Tag: Jefferson School African American Heritage Center

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Arts Culture

JSAAHC adds highly detailed Black spaces exhibition to its permanent collection

Through deep examination of documents, oral histories, and extensive research, “Toward a Lineage of Self” offers a detailed, interactive look at the prosperity, vibrancy, segregation, and discrimination of Charlottesville’s Black community. Image courtesy of Jordy Yager.

“Toward a Lineage of Self” is the latest addition to the “Pride Overcomes Prejudice” permanent exhibition at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center. Featuring an interactive digital map, the exhibition uses deed records, oral histories, documents, and photographs to show how Charlottesville’s historically Black neighborhoods came to be, the struggles they faced when confronted with racist civic policy, and the community’s response.

With photographs and descriptions, the map breathes life into the past, enlivening the facts it lays bare. The map has three categories: community, civil rights, and discrimination—and what emerges is a picture of a vibrant, well-organized, and prosperous community that supported its members, and when discriminatory practices were introduced, joined the fight for civil rights. 

“They structured their lives within this space of legalized apartheid. There’s no other way to describe it,” says JSAAHC Executive Director Dr. Andrea Douglas. “It says in the minutes of the City of Charlottesville … ‘This will accomplish racial segregation in our city.’ You can’t get past those documents and those are the things that are important as we start to think about what is equitable.”

“The minute that African American people leave enslavement, they begin to shape Charlottesville,” says Douglas. “They begin to purchase property, they begin to create their home places, and they begin to build around those places the ancillary needs—the grocery store, churches, and community aid societies … and they’re doing it in the built landscape and they’re doing it at a rapid rate, facilitating this ascendancy for each other—that is what ‘Toward a Lineage of Self’ really articulates.”

One example is John West, a successful barber and the first Black man elected to Charlottesville’s Town Council. He was responsible for more than 600 property transactions between 1870 and 1927. As a landlord, he offered reasonable rates and made home-buying possible for many African Americans. 

Similarly, the Piedmont Industrial Land Improvement Company was formed by nine residents, who pooled funds to buy more than 50 properties in its 26-year history, providing both affordable housing and economic returns to its investors. And the fact that Charlottesville’s Black community managed to build seven churches between 1864 and 1919 is a testament not just to its faith, but also to its prosperity.

“The whole of Charlottesville’s center was Black-owned,” says JSAAHC Director of Digital Humanities Jordy Yager. ”This had never been articulated before. We talked about all these different neighborhood pockets like Vinegar Hill, Fifeville, etc., but once you look at it in its entirety, you really start to see how large the center of Charlottesville is as a Black space.” The area totaled some 800 acres.

Yager, a journalist and Charlottesville native who’s written about Vinegar Hill and the gentrification of the 10th and Page neighborhood for this publication, has accumulated hours of taped recollections for C-VILLE Weekly stories, which he offered to JSAAHC for its oral histories archive. Out of this came an initiative, supported by a grant from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, to collect interviews about what it was like growing up Black in Charlottesville. 

An offshoot of this, Mapping Cville, began around the same time as the Unite the Right rally in August 2017. “After that we had a reckoning in Charlottesville in terms of [the city’s]  history,” says Yager. “It was then we realized, we really didn’t know that history. We knew that racist housing policies were enacted, but we didn’t know where and we didn’t know how.”

Armed with a Charlottesville Area Community Foundation grant and with the cooperation of city and county clerks, JSAAHC digitized an astounding 300,000 pages of property records. Then, using optical character recognition software, the racial covenants were extracted.

More than 2,000 community members helped log the information to create what Yager says is  “The first complete database of every single racially restricted property in Charlottesville that’s ever existed.” 

“Toward a Lineage of Self” spells out the retaliatory discriminatory practices—land seizures, racial covenants on deeds, intentional lack of city services, like water and sewage, that were instituted by local and state governments alarmed or offended by the progress—their affluence and their successful voter campaigns, which, among other things, helped elect James T.S. Taylor to the Constitutional Convention of 1868—made by Black residents.

The uncomfortable truths revealed by the research must be dealt with. These truths are not lodged in the distant remove of ancient history; you only have to look around Charlottesville to see the fallout of this civic-endorsed inequity. 

“Toward a Lineage of Self” operates on both a micro and macro level, providing a vivid road map for descendants of the people who formed Charlottesville’s Black community, while at the same time revealing the larger ramifications of systemic racism and inequality.

“We can give people their histories, but we can also engage in a conversation about repairs,” says Douglas. “We can also engage in a conversation about present-day housing practice. In this age when the truth is contestable, the forensics are not, the paper trail is not contested.”

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Arts Culture

Jefferson School spotlights sculptor who carved out a remarkable legacy

“Beyond Boundaries: The Sculpture of Alice Wesley Ivory” is on view at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center through December 14. Photo by Eze Amos.

The story of sculptor Alice Ivory is a story of triumph against adversity, and the power of the creative drive. It is also an American tragedy of sorts, highlighting the dearth of opportunities afforded people outside the white, predominantly male, status quo. In “Beyond Boundaries: The Sculpture of Alice Wesley Ivory,” the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center highlights the work and life story of the under-celebrated artist.

Ivory was born in Albemarle County in 1931. From the start, she faced challenges as a poor, Black female in segregated Virginia. But Ivory had a few things going for her. Her parents, Warner Wesley and Gladys Frye Wesley, owned their own farm in White Hall, and though neither one had attended school, they were literate.

As a child, Ivory attended White Hall Colored School, a two-mile walk each day. She completed her secondary education at Albemarle Training School on Hydraulic Road—at the time, it was the only school in the surrounding five-county area to offer Black kids an education beyond the seventh grade. Ivory went on to Virginia State College (now University) in Petersburg, where she earned a degree in art education. She taught at Jackson P. Burley High School for seven years before applying to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. (The University of Virginia was out of the question, as it was still segregated.) 

Accepted provisionally at first because her undergraduate degree was from a Southern Black institution, Ivory satisfied UWM’s requirements, gained full admission, and received her M.S. in art education in 1962. It was at UWM that she discovered her lifelong passion for welding, a highly unusual choice for a woman at the time. Her interest was not lost on Fred Ivory, who presented his bride with an oxo-acetylene torch when they married. She would use that equipment for the rest of her life. In 1970, she became the first Black teacher hired by the Blue Ridge School, and taught there until retiring in 1990.

Ivory received some artistic acclaim during her lifetime, garnering certificates of distinction from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts for her sculptures “Crow,” “Wild Boar,” and “Eagle”—the latter created in response to JFK’s assassination. She was also the subject of a one-woman show at the VMFA, which also subsequently commissioned “Kangaroo” for its 1980 “Fantasies,” a touchable exhibition designed for people with visual impairments. Ivory’s work has been exhibited at McGuffey Art Center, and a painted portrait of Ivory by Frances Brand was part of the “Firsts” exhibition. But these acknowledgments are not commensurate with her talent.

The sensitivity, compassion, and humor with which Ivory’s animals and insects are rendered reflect her rural upbringing. Michael R. Taylor, artistic director and chief curator at the VMFA has an interesting take on her work. 

“In a way, Alice Ivory’s marvelous welded metal sculptures are all self-portraits,” says Taylor. “She’s in them. She is the fierce junkyard dog, she is the beautiful crow, and she‘s the kangaroo protecting her young. I think that’s all of her rolled into one.”

Ivory used both naturalism and caricature to capture her subjects. Her chickens possess a hand-wrought honesty and humor reminiscent of some of Alexander Calder’s animals. Even though they are abstracted versions, Ivory nails the posture, stance, and movement—in essence, their chickenness. 

Generally, she didn’t bother with surface details, placing emphasis on form and gesture. In a very modern way, Ivory acknowledged the materiality of the work, with unadorned metal and exposed welding seams and brazing marks. Other animals in this vein are the attenuated Alberto Giacometti-like “Heron” and the menacing, yet funny, piranha whose teeth are made from nails. 

Ivory’s “Bull’ is a study of compressed energy. The bull seems to be gathering itself in preparation for charging. To emphasize the animal’s power, she exaggerates the hooves, attaches the plates of metal so the seams accentuate the animal’s musculature and adds a tail that seems charged with electricity. Her magnificent, oversized “Crow” gets the bird’s attitude exactly right, with a cocked head that conveys curiosity and intelligence.

The majority of Ivory’s sculptures were made (using scrap metal her husband collected for her) between 1960 and 1970, while she was taking a break from teaching to care for her two young children. It wasn’t easy, as Ivory herself wrote: “…other sculptures have been made at home when I had managed to get the baby quiet, the dishes washed, the laundry hung out to dry and another of hundreds of huge meals prepared.”

In spite of these domestic burdens, she produced, by her estimation, 100 sculptures. By way of comparison, American sculptor David Smith, who died 10 years younger than Ivory, produced well over 500 sculptures.

Ivory made the best of it, producing extraordinarily sympathetic work. She unquestionably had the talent to scale the heights of the art world, yet she lived out her days in relative obscurity, raising children, keeping house, and supporting herself as an art teacher. When she died in 1991, Ivory left behind a body of superlative work that speaks not only to what she achieved but also to how she triumphed in a world of exclusion. Looking at it, one can’t help but feel that she, and (to a far lesser degree) we, were cheated out of a more fully realized career.

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Meltdown

Molten metal being poured
The statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee was melted down into bronze ingots by the Swords into Plowshares project at an undisclosed foundry on October 21. Photo by Eze Amos

After years of legal battles, the Swords into Plowshare project has melted down the statue of Robert E. Lee, which once stood in a park near Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall. Opposition to the monument’s initial removal fueled the deadly violence of the 2017 white supremacist Unite the Right rally. Now, the bronze which once formed the likeness of a Confederate general will be used to make a new piece of public art, set to be on display in Charlottesville by 2027.

The Jefferson School African American Heritage Center’s proposal to repurpose the statue’s bronze, under the project name Swords into Plowshares, was selected by City Council in 2021. But the project’s proponents have spent the last two years battling it out in the Charlottesville Circuit Court with two other groups that unsuccessfully bid to acquire the Lee statue. After the last remaining legal challenge to the Swords into Plowshares project was dropped this summer, the Jefferson School was finally able to crank up the heat on Lee on October 21 of this year.

Traveling with the disassembled statue in secret, Swords into Plowshares melted down the Lee Statue at an undisclosed foundry in the South.

The project team purportedly plans to transform what was previously considered by some to be a symbol of hatred into artwork that embodies Charlottesville’s values of “inclusivity and racial justice.”

For more on the melting down of the monument and the Swords into Plowshares project, check out the November 1 edition of C-VILLE Weekly.

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‘We’re still going’

Lee statue being removed
The Jefferson School African American Heritage Center shared updates on the Swords Into Plowshares project during an October 30 community engagement session. Photo: Eze Amos

Community members gathered at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center on October 30 to hear the latest on the Swords Into Plowshares project, which seeks to melt down Charlottesville’s Robert E. Lee statue and repurpose its bronze into a new public artwork.

In December, the Trevilian Station Battlefield Foundation and the Ratcliffe Foundation filed a lawsuit against the City of Charlottesville, claiming the city violated state code, the Virginia Public Procurement Act, and the Freedom of Information Act when it donated the statue to the Jefferson School. (The school was initially named as a second defendant, but was removed, and is now a party to the suit.) On October 10, Charlottesville Circuit Court ruled that the lawsuit had grounds to move forward, with a trial date set for February.

While the Jefferson School initially planned a six-month community engagement process, during which Charlottesville residents would discuss ways to represent inclusion through art and public space, the lawsuit has delayed it. But Jefferson School Executive Director Andrea Douglas remains hopeful about where the project currently stands.

“We’re still going. We’re still raising money. We’re still asking the questions,” said Douglas. “We’re still a united front against this court case.”

During the October 10 hearing, the plaintiffs pushed the Jefferson School to disclose the Lee statue’s location to the public, but the two parties later agreed to a protective order allowing only an expert and lawyers from each side to know the statue’s location, marking a victory for Swords Into Plowshares.

UVA professor Frank Dukes, who is leading the community engagement phase of the project, presented the results of a survey that asked community members for input on what should happen to the Lee statue, including the stories the resulting artwork should tell. Respondents were primarily from Charlottesville and Albemarle County, and came from various age groups, including young children.

Stories that respondents thought needed to be told included information about Vinegar Hill, the Jefferson School, McKee Row, and the lives of enslaved and Indigenous people.

Respondents also voiced fears for the project—some felt that art might be too abstract or figurative, or represent an oversimplification of a complex issue. Among those who liked the art idea, common desired themes included incorporating touch or sound, serving a function, and not honoring a single person.

Community engagement meetings have also served as a forum for residents to voice their thoughts. “We’re gonna continue to do this until there’s an opportunity for us to say, ‘Okay, we’ve heard enough from people—we can start creating,’” said Dukes.

Zyahna Bryant, a student activist who first petitioned for the removal of the Lee statue in high school, emphasized that the final product should be treated with the same degree of esteem that had been given to the Lee statue.

“I don’t think it needs to be sad or somber, but I definitely think that it should have some level of respect and honor,” Bryant said.

Other community members hoped the new artwork would provoke dialogue while reflecting a historical consciousness. One suggested incorporating some kind of theatrical form, creating a lively interactive space.

Charlottesville resident Peter Kleeman, who has frequently attended SIP’s community engagement events, said he finds the project to be the only one of its kind he has come across.

“This whole project is such a fabulous idea,” said Kleeman. “The idea of taking a Civil War memorial and making it into something new, taking something that shouldn’t be part of our memorial collection and thinking, let’s transform it into something that meets our ideas for today.”

With the trial set for February 1, the Jefferson School has no plans to slow down.

“We’re deliberately moving forward with a kind of consistency of message that says to the larger world that Charlottesville will make its own decisions about its public spaces,” said Douglas.

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Molten bronze

Reimagining the Robert E. Lee statue, which stood in downtown Charlottesville for almost 100 years, is the goal of Swords Into Plowshares, which held its first community engagement session on Saturday. Photo: Eze Amos

For nearly a century, Charlottesville’s Robert E. Lee statue—erected during the Jim Crow era, in the heyday of the Ku Klux Klan—towered above the park at the city’s center, signaling to Black residents that they were not wanted downtown. After years of court battles and a deadly white supremacist rally, the city removed the racist monument last summer and donated it to the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, which plans to melt down the statue and use the bronze to create a new public artwork, one that is welcoming and inclusive of the entire community.

On Saturday, the Jefferson School kicked off the innovative project, titled Swords Into Plowshares, hosting its first community engagement session at the museum. More than 50 community members attended the event, and dozens more tuned in on Zoom. 

“We’re not looking for the representation of the Black body to replace the object. We’re looking for the representation of Charlottesville and how Charlottesville deals with its own needs towards healing,” said Andrea Douglas, executive director of the Jefferson School. “Something happened to us. Something has been happening to us. So how do we channel all of that energy?” 

Jalane Schmidt, a member of the project’s steering committee, showed attendees a slideshow of various memorials, and discussed the feelings they conjure in the viewer. While some, like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, may make visitors feel mournful or somber, others, like the Montgomery Civil Rights Memorial, are focused on inspiring guests to think deeply and reflect upon Black history. “What does it mean to incorporate everybody and express our values in our public spaces?” she asked.

Douglas explained that the new artwork does not have to be limited to the melted bronze, and could be made of a variety of other materials. It could also include several objects, and be installed at multiple locations around the city. “We have no boundaries,” she said.

Schmidt pointed to the University of Virginia’s Memorial to Enslaved Laborers as proof that “thinking out loud and thinking together” can yield positive results. The memorial came to fruition through a robust community engagement process, including surveys and public forums for students, staff, faculty, alumni, local residents, and descendants of enslaved laborers. 

Project participants were later asked to divide into small groups, and discuss their aspirations for the artwork, using a provided list of questions. In one group, Paola Christy shared some of the difficulties she’s faced raising a biracial child in Charlottesville, and emphasized the need for more representation and spaces for children of color. Her teenage daughter, Zaharra Colla, added that many places in Charlottesville are unwelcoming. “It’s not always about the place—but the people,” she said.

The group agreed that the project should focus on the city’s Black history, such as the 1964 destruction of Vinegar Hill, which was home to many of the city’s Black-owned businesses. Christy suggested the art installation include an interactive model of Vinegar Hill, which might make it easier for young people to engage with and understand the history, as well as inspire them to pursue entrepreneurship and other important careers.

Colla agreed the artwork should be interactive and educational, as well as bring the community together and foster mutual respect and appreciation. “The future is my generation and what’s being put into our mind,” she added.

Representatives from each small group later shared the ideas they had discussed. Several emphasized the importance of the artwork honoring the city’s Black history and residents rather than attempting to assuage white people’s guilt. “These public places used to be Black neighborhoods,” said one attendee.

Many groups shared that the project should be safe and accessible to all, and engage a variety of age groups, by, say, including doors visitors can walk through. One suggested the artwork have a playful or whimsical feel, completely transforming the hateful energy of the Lee statue. 

When the statue was first awarded to the Jefferson School, a group that lost out on the bidding filed a letter of protest and then a lawsuit against the city. The group, represented by the same lawyers who sued to keep the Confederate statues up, alleged that the statue-awarding process had been conducted improperly. But the Jefferson School is moving forward with its project. 

After hosting engagement sessions throughout the spring and summer, the Jefferson School plans to compile the community’s input into a guiding document this fall. In the winter, it will issue a request for proposals, requiring interested artists to attend public forums and engage with the community. The organizers hope the new public artwork will be completed and offered to the city by 2026.

“Our goal at the end of it is to create something so representative that when we offer it to Charlottesville, they’ll say yes,” said Douglas. 

Douglas encouraged participants to get more community members involved, and complete the survey on the Swords Into Plowshares website. The Jefferson School is also working to raise money for the costly project, and recruit ambassadors to get the word out. 

The next community engagement session will be held in May. 

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In brief: Masks optional at schools, liberation celebration

The Daughters of Zion Cemetery is among the historical sites that runners and walkers will pass during the Reparations Fun Run/Walk. Photo: Natalie Jacobsen

Running for repair

On March 3, 1865, Union army troops arrived in Charlottesville, liberating over 14,000 enslaved people—more than half of the city and Albemarle County’s population.

In celebration of Liberation and Freedom Day, the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center is hosting its second annual Reparations Fun Run/Walk from March 1 through 6. The 9.7-mile route takes runners and walkers past over a dozen local Black historical sites, including First Baptist Church, Daughters of Zion Cemetery, Washington Park, Jackson P. Burley Middle School, and the Kitty Foster Memorial. Participants are encouraged to stop by the city’s Black-owned restaurants, like Mel’s Cafe and Royalty Eats, along the way.

“There are monuments to Blackness in this town—the question is are they visible?” says Andrea Douglas, executive director of the Jefferson School. “What that course does is say to us that these spaces are not in easy view…but they’re there and we need to recognize them.”

“People need to revisit these sites over and over,” she adds.

Participants in the 9.7-mile event are encouraged to stop at Black-owned restaurants, like Mel Walker’s Mel’s Cafe. Photo: John Robinson

The Jefferson School aims to raise $45,000 to support seven local Black-led organizations:  African American Teaching Fellows, the Jefferson School’s teacher training program, the Albemarle-Charlottesville NAACP’s youth council, the Public Housing Association of Residents, Vinegar Hill Magazine’s Black business advertising fund, We Code Too, and 101.3 JAMZ. Last year, the event raised $22,000. 

“We are trying to address all of the areas of concern in the African American community that are being dealt with by African American-led organizations,” says Douglas.

To kick off Liberation and Freedom Day, Descendants of Enslaved Communities at UVA will lead a discussion about African American spirituals at the university’s Memorial to Enslaved Laborers. The Jefferson School will also host the first community engagement session for the Swords Into Plowshares project—which will melt down the Robert E. Lee statue, and transform it into a new public artwork—as well as an art exhibition on climate justice.

Douglas ultimately hopes the festivities will push the community to not only “focus on African American history,” but “think about what repair looks like.”

Schools brace for life without masks

Starting March 1, masks will be optional at all Virginia public schools, under Governor Glenn Youngkin’s new state law.

Charlottesville City Schools and Albemarle County Public Schools will continue to strongly recommend mask wearing, but will not be allowed to require students to mask up—that choice will be up to their parents.

“As mandated, the decision on whether a child will wear a mask in school will be made and enforced at home, not at school,” wrote ACPS Superintendent Matt Haas in an email to the school division last week. “Students will not be questioned at school about this choice.”

A used medical facemask hangs on a wood lecture chair in the empty classroom during the COVID-19 pandemic

In accordance with federal law, masks will still be mandated on school buses in both districts. Employees and visitors must also continue to mask up on school property.

Youngkin signed the new bill last week, after attempting to end school mask mandates by executive order on his first day as governor. Both local school districts immediately pushed back against the executive order, and issued statements confirming they were keeping their mask mandates in place, in compliance with Virginia Senate Bill 1303. The now-overturned law required public schools to follow the CDC’s mitigation recommendations. 

Most Democratic lawmakers opposed Youngkin’s ruling, but a handful helped the anti-mask bill pass the Democratic-controlled state Senate. 

“Based on the strong feedback in favor of masking that we’ve received, we anticipate most students to continue masking,” wrote CCS Superintendent Royal Gurley, Jr., in an email. “Although the numbers look better today than in January, our community transmission is still classified as ‘high.’”—Brielle Entzminger

New polling offers VA temperature check

How are we feeling, everybody? With the General Assembly hashing out the future of Virginia from Richmond, voters weighed in on key policy issues in a new batch of polls from Christopher Newport University’s Wason Center for Civic Leadership. 

Perceptions about the state of Virginia were somewhat pessimistic and largely divided along party lines. Forty-five percent of voters (and just 22 percent of Democrats) believe Virginia is headed in the right direction while 41 percent (80 percent of Republicans) think the opposite. Republicans overwhelmingly approve of Governor Glenn Youngkin’s performance (85 percent), whereas Democrats overwhelmingly disapprove (81 percent). Voters were particularly gloomy when asked about the direction of the country, with 67 percent saying the U.S. is headed in the wrong direction.

Support is high for Youngkin’s proposal to repeal the 2.5 percent grocery tax, with the majority favoring either a total repeal (47 percent) or giving tax credits to low-income residents (25 percent). With the current budget surplus, most voters (59 percent) want the extra money to be spent on education, public safety, and social services rather than returned in the form of tax cuts (38 percent). 

But schools remain a policy battleground. While a majority of respondents agree on mandating vaccines for teachers, around 50 percent oppose mandatory vaccines for students. Youngkin’s ban on the teaching of critical race theory in public schools—implemented on his first day in office—saw minimal support (35 percent) and significant opposition (57 percent), but Republicans’ desire to station a police officer in every school was met with overwhelming support, with 70 percent of respondents in favor.—Maryann Xue

Do do do, do-do-do do dooo…

Third-year UVA classics major Megan Sullivan competed in the “Jeopardy! National College Championship” last week, testing her knowledge against other sharp undergrads from around the country. Sullivan made it to the semifinals of the event, correctly answering questions about Edgar Allan Poe and Shaquille O’Neal before being eliminated when asked about the 1928 D.H. Lawrence novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover. (It’s alright Megan, we didn’t know that one either.) 

Megan Sullivan. Supplied photo

In brief

Cops still short-staffed 

The Charlottesville Police Department, citing staffing shortages, says it won’t be able to respond to certain non-emergency calls, and that dispatchers will instead instruct callers to submit their comment or request through an online service portal. The department reports that 24 percent of its sworn positions are currently unfilled, and the city still has not hired a permanent police chief since RaShall Brackney’s departure in the fall. 

Brackney’s next move

Brackney announced on LinkedIn last week that she is retiring from policing. She was controversially fired from her post in Charlottesville last October, and has since threatened to sue the city for the manner in which she was laid off. Brackney says she’s accepted a post as a visiting professor of practice at George Mason University, and is working on a book which will be titled The Bruising of America: When Black, White and Blue Collide.

RaShall Brackney. Photo: Eze Amos

Down with it 

Local COVID cases have continued to decline since the peak of a major winter surge in the middle of January. Monday saw the seven-day rolling average of new cases in the region drop to 51, the lowest its been since November. Vaccinations and testing are available throughout the week—visit the Virginia Department of Health website for details. 

Peas in a pod

Astronauts need hummus, too: On Saturday, NASA launched chickpea seeds—and a custom-made mini greenhouse—from Virginia State University’s College of Agriculture all the way to the International Space Station. The researchers hope to learn more about whether chickpeas can be cultivated in space. 

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Limited choices

A new book traces the life story of Mable Wall Jones, who traveled between Charlottesville, where her children lived, and New York, where she was a domestic worker in the 1940s and ’50s. Supplied photo

Between about 1944 and 1953, Mable Wall Jones was a major figure in the lives of Emily Abel and Margaret Nelson. In addition to cooking and cleaning for their family, Jones cared for the sisters and their three siblings at their home in New York. Until one day, she left.

“We didn’t know much about her,” remembers Abel, a professor at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. “We remembered her, and we really wanted to know what happened in her life after she left.”

“We wanted to honor her, show that she had been important to us, and that altogether she was an important person,” adds Nelson, a sociology professor at Middlebury College. So the two decided to trace Jones’ story, and write a book about her life.

In Limited Choices: Mable Jones, a Black Children’s Nurse in a Northern White Household, Abel and Nelson piece together Jones’ story, drawing from their childhood memories, discussions with Jones’ descendants, and an interview Jones did with the Ridge Street Oral History Project in 1995. The book shows how Jones negotiated life as a domestic laborer—a job held by the majority of Black women during the 20th century—in both the South and the North, as well as highlights her strong relationships with her family and her impact on Charlottesville’s Black community.

According to her 1995 interview, Jones was born in Gordonsville, Virginia, in 1909. As a teenager, she moved to Charlottesville and attended the Jefferson School, but in eighth grade she had to leave school to help her widowed single mother support her and her four siblings. When Jones was 20, she married James Jones and they had two sons.

Nelson and Abel’s mother hired Jones to care for the family in Washington, D.C., in the mid-’40s. When the family moved to the affluent white suburb of Larchmont, New York, Jones accompanied them. To spend time with her own children, Jones regularly traveled back and forth between Charlottesville and New York, until she stopped working for the family in 1953.

In addition to the oral history interview, Nelson and Abel pieced together Jones’ story through interviews with her descendants, as well as one of her friends and her pastor. The sisters also received help from Gordonsville-based research group One Shared Story, and Charlottesville civil rights activist Eugene Williams, who grew up in the same neighborhood as Jones.

Dr. Andrea Douglas, executive director of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, says she appreciates the book’s focus on Black migration and Black labor after emancipation. For many Black people, the North offered little more opportunity than the South.

“You often hear about the idea of migration, and the reasons why people were leaving the South, but you very rarely, especially in this region in particular, understand what the lives of people in the North were,” says Douglas, who wrote the book’s foreword.

“How do we understand a much more national conversation, than just simply limit it to the idea that Black folks moved north as a consequence of violence?” she adds.

After leaving New York in 1953, Jones moved back to Charlottesville. In 1957, she moved with her mother to Ridge Street, and stayed there until 1994, when a tree fell on her house and it had to be demolished. Jones passed away in 1995.

Abel and Nelson hope Jones’ story will not only help readers understand the struggles Black domestic workers faced in the past, but also how they continue to be exploited today.

“We hope that domestic workers get paid better, are recognized, and are supported more,” says Abel. “They do such invaluable work.”

The Jefferson School will host a virtual discussion about Limited Choices with Abel and Nelson on February 5 at 2pm.

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In brief: Fate of Lee statue determined

City Council voted Monday to donate the Robert E. Lee statue to the Jefferson School, which will melt it down and use the bronze to create a new work of public art. Photo: Eze Amos

Lee will melt

Charlottesville’s statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee is about to take even more heat.

At the end of its Monday meeting, City Council unanimously voted to donate the Lee monument to the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, which plans to melt down the statue and use the bronze to create a new work of public art.

Though council originally wanted to hold off on making its decision due to Vice-Mayor Sena Magill’s absence, the councilors decided to move forward with the vote at the end of the meeting after multiple frustrated community members urged them to do so during public comment.

The project, titled Swords Into Plowshares, will gather extensive input from the descendants of enslaved persons who were disenfranchised by Virginia’s Jim Crow laws. The Jefferson School will then commission an artist of national significance to create a new bronze sculpture in partnership with the community.

Once completed, the artwork will be gifted to the city to be installed on public land by 2026. The project will ultimately transform “what was once toxic in our public space into something beautiful that can be more reflective of our entire community’s social values” and “offer a road map for other communities to do the same,” writes Jefferson School Executive Director Andrea Douglas.

The project has received support from many local and national organizations, and raised nearly $600,000. The Jefferson School has launched an Indiegogo campaign to raise an additional $500,000 for the first phase of the years-long effort.

According to the campaign website, the funding will go toward transporting the statue to a foundry and melting it, conducting a six-month community engagement process, commissioning a nationally recognized artist, and hiring a salaried project manager.

Though the city received four other offers for the Lee statue, the councilors did not discuss them during the meeting. The Jefferson School was the only local entity that made a bid for the monument.

The city also has to decide what to do with the statues of Stonewall Jackson and Lewis, Clark, and Sacagawea. Council will vote on their fates on December 20.

Pipeline permit panned

The Mountain Valley Pipeline, a controversial natural gas pipeline under construction in western Virginia, was dealt a significant setback last week when the Virginia Air Pollution Control Board denied an important construction permit. The company planned to construct a compressor station in a predominantly Black community in Pittsylvania County, which garnered pushback from activists and the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality. The APCB cited the Virginia Environmental Justice Act, a 2020 law that requires state agencies to examine proposed policies “in relation to [their] impact on environmental justice prior to adoption,” in its denial of the permit. The Mountain Valley Pipeline team is now “evaluating its next steps,” says the Virginia Mercury.

In brief

Lee statue pedestal comes down in Richmond

Charlottesville isn’t the only city figuring out what to do with its reclaimed Confederate spaces. On Monday, Richmond’s leaders ordered the removal of the graffiti-covered pedestal that used to hold the statue of Robert E. Lee on Monument Avenue. The pedestal had become a symbol of the protests against police brutality that unfolded across the city and country in 2020, and the area around the dramatic, colorful pedestal had remained an informal gathering place. The land will now be controlled by city of Richmond, and its future remains unknown.

Karen Greenhalgh. Photo: Ballotpedia

It’s really over now

A recount confirmed a narrow Republican victory in House of Delegates District 85, in which Karen Greenhalgh beat one-term incumbent Alex Askew. Greenhalgh’s victory in Virginia Beach confirms that Republicans will hold at least 51 seats in the House for the next two years, though a second narrow Republican victory is pending a recount, too. Greenhalgh beat Askew by 115 votes out of more than 28,000 cast.

They literally stole Christmas

Nine-foot-tall inflatable snowman and Santa Claus decorations were pilfered from a yard in Belvedere this weekend, reports CBS19. The thief arrived at 4 in the morning and threw the decorations in a van, according to the doorbell camera of the affected house. It’s been a season of desperation, it seems—last week, CBS reported that Christmas trees had been stolen from a local farm, too. That’s no way to get in the holiday spirit, people.

Categories
News

In brief: Zoning talks, melting monuments

The Future Land Use Map will be a guiding document for the city as it figures out which neighborhoods are fit for denser housing. Photo: City of Charlottesville

Map moves ahead  

The process of rewriting Charlottesville’s Comprehensive plan—and, subsequently, reevaluating the zoning for the entire city—took a major step forward last week, when the Planning Commission unanimously recommended that City Council approve the most recent draft of the Future Land Use Map. 

The Future Land Use Map shows which areas of the city could be sites for denser housing. The map has been under discussion throughout the summer, drawing thousands of comments from residents who have ideas about how Charlottesville should grow. 

The Planning Commission’s recommended map would allow for increased housing density in many neighborhoods. In the new map, much of the city is designated General Residential (bright yellow, right). General Residential areas allow four units per lot, on the condition that the fourth unit is affordable.

In some other corridors, plots that are currently zoned R-1—allowing for only one unit—will be designated Medium Intensity Residential (mustard yellow, right). On Medium Intensity Residential lots, builders will be able to construct buildings of up to 12 units, as well as detached accessory dwelling units and townhouses. If your street is colorful, it doesn’t mean the city is going to come seize your house and tear it down to build an apartment. The map is a loose guide to what could be allowed in the future. 

In earlier drafts, some residential areas had Mixed-Use Nodes, which would have allowed for small chunks of commerce amidst the houses and apartments. Many of those nodes have been removed. Additionally, sensitive community designations have been added, meaning in some areas developers will have to build a higher percentage of affordable units.

City Council will decide whether or not to move forward with the map at its November 15 meeting. Watch this space for additional coverage of the Comprehensive Plan process throughout the fall.

Art from war  

Charlottesville’s Robert E. Lee statue was removed from Market Street Park on July 10. Photo: Eze Amos

Confederate statues, once removed from their pedestals, present a tricky problem. Where do you put the unsightly hunks of bronze? Do you leave them in storage forever? Do you donate them to a person or organization that wants them and might allow them to live another life as a rallying point for hate? 

The Jefferson School African American Heritage Center has an innovative answer to these problems. It’s submitted a bid to take ownership of the recently removed Robert E. Lee statue. Then, it’ll melt the monument down. 

The project, Swords into Plowshares, will call upon an artist-in-residence to repurpose the bronze material to create a new public art installation. 

Dr. Andrea Douglas, executive director of JSAAHC, said in a press release that she views SIP as “Charlottes-ville’s opportunity to lead by creating a road map that can be followed by other communities that wish to impact history.”  

The project will invite input from the descendants of enslaved persons who were disenfranchised by Virginia’s constitution, which entrenched Jim Crow rule. It will seek to represent the community’s desire for ”value-driven, socially-just objects in our public spaces,” Douglas says. 

Swords into Plowshares has already raised over $500,000, and is supported by many local and national organizations, including Descendants of Enslaved Communities of the University of Virginia and the Equal Justice Initiative. 

The city has received numerous offers from organizations that wish to claim the Lee and Jackson statues, which were taken down on July 10. City Council has until January 13 to make a decision. 

In brief

Couric’s confessional  

Katie Couric.
Photo: Yahoo news

UVA’s prized alum Katie Couric found herself in hot water recently, when it was revealed that her new autobiography includes first-person accounts of multiple less-than-flattering moments. Couric confessed that she withheld inflammatory remarks from a 2016 interview she conducted with the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, concerning Black athletes’ decision to kneel during the National Anthem. 

It was previously published that the justice called the gesture “dumb and disrespectful,” but Couric said this week that Ginsburg also said the athletes showed “contempt for a government that has made it possible for their parents and grandparents to live a decent life.” Couric admitted she intended to protect RBG, because the sitting Supreme Court justice was “elderly and probably didn’t fully understand the question.”

Back to the well(ness)

UVA’s new student health center on Brandon Avenue has received more than just a face lift: In fact, the building itself is said to have healing powers. According to Jamie Leonard, director of the Office of Health Promotion, the building was designed to “help physiologically change somebody” as they enter it. Natural wood, hues of blue, and plenty of sunlight offers “a significant mood-booster,” according to a UVA Today article about the space. The four-story building includes a revamped Department of Kinesiology and a pharmacy as well as a wellness suite, reflection rooms, and designated quiet spaces for introverted students. The space even features a state-of-the-art testing kitchen, where students can go to learn how to make healthy meals. Are you feeling better yet? 

Categories
Arts Culture

An abstract discourse

Photo by Eze Amos

By Sarah Sargent

Robert Reed’s “San Romano (Hip Strut)” explodes off the wall of the Jefferson School’s gallery. The bright colors and bold shapes are both abstract and representational—in one corner it’s all color and form, and in another corner there’s a chessboard, a gift from Reed’s son.

Reed attended the Jefferson School as a child in the age of segregation before finding success as an artist and academic. He taught at the Yale School of Art from 1969 until his death in 2014, but he maintained ties to the community throughout his life, keeping a studio here and sitting on the advisory board of Second Street Gallery. Now, his work is on display as part of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center’s “Charlottesville Collects African American Art” exhibit.

“This exhibition shows what African American artists have been thinking about, and how they’ve been approaching their work, over the last 70 years,” says JSAAHC Executive Director Andrea Douglas. The show’s 18 works provide a surprisingly in-depth survey, revealing what Douglas calls “a dramatic shift in America post-civil rights movement, when Black artists, and Americans in general, began to exist in a more racialized space.”

Reed’s work shows the tension at the heart of that evolution, as Black artists struggled to find success in the world of abstract art. Though the art establishment in the late 20th century sought abstract work, it also sidelined Black modernists because of their race. Meanwhile, these artists were repudiated by members of their own community for their emphasis on aesthetics rather than narrative.

“At the heart of this exhibition is the discourse of aesthetics versus race,” says Douglas. “It began with Alain Locke and W.E.B. Du Bois in the 1920s, James Porter in the ’40s, and then, in terms of the visual arts, it came to a head in 1971, with a show entitled ‘Contemporary African American Art’ at the Whitney Museum in New York City, and a second show in Houston, Texas, called ‘The DeLuxe Show.’” The early ’70s saw Black artists “articulating what it is that they understand to be their role and place in the larger American conversation,” says Douglas.

The Whitney mounted “Contemporary African American Art” in response to calls for more representation in museums from a group of artists called the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition. But as the exhibit went up, two points of contention emerged. The BECC were upset that the show had been scheduled for the spring, rather than the more prestigious winter months. The coalition also felt The Whitney hadn’t consulted enough experts in Black art about the selection of works. The BECC called for a boycott of the show, and 15 of the 75 artists on display withdrew their work.

Meanwhile, down in Texas, “The DeLuxe Show” was formed and presented in a remodeled movie theater as the first fully integrated show of its kind. The exhibition featured exclusively aesthetically based abstract art. The artists, regardless of their race, were presented on equal footing.

Standing next to Reed’s work at the Jefferson School is a sculptural work by renowned abstract artist Sam Gilliam, one of the artists who  was in “The DeLuxe Show,” and one of the 15 who withdrew from the Whitney following the BECC boycott.

In the Charlottesville exhibition, his “Concrete (Tall #7)” creeps up on you, revealing its power incrementally. Gilliam uses concrete as his surface, silk screening the ink onto the overlapping, wafer-thin planes. It’s an interesting pairing—the obdurate weightiness of the concrete contrasting to the color, which at the upper part of the work, appears almost vaporous. Down below, three-dimensional drips and ridges of pigment add additional materiality, and impart visual heft. Gilliam uses copper wire to stitch together the planes, the copper is dull, so it doesn’t scream at you, but the chain-like stitches are so beautifully done, it’s clear they transcend their function to become a player within the composition. Jazz inspires Gilliam, and there’s a musical quality to the rhythm of the work with its varied passages of quiet and clamor.

Placing Gilliam’s piece next to Reed’s was “a really important gesture,” says Douglas. The two were friends and their approach to color and strong geometric forms is similar.

Reed isn’t the only artist featured in the show who attended the Jefferson School. Brothers Henderson “Bo” Walker and Frank Walker, and their friend Gerry Mitchell, were students there too, making the exhibition a reunion of sorts.

Moving around the room, two lithographs by Richard Hunt also stand out. Hunt is a prolific sculptor with over 125 public commissions to his name. His affinity for working in three dimensions is obvious here in the assemblage of bone-like objects, some flat, some rendered with volume, producing a striking sculptural effect. The earthy browns and grays punctuated by a pop of yellow strikes just the right note of stylish restraint.

Alison Saar’s “Black Bottom Stomp” draws on West African art and imagery. The title references Jelly Roll Morton’s 1925 jazz composition of the same name, so there’s a back and forth going on between West Africa and America. Saar’s images—the female figure, the moon, and also the title and the colors—present clues that resonate with the viewer.

If you’ve been to the Times Square subway station, you might recognize Jacob Lawrence’s “Transit I and II.” The sketches are the silkscreen models for a mosaic mural commissioned by the New York City Transit Authority for the busy station. “Transit I” depicts a subway car with riders holding onto poles. In “Transit II,” the subject shifts to a bus crowded with riders.

Lawrence uses a reduced palette of handsome earth tones that resemble collaged pieces of paper. With his jerky, jangly shapes and figures, he conveys the movement of train and bus and the press of humanity within them. He also adds recognizable touches—a briefcase, a long strand of sausages links, rosary beads for a potential subway proselytizer—to point out the range of transit patrons. With their flattened space and flat blocks of color, the compositions come across as abstract/figurative hybrids.

“We could write a very good history of photography between a Gordon Parks, a Carrie Mae Weems, and a Hank Willis Thomas, in terms of developing a conceptual idea about what photography has the potential to speak about,” says Douglas, referring to three photographs in the show. “Gordon Parks was sent to Alabama right after the bus boycott with the intention of documenting life in the South for Black people. He went to one of the poorest areas, met a sharecropper, Willie Causey and his family, and then documented that family in a series that appeared in Time magazine. Parks was approaching it from an aesthetic position, but he was also interested in describing Black poverty in the midst of the civil rights movement as a way of creating empathy for these people.”

The Weems’ photograph is from her “Kitchen Table Series,” which consists of 20 images of Weems, her romantic partner, her child, and her mother positioned around her kitchen table. Below an ever-present and distinctive overhead light fixture, the people in the photographs are caught in the ordinary moments of a woman’s life. Dating to 1990, the “Kitchen Table Series” established Weems’ reputation. The series is remarkable because it focused on a Black family at a time when so much contemporary art exhibited in museums and galleries did not. And while the subject of the series is a Black woman, the images also possess a universality that transcends race and gender.

Hank Willis Thomas’ haunting color photograph, “Strange Fruit,” depicts a muscular Black man wearing shorts and Nike sneakers in midair, slam dunking a basketball through a noose. “Looking at the image, you can see Thomas is thinking about the role of commodity and Black bodies,” says Douglas. “Embedded within the image also is the history of violence against Black bodies, the ways in which sports has become a road out of poverty, the importance of Nike as a brand and, therefore, the branding of that body with the racist, capitalist discourse that that can engender. …All of those things are there.”

The University of Virginia Art Museum, where Douglas was once a curator, used to mount a recurring show, “Charlottesville Collects,” which focused on local collections. Those collections overwhelmingly belonged to white people and featured white artists. So it was important for Douglas to present a show that shifted the emphasis to Black artists. “Charlottesville Collects African American Art” reveals a wealth of that art in this community.