufer
With 46 percent of the vote in this month’s City Council Democratic primary and nearly $20,000 in donations, Laufer also had a lengthy list of endorsements, including governor hopeful Tom Perriello and former 5th District congressman L.F. Payne.
Laufer, a current school board member and former chair and vice chair of the board, is also the founder of Virginia’s List, a PAC that supports Democratic women running for state office. If she takes a seat on City Council, keep an eye out for the progress she makes on her top issues: workforce development, affordable housing and the environment.
Khizr Khan. Photo by Eze Amos
11. Khizr Khan
Khan launched the city into the international spotlight when he, accompanied by his wife, Ghazala, took the stage on the final day of the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia and harshly criticized several of then-Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s policies, including his proposed ban on Muslim immigration.
“Donald Trump, you’re asking Americans to trust you with their future,” Khan said. “Let me ask you, have you even read the United States Constitution? I will gladly lend you my copy. In this document, look for the words ‘liberty’ and ‘equal protection of the law.’”
Khan could be seen shaking a pocket-sized copy of the Constitution at the camera—his face splayed across every major news network for days thereafter. At the convention, he discussed the death of his son, Humayun, a UVA graduate and former U.S. Army captain during the Iraq War, who died in an explosion in Baqubah, Iraq.
Khan also spoke before hundreds at Mayor Mike Signer’s January rally to declare Charlottesville a “capital of the resistance,” and Khan and his wife recently announced a Bicentennial Scholarship in memory of their son, which will award $10,000 annually to a student enrolled in ROTC or majoring in a field that studies the U.S. Constitution.
John Dewberry. Photo by Eze Amos
12. John Dewberry
Even though he doesn’t live around here, he’s from around here, if you stretch here to include Waynesboro. Dewberry continues to hold downtown hostage with the Landmark Hotel, although we have seen some movement since he was on last year’s power list. After buying the property in 2012, he said he’d get to work on the Landmark, the city’s most prominent eyesore since 2009, once he finished his luxury hotel in Charleston, South Carolina. That took a few years longer than anticipated—these things always do—but earlier this year Dewberry wrangled some tax incentives from City Council, which has threatened to condemn the structure, and on June 20, the Board of Architectural Review took a look at his new and improved plans. One of these days, Dewberry promises, Charlottesville will have a five-star hotel on the Downtown Mall.
13. Andrea Douglas
The Ph.D. in art history, who formerly worked at what’s now UVA’s Fralin Museum of Art, always seemed like the only real choice to head the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, and since it opened in 2012, she’s made it an integral part of the community. The heritage center is far from self-sustaining, but a $950,000 city grant, a fundraising campaign and Douglas’ steely determination keep the historic school—and its place in the city’s history—firmly in the heart of Charlottesville. And Douglas can get a seat at Bizou anytime she wants—she’s married to co-owner Vincent Derquenne.
Paul Beyer. Photo by Ryan Jones
14. Paul Beyer
Innovation wunderkind Beyer ups the stakes on his Tom Tom Founders Festival every year. The event began six years ago as a music-only festival, but has morphed into a twice-a-year celebration of creativity and entrepreneurism. The fall is dedicated to locals who have founded successful businesses/organizations, while the week-long spring event continues to draw some of the world’s biggest names in the fields of technology, art, music and more. This year’s spring fest, which added a featured Hometown Summit that drew hundreds of civic leaders and innovators from around the country to share their successes and brainstorm solutions to struggles, was the biggest yet: 44,925 program attendees, 334 speakers and 110 events.
Lynn Easton and Dean Porter Andrews. Photo by Jen Fariello
15. Easton Porter Group
We know them as local leaders in the weddings and hospitality industry (Pippin Hill Farm & Vineyards is often the site of well-to-do weddings, with some totaling in
the $200,000s, we hear), but now the Easton Porter Group has its sights set on a much bigger portfolio: Its goal is to secure 15 luxury properties in high-end destinations in the next 10 years. In 2016, the group, owned by husband-and-wife team Dean Porter Andrews and Lynn Easton, landed on Inc. magazine’s list of the 5,000 fastest-growing private companies in the nation.
Their latest project is to our north, with the renovation of the Blackthorne Inn outside of Washington, D.C., in Upperville, Virginia. The historic hunt-country estate, which is being transformed into a boutique inn featuring luxury-rustic accommodations, fine dining and wine, is projected to open in spring 2018.
The Easton Porter Group’s other businesses include Red Pump Kitchen on the Downtown Mall, as well as Cannon Green restaurant and the Zero George Hotel Restaurant + Bar in Charleston, South Carolina.
16. EPIC
Equity and Progress in Charlottesville made a poignant debut earlier this year, shortly after the death of former vice-mayor Holly Edwards, who was one of the founders of the group dedicated to involving those who usually aren’t part of the political process. It includes a few Democrats no longer satisfied with the party’s stranglehold on City Council, like former mayor Dave Norris and former councilor Dede Smith. The group has drawn a lot of interest in the post-Trump-election activist era, but its first two endorsements in the June 13 primary, Fenwick and commonwealth’s attorney candidate Jeff Fogel, did not fare well. The group still holds high hopes for Nikuyah Walker as an independent City Council candidate, and despite the primary setback, says Norris, “We may not have won this election, but we certainly influenced the debate.”
Dr. Neal Kassell. Courtesy photo
17. Dr. Neal Kassell
UVA’s Focused Ultrasound Center, the flagship center of its kind in the U.S., has had a banner year. The use of magnetic resonance-guided focused ultrasound technology to treat tremors has moved from the research stage to becoming more commercialized for patient treatment. And we can thank Kassell, founder and chairman of the Focused Ultrasound Foundation, for placing our city in the neurological pioneering sphere.
Two months ago, the Clinical Research Forum named the center’s use of focused sound waves to treat essential tremor (the most common movement disorder) instead of requiring invasive incisions, as one of the top 10 clinical research achievements of 2016. And it can’t hurt to have someone as well-known as John Grisham in your corner. He wrote The Tumor, and the foundation, which works as a trusted third party between donors, doctors and research, distributed 800,000 copies.
Kassell is the author of more than 500 scientific papers and book chapters, and his research has been supported by more than $30 million in National Institutes of Health grants. In April 2016, he was named to the Blue Ribbon Panel of former vice president Joe Biden’s Cancer Moonshot Initiative.
18. Jody Kielbasa
Since Kielbasa came to town in 2009, he has continued to steer the Virginia Film Festival toward an ever-expanding arts presence in not only our community, but statewide as well. Last year’s festival featured more than 120 films and attracted big-name stars, including director Werner Herzog and Virginia’s own Shirley MacLaine. And Kielbasa expanded his own presence locally, as he was appointed UVA’s second vice provost for the arts in 2013, which places him squarely in the university’s arts fundraising initiatives. Last year there was talk of a group of arts sector powerhouses forming to lobby the city in an official capacity to gain more funding for local arts initiatives—no surprise that Kielbasa was among those mentioned.
Jefferson School African American Heritage Center director Andrea Douglas has a board that’s determined to make the center financially sustainable.
Photo by Eze Amos
When Charlottesville decided to keep the historic Jefferson School and its prime real estate as a community center rather than selling it for condos, a complicated financial structure was required to make the $18 million rehab of the 1926 high school possible.
Four years after the renovated school reopened in 2012, fundraising that was supposed to pay off the loans hasn’t happened, and the city has pledged a $950,000 grant to the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center to cover its rent for the next few years.
The city sold the school for $100,000 in 2011 to the private Jefferson School Community Partnership LLLP, a move needed to procure the tax credits and loans to make the renovation possible. The plan envisioned was that the nonprofit Jefferson School Foundation would raise enough money to pay off the loans and support the African American Heritage Center.
It hasn’t quite happened that way.
The partnership is working on refinancing a nearly $6 million loan, and the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center spun off to be its own nonprofit last year.
Heritage center board secretary Elizabeth Breeden feels the original plan to go from raising “zero to $5 million in five years was setting someone up for failure,” she says. “You’ve got to establish a track record, which the building has done.”
The whole idea of a museum and cultural center to tell the story of African-Americans in Charlottesville is “a new concept,” says Breeden, one that potential contributors were waiting to see prove itself. When the center was under the umbrella of the Jefferson School Foundation, it had some difficulty raising money, says Breeden. “You can’t ask donors for rent.”
The heritage center likely wouldn’t have been able to pay its $210,000 rent without the proposed $950,000 grant from the city. That, says executive director Andrea Douglas, was a recommendation from the Blue Ribbon Commission on Race, Memorials and Public Spaces.
Douglas says the heritage center is facing the same challenges as every other nonprofit in Charlottesville. “We’re trying to raise $254,000 to pay for programming, common area fees and staff,” she says. “The board understands its fundraising job.”
The African American Heritage Center is getting ready to roll out a fundraising campaign that is “aspirational and worthy of what’s been asked of it by the Blue Ribbon Commission,” says Breeden.
Rent for tenants in the building could go down if the Jefferson School Community Partnership succeeds in refinancing a nearly $6 million loan, says partnership president Steve Blaine. “We’ve already got a commitment from the bank for better terms than we have now,” he says. “We don’t know where interest rates will be when the loan is due in another year.”
He says the $500,000 the city chips in to rent Carver Recreation Center helps make it possible to pay back the loan from rent. Other tenants like Sentara, Piedmont Virginia Community College and the Jefferson Area Board for Aging have five-year leases, and most plan to stay at the school, says Blaine.
Some tenants had feared rents would increase, but with the new loan, organizations like Literacy Volunteers could end up saving $15,000 a year, according to executive director Ellen Osborne. “It really is a privilege to be here,” she says.
Osborne believes the city should pay the heritage center’s rent. “This is their building anyway,” she says. “That would be the moral thing to do. They cover rent for McGuffey and the Discovery Museum.” That way, the heritage center could focus on its programs, she says. “It’s to everyone in the building’s benefit if the heritage center flourishes.”
And some, like former city councilor Dede Smith, who is on the African American Heritage Center Board, would like to see the city buy the building, as it did with McGuffey Art Center, but that doesn’t seem to be in the cards for now.
Her hope is the city will do a cost-benefit analysis, and weigh howmuch it already has spent on the building, including the $6 million CEDA loan, the $500,000 annual rent for Carver Recreation Center and the grants like the $950,000 it plans to make to the heritage center. Over the past four years, the city has budgeted $120,000 to the heritage center and $30,000 to the Jefferson School Foundation.
“The building is undisputedly the most important African-American monument in the city,” says Smith.
“Why wouldn’t we survive?” asks Douglas, at a time when the city is confronting its racial history with Civil War monuments. “If you look at the present climate,” she says, “it’s important.”
KEY PLAYERS
Jefferson School City Center: The building that was once the only educational option for black students in Charlottesville and Albemarle now houses nonprofits and is anchored by Carver Recreation Center and the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center.
Jefferson School Community Partnership LLLP: The limited liability partnership owns the building, which it bought for $100,000 in 2011 to take advantage of tax credits, because the city or nonprofits aren’t eligible for the credits. A $6 million bank loan, a $6 million CEDA loan and $6 million in tax credits made the $18 million renovation possible.
Jefferson School Foundation: This nonprofit’s mission was to fundraise to pay off the center’s loans and support the African American Heritage Center. Repeated phone calls to its president, Martin Burks, yielded no response about what the foundation is up to these days.
Jefferson School African American Heritage Center: The historical and cultural anchor of the project faced doubts from the beginning about its viability. But now as its own nonprofit and with a board ready to kick off a fundraising campaign, “We have every intention of being in the Jefferson School,” says director Andrea Douglas.
The plaque currently memorializing Vinegar Hill is often hard to spot, but at least it’s no longer flanked by a big black planter and a trash can bolted to the ground. Staff photo
A forthcoming addition to the Downtown Mall will commemorate Vinegar Hill, the historically African-American neighborhood that saw displacement of 158 families when city residents voted to develop the land in the 1960s. Officially called Vinegar Hill Park, this chunk of real estate between the Omni hotel and Main Street Arena will house $15,000 worth of interpretive signage, such as informational kiosks.
“The important thing about this site is its location,” says Mary Jo Scala, the city’s preservation and design planner. “It’s near where [Lawrence] Halprin envisioned this homage to Vinegar Hill, and it’s near where a lot of West Main Street’s African-American businesses were located.”
Halprin, a renowned landscape architect, began designing the Downtown Mall in the early 1970s, but he left room for a “park” that was never built to remember the lost neighborhood.
“The whole mall is a park, in a sense,” Scala says. “It’s an urban park. It doesn’t necessarily have to have trees or playground equipment or whatever you traditionally think of as a park. I think urban parks are kind of a place of respite where you can sit and enjoy yourself.”
Halprin’s drawing of the park shows trees and a water feature, Scala says. “That’s certainly possible for the future,” she adds. “That’s the beauty of this site.”
Within the next six months, Scala says you’ll be seeing wayfinding signage for Vinegar Hill Park on the mall.
Asked if this is the type of commemoration the Blue Ribbon Commission on Race, Memorials and Public Spaces has advocated for, commission chair Don Gathers says, “That and much more. We would like something specific and highly visible located at the entrance to the park or plaza—whatever they intend to call it—and also something throughout the Downtown Mall to direct people that way.”
The current marker memorializing Vinegar Hill, which will stay in place, isn’t cutting it on its own, Gathers says.
“It came to be known because it was behind one of those huge black planters and on the opposite side of it was a large city trash can bolted to the ground,” he says. “Unless you were looking for it, you never would have known it was there.”
While the city has since removed the planter and the trash can, Gathers says the marker still sits eight to 10 inches off the ground and is barely visible to the public.
Andrea Douglas, executive director of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, says the park—as the Historic Resources Committee described it—will honor more than the displaced families and the black population, but also the idea that Vinegar Hill was once a center of commerce in Charlottesville.
“It wasn’t just black people who used the commerce on Vinegar Hall,” she says. “Inge’s store was the place in Charlottesville where anyone could go to buy fish. …It holds a significant history that is associated with the development of our community.”
And there’s also room for more seating at the park, but, according to Scala, the Board of Architectural Review and Parks & Recreation have squabbled about what constitutes a Halprin-approved bench on the mall. (Which, if you ask the BAR, the backless benches in front of City Hall apparently aren’t).
In the past, the city has removed benches on the mall because of an alleged “behavior problem” by those using them, which the homeless people who camp on them have taken as a personal attack.
