Tag: James Madison’s Montpelier

After nearly two months of tension that included firings of high-level staff and public accusations of game-playing and racism against the Montpelier Foundation, the dispute between the foundation board and the Montpelier Descendants Committee has ended. At the May 16 foundation board meeting, the board voted in 11 new members recommended by the MDC, two more than had been previously promised. 

“This historic and unprecedented vote by the Board of Directors means that the Foundation has achieved its long-sought goal of parity on the Board for descendants of Montpelier’s formerly enslaved population,” the foundation said in a release. “It has been a long and not always easy process to get to this point, but one result of the process has been the identification of an incredibly gifted and renowned slate of new Board members.”

“I just think all of us are surprised, thrilled and, you know, want to commend the board members, whatever their motivations were throughout,” says Greg Werkheiser, attorney for the MDC. “In the end, they took a hard vote. They did the right thing. And now, you know, the really hard work of rebuilding and restoring Montpelier’s finances, its reputation, its staff. That’s the next chapter.” 

The stage for dispute was set last summer when the foundation board voted to rewrite its bylaws giving MDC authority to recommend at least half of the board members. In late March, the board reversed that historic vote and blamed the MDC for being uncollaborative.

“That’s not partnership. It’s not collegiality,” said former board chair Gene Hickok in an early April interview. Hickok resigned from the board at the Monday meeting. 

Dozens of historic organizations, including the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which owns Montpelier, condemned the foundation’s actions. Remaining Montpelier staff released a fiery statement alleging the board was putting historic preservation work at risk and violating federal law. Those employees and the MDC demanded the reinstatement of staff who’d been fired for speaking out in support of the descendants and a change in leadership.

Werkheiser says the new board will act quickly to rehire fired staff but declined to comment on the future of Montpelier’s embattled CEO Roy Young. Hickok and Young declined to be interviewed.

The 25-member foundation board now includes 14 people representing descendants of the enslaved at Montpelier. Among those new members are journalist Soledad O’Brien, UVA McIntire School of Commerce Dean Nicole Thorne Jenkins, and the Reverend Cornell William Brooks, Harvard professor of the practice of public leadership and social justice and former NAACP president and CEO.

“As our nation grapples with and even grieves over the racial injustices of this day, the work of the Montpelier Foundation is all the more important: teaching the lessons of the living legacy of President James Madison, studying the past and possibilities of our Constitution, and sharing across our Republic and beyond the ongoing story of those enslaved at Montpelier,” Brooks said in an MDC statement released after the May 16 vote. 

The new board members were selected from a list of 20 names MDC recently put forth for consideration. Werkheiser says the nine individuals who were not named to the board will serve on an advisory council.

“It’s just further testament to the kind of egolessness of a lot of these public servants that they are willing to stay at the table, not sit on the bench,” he says. “They’re willing to put their shoulder to the wheel here as well. And trust me, all of them are going to be needed, as well as the returning staff, to put Montpelier back together again as quickly as possible.” 

Courteney Stuart is the host of ­“Charlottesville Right Now” on WINA. You can hear her interview with Greg Werkheiser at wina.com.

A dispute between the Montpelier Foundation board and the Montpelier Descendants Committee over a power-sharing agreement reached last summer has now snowballed into what appears to be a full-on revolt by staff at the fourth U.S. president’s historic estate.

“By revoking parity with the MDC and by firing and suspending staff, TMF has attempted to co-opt the meaning of this ancestral space, and in the process has done irreparable harm to the security of and accessibility to these culturally significant resources,” reads a statement released Saturday, April 23, on a new website, montpelierstaff.com, and signed by “a majority of full-time staff and a growing number of part-time staff.”

The controversy erupted in late March when the Montpelier Foundation board voted to reverse its June 2021 decision to rewrite the bylaws granting the MDC the right to recommend at least half the members of the board. The stated goal was to create “structural parity” by giving descendants of the enslaved workers who built and ran Montpelier equal say in determining the future of the site. 

The reversal prompted immediate backlash from the MDC, Montpelier staff, and historic preservation groups including the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which owns Montpelier and leases it to the foundation. 

Foundation Board Chair Gene Hickok insisted the board would still create structural parity by appointing descendants itself; he blamed the situation on the MDC for refusing to recognize two descendants put forth by the board as contributing to structural parity.

“That’s not partnership. It’s not collegiality. And that’s not what the original understanding of our relationship would be,” he said in an interview earlier this month. Neither Hickok nor Montpelier CEO Roy Young responded to a request for comment for this article.

The situation further deteriorated last week when Young fired multiple high-level staff members including Executive Vice President and Chief Curator Elizabeth Chew and Director of Archaeology and Landscape Restoration Matt Reeves. 

According to the statement from remaining Montpelier staff, those firings came in retaliation for public statements in support of the MDC and have created a “culture of fear” for those staff members who remain.

Hickok initially released a statement defending the board’s actions and placing the blame on MDC. After last week’s firings, the foundation board released a new statement with an offered compromise. MDC could put forth a list of 15 people from which nine would be chosen to serve on the board. Half would begin serving July 1 and the other half would be installed on October 1.

MDC attorney Greg Werkheiser said that was a move in the right direction, but he said the delay in installing some of the MDC-recommended board members was a deal-breaker.

“The reason they would do that is because by splitting up these new board members, they maintain their two-thirds majority,” Werkheiser says. “And in those four months, they will not rehire the fired staff. They will fire additional staff. They will take actions against the current serving MDC board members, and they have the power with a two-thirds majority to actually expand the board and dilute any new MDC members they put on.”

The Montpelier staff also reject the foundation’s compromise, and do so using charged language.

“In short, the Board is offering a type of ‘three fifths compromise’ which will allow TMF to retain full control and sideline the MDC as an equal steward of the site,” staff write, referring to the agreement in the U.S. Constitution that said three-fifths of the enslaved population would be counted when determining taxation and representation. 

The staff statement describes the devastation wrought by the foundation’s actions.

“TMF has defiled archaeological ethics and museum best practices by endangering the data and research of the site,” it reads. “At present, there are open excavation units that are abandoned mid-excavation. Artifacts and other archaeological samples remain unprocessed.”

The foundation’s actions are not just “unethical and immoral,” the staffers claim, they also violate federal law.

“Archaeology is an inherently destructive science which rests entirely on proper recording and protection of data and the direct involvement of a site’s cultural descendants,” the statement reads. “By leaving this site abandoned and removing staff with institutional knowledge, Montpelier’s ‘leadership’ has put the property’s cultural heritage at risk, the stories at risk, and the ability for this information to be shared at risk.”

The MDC has previously called for Young and Hickok to resign; the National Trust released a statement condemning the firings and suggesting the foundation change leadership.

The National Trust did not respond to a request for comment on whether the Montpelier lease could be revoked.

The Montpelier staff statement repeats the call for foundation leadership to resign and says there is only one acceptable path forward.

“There is no justifiable reason to trust any proposal that does not begin with immediate parity with the MDC and the reinstatement of fired staff who steward Montpelier’s historic resources,” it reads.

Courteney Stuart is the host of ­“Charlottesville Right Now” on WINA. You can hear interviews with Greg Werkheiser and Gene Hickok at wina.com.

Timing is everything, and that can certainly be said of Montpelier Foundation co-founder William Lewis’ new book, which traces the history and extensive renovation of the fourth U.S. president’s former home. Montpelier Transformed: A Monument to James Madison and Its Enslaved Community was published Monday, April 11, amid an ongoing controversy over a power-sharing agreement between the foundation and the Montpelier Descendants Committee.

“My hope is that as people read this, they’ll be aware that Montpelier has always been a foundation that was very interested in having descendants be key members of the board,” Lewis says. 

Lewis, a retired environmental attorney, began volunteering at Montpelier in the late 1990s after he and his wife bought a nearby property in Gordonsville. His book covers Dolley Madison’s sale of the property in 1844, the Dupont era from 1901-1983, and a legal battle with Dupont heirs that ended with the sale of the property to the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 1987. A decade later, Lewis helped form the new Montpelier Foundation and negotiate the foundation’s lease of the property from the National Trust.

He describes the foundation’s work at Montpelier over the next 20 years as an “impossible dream realized.”

With millions of dollars from philanthropists, the foundation completed a $25 million renovation of the home, built a $9 million visitors center and gallery, as well as The Center for the Constitution in the first decade. It also created a new entryway to the property and renovated a former slave cabin.

The foundation’s original mission, Lewis says, was to present for historic education the life and legacy of James Madison, who is primarily known as the father of the Constitution and the architect of the Bill of Rights.

Lewis says the foundation also wanted to illuminate the less-publicized aspect of Madison’s legacy. 

“He owned hundreds of slaves,” Lewis says. “Those slaves were never freed by Madison, even at his death. So the focus of the foundation has been to tell the story and educate the public on the Constitution and Bill of Rights and also present the tragedy of slavery and recreate the slave community.”

To that end, Lewis says, “the second decade was focused on educating about the tragedy of slavery and recreating the slave community that was adjacent to Madison’s home.”

For years, Montpelier has won praise for its unflinching depictions of the lives of enslaved workers who built and operated the presidential estate. That reputation has been marred in recent weeks after the foundation board reversed a decision to achieve “structural parity” with the Montpelier Descendants Committee. The foundation’s late-March vote revoking the MDC’s sole right to recommend descendants to the board sparked national news coverage and criticism from the National Trust and other organizations.

Lewis says he has not been involved with the foundation board’s recent decisions, and has been pained to see the conflict.

“I’d worked for a long time to try to build a relationship with descendants,” he says. “The idea there would be additional descendants [on the board] seemed a wonderful thing.”

Lewis believes any descendant should be eligible to serve on the board. He hopes his book will contribute to the conversations about Montpelier’s place in history and that the foundation and the MDC will resolve their dispute.

“I hope it will result in more representation for descendants on the board,” he says, “and there’s no reason why that won’t be true.”

Courteney Stuart is the host of “Charlottesville Right Now” on WINA.