Tag: Lorenzo Dickerson

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What’s in a name?: Behind the recommendation to rename Cale Elementary

Paul H. Cale Elementary School is now one step closer to having a new name. (Photo: Staff Photo)

By Ali Sullivan

The final meeting lasted just a few minutes. 

After months of investigation, an advisory committee determined that Paul H. Cale Elementary School—named after a former Albemarle County Public Schools superintendent—should change its name.

The recommendation comes nearly four months after the Cale Advisory Committee’s first meeting and almost a year since Lorenzo Dickerson, web and social media specialist for Albemarle County schools, uncovered a 1956 article in Commentary Magazine that set the process in motion.

Commenting on the possibility of integration in county schools, the article quotes Cale as saying, “What did the Negroes expect to happen next? What did they want?” The piece then paraphrases Cale’s other remarks, which were critical of integration.

In its research, the committee found no evidence that Commentary Magazine ever retracted or corrected these statements.

Dickerson, who’s also a local historian and filmmaker, included Cale’s comments as part of a presentation titled History of the Present, which he delivered to Western Albemarle High School in October 2018. Dickerson estimates that he’s the first to delve deeply into the county’s history of desegregation.

“We know a lot about the City of Charlottesville with the Charlottesville 12,” Dickerson said. “But the county itself hadn’t been researched a lot as far as desegregation.”

The name evaluation comes on the heels of protracted debate over whether to allow Confederate imagery in county schools—a months-long process that ended in February with Haas banning all symbols of white supremacy. Soon after the decision, the county school board unanimously adopted an antiracism policy, which in part guided the Cale committee’s research.

Throughout its investigation of Cale’s 22-year tenure as superintendent, the committee scrutinized meeting minutes and newspaper archives; it interviewed former students, teachers, and administrators, and gathered public input. Dennis Rooker, chair of the committee and a former member of the Albemarle Board of Supervisors, estimates the committee reviewed 300 pages of written materials alongside the public hearings, which were largely attended by Cale’s supporters.

“Any time you have a public hearing, the people that are generally going to show up are the ones that have a personal interest,” Rooker said.

Rooker added that the committee balanced the loud input from Cale’s friends and family with written comments in favor of a name change, as well as interviews with black former Albemarle students who experienced the integration process firsthand.

Paul Cale Jr., Cale Sr.’s son, expressed concern that the committee’s method lacked objectivity—that it was only seeking to confirm that Cale Sr. intentionally slowed integration. 

“If you’re doing research, you should not just be trying to find negative things,” Cale Jr. said. “You should be trying to find positive things.”

Beyond the Commentary article, the committee found no evidence that Cale spoke publicly against integration. Under his purview, however, county schools didn’t integrate until 14 years after Brown v. Board of Education.

“Somebody had their foot on the brake,” Rooker said.

Although he laments that the process became “a referendum on somebody’s character,” Rooker added that—regardless of Cale’s reputation—many associate his tenure with the period of opposition to integration known as massive resistance.

“At the end of the day, we didn’t want to make this a judgment about his character,” Rooker said. “We wanted to make it a judgment about what is the best name for the school going forward.”

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Past perspectives: New documentary collects stories from the Paramount’s segregated era

Lorenzo Dickerson premieres his fifth documentary, "3rd Street: Best Seats in the House" on Thursday at the Paramount Theater. Photo by Eze Amos

Lorenzo Dickerson is always chasing down stories that he heard as a kid. “Stories I heard who knows when,” he says, local stories he now feels compelled to share with local audiences. His fifth documentary film, 3rd Street: Best Seats in the House, tells one such story—that of the Third Street side entrance to The Paramount Theater, when the theater was (legally) segregated. Black moviegoers were forced to use a side entrance and sit in the balcony (though those seats offered the best view, local artist Frank Walker notes in the film).

A tour of the Paramount in fall 2017 sparked the idea. A guide mentioned that the theater wasn’t sure how to best tell the story of that entrance, but Dickerson knew immediately. He shot more than 20 hours of interviews with black Charlottesville and Albemarle County residents, and combed through interviews conducted by Jane Myers in 1995 that have sat, unused, in the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society archives. Dickerson’s film premieres at the Paramount on Thursday. In advance of the screening, he sat down with C-VILLE to talk about the film, and what he hopes it can accomplish.

C-VILLE: When did you first hear about the Third Street entrance?

Lorenzo Dickerson: As a child. My father loves westerns, and his favorite film of all time is a western, Shane. The first time he saw it was when my grandmother took him to the Paramount to see it. He was 6 years old or so. [He told me] that he went in through that entrance, sat in the balcony, and saw that film.

When you started the project, what was your idea for the film?

The initial idea was really for people to tell their stories. What was it like to use that entrance?…And also, what segregated spaces were like in Charlottesville in that time period: The Lafayette Theatre, the Jefferson [Theater], the Woolworths, Timberlake’s. The University Theater, where you couldn’t go at all.

How did you decide who to interview?

I was trying to find people who could tell different stories, not only about that segregated entrance but about what that experience was like. For my previous film, Albemarle’s Black Classrooms, I interviewed Marcha Howard about her going to and teaching at Burley [which was Charlottesville’s black high school during segregation]. During that interview, she mentioned going to the Paramount and looking over her shoulder into the balcony after it was desegregated, sitting in the bottom, feeling weird about that. I always had that in the back of my mind.

Bernice and Kenneth Mitchell tell their love story, how they would go on dates at the Paramount, and how Kenneth at one point passed for white. …Phil Jones talks about coming in from Albemarle County on the back of a dump truck with eight other people or so.

The Reverend Nate Brown—I’ve known him my entire life, and to me, he’s the greatest storyteller ever—he has [used] a wheelchair his whole life. And at a family funeral, I had this moment, like, “Whoa. If you were handicapped in any way, and African American, what would you do?” So I asked him. He never went, because he couldn’t.

It’s likely that these people will be familiar to the audience watching the film.

That was the point, really, for people we know to tell these stories. …I hope that by watching it and being in that space, that you would think of it differently as you leave the theater that evening. And the next time you go to any of the shows at the Paramount, that you may think about that space differently, [that it’s not] just a theater on the Downtown Mall.

Think about it differently how?

What did it feel like to be sitting there watching a film where you were forced to sit in the balcony due to Jim Crow, and you were never watching anyone that looked like you there on the screen? You may have gone to Timberlake’s to get ice cream before the movie—and you could purchase it. The person working there, or making the food, may have been African American. But then you had to come outside to eat it.

I’m hoping that people will really feel, even just for a moment, what that experience was like. To understand that the experience that we have now is nothing like the experience they had at that time. Billy Byers mentions that he didn’t know that the front door even existed. Or that there were seats under the balcony, because [up there], all you can see is what’s forward. Your experience is completely different if you’re African American. It’s not simply, “you’re sitting up here instead of sitting down here.” It’s a lot more to it than that.

What got cut from the film that you wish you could have kept in?

I was going to interview a [black] woman and her white friend, and the friend had some type of health stuff going on. But they were going to be on camera, together, talking about walking to the Paramount, together, as friends, then getting to the Paramount and having to go their separate ways. And then after the film, getting back together and walking back home.

Lorenzo Dickerson premieres his fifth documentary, “3rd Street: Best Seats in the House” Thursday, August 29 at the Paramount Theater. 

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Another name change? Albemarle school board confronts racist past

Before potentially renaming Cale Elementary School, Albemarle County School Board Chair Kate Acuff wants the superintendent to review the current policy on naming schools, and to examine the names of all schools in the division. Photo by Eze Amos

“White parents would not permit their children to receive instruction from inferior Negro teachers—and they were inferior.”

These recently resurfaced words, which originally appeared in a July 1, 1956, article titled “Virginia’s Creeping Desegregation: Force of the Inevitable” in Commentary Magazine, were said by Dr. Paul Cale, the longest-serving Albemarle County schools superintendent, and the namesake of one of the county’s most diverse elementary schools.

And now that his racist murmurings have been brought to light, some school board members say celebrating the long-gone superintendent doesn’t sit well with them.

“The author writes of Dr. Cale’s agreement that two years after Brown vs. the Board of Education, integration was not practical in Albemarle County and if it were to be enforced, white parents would withdraw their children and stop paying taxes,” said school board chair Kate Acuff October 18 at the board’s most recent meeting. “This was the essential strategy of massive resistance, which was formally born in Virginia only months before this article appeared.”

In a motion that wasn’t on the meeting’s agenda, she called for superintendent Matt Haas to review the current policy on naming school buildings and to review the monikers of all schools in the division, including Cale Elementary School, within six months.

“We should not revere or celebrate these viewpoints nor preserve them in perpetuity in the names of public buildings,” Acuff said. “As this board often has said, in this school division, all should always mean all.”

Local filmmaker Lorenzo Dickerson, who also serves as a web and social media specialist for county schools, says he dug up the Commentary article when creating a presentation for a professional development day for teachers and administrators at his alma mater, Western Albemarle High School. He showed his work to the school board at Acuff’s request.

Dickerson has also directed a film called Albemarle’s Black Classrooms, and focuses his work on telling stories of local African-American history. He’s spent years researching the themes in his name-change prompting presentation.

“What surprised me the most was a photo of a black-faced minstrel show that was given at Albemarle High School during the 1962-63 school year,” he says. “I found this photo in the AHS yearbook from that year. It was displayed just as any other typical school play.”

These types of discussions aren’t new to Albemarle. The county school board has recently come under fire by anti-racist activists for its dress code, which allows Confederate imagery. These community members, some with the Anti-Hate Coalition of Albemarle County, considered the most recent meeting a “huge win,” according to the group’s Facebook page.

“I know that the members of this board will continue to struggle with these issues,” said David Oberg, one school board member who has publicly supported the ban on hate symbols in schools. “I hope that as we do, we will engage our entire community on not only the issue of Confederate imagery, but also the issues of systemic discrimination within our schools and within our community.”

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Arts

Maupintown Film Festival shines through the eyes of others

Lorenzo Dickerson’s Maupintown Film Festival opens at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center on Friday. Photo by Eze Amos

When Lorenzo Dickerson was in fifth grade at Murray Elementary school, he had to write a book report.

He went down to the school library and came across Extraordinary Black Americans, a book full of dozens of profiles on inventors, politicians, activists, artists, writers and more.

It was a sizable read for the fifth-grader, who read the book, wrote the report and kept checking the book out of the library until Dickerson’s father took note and purchased a copy that his son could call his own.

Extraordinary Black Americans is “what really got me hooked on African American stories, aside from the elders in my family constantly telling me stories,” says Dickerson, now an independent filmmaker who focuses his lens on the African American experience in Charlottesville and Albemarle County, and runs the annual Maupintown Film Festival that takes place this week, from July 13 to 15 at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center.

Dickerson is drawn to film for its ability to hold attention unlike any other storytelling medium. “Being able to hear the stories directly from people who have those experiences, and being able to see their faces as they tell the stories,” is unbeatable, he says.

He learned this in his first documentary film, The Coachman, about one of his ancestors, Warren Dickerson, a descendant of slaves who lived, loved and worked in Albemarle County through the Great Depression, the Great Migration, World War I and World War II. It was a way for Dickerson to capture his research into a single narrative story for his family members.

From that point on, when he saw a movie that moved him and made him think, he wanted to share it with others. “How am I going to get other people to see this?” he thought. He decided to have a film festival.

The first Maupintown Film Festival took place in 2015, at St. John Baptist Church in Cobham, Virginia, on land that Dickerson’s family has lived on for generations—some of them were enslaved on a plantation (now the Castle Hill estate) just across the street.

The theme for the 28 films that will be shown at this year’s festival is “aware of the evidence.” Dickerson says the intention is “to highlight stories that we don’t typically hear. In schools, we’re going to get Harriet Tubman, we’re going to get Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks. And then it kind of drops off from there.” They’re important figures, but it’s the same type of story every time. “And a lot of times, you only get that in February,” during black history month, so “that’s part of the reason why the film festival is in July, so we can get this [history] some other time of the year.”

A variety of perspectives are presented at the Maupintown Film Festival, from an animated cartoon about Harriet Tubman to local director Paul Wagner’s 1982 documentary Miles of Smiles, Years of Struggle, about a group of Pullman car porters who in the 1920s organized the first African American-led labor organization to receive a charter in the American Federation of Labor.

It’s about “bringing awareness to these stories that we don’t often hear and allowing people to understand the experience of [people] of African descent from various parts of the world,” says Dickerson.

There are hyper-local stories in films like Phil Audibert and Ross Hunter’s Someday: The Unexpected Story of School Integration in Orange County, Virginia. Frederick DeShon Murphy’s The American South As We Know It considers African American history in a national sense, examining how African American history began in the South and moved to different parts of the country.

Murphy interviewed community civil rights activists, Negro league baseball players, historians and regular people for his film that he says is ultimately about “the resiliencies of African Americans living in the South, from enslaved people to sharecroppers and people living through and after Jim Crow.”

“A lot of people perished along the way,” says Murphy. They died on slave ships and on plantations, at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan, their employers and their neighbors. “It could have been easy to give up during Jim Crow…if you’re here today, you spawn from a resilient bloodline. That’s what I push people to understand with this film,” says Murphy. “African American history is American history.”

Ebony Bailey’s 15-minute documentary, Life Between Borders: Black Migrants in Mexico, offers an international perspective. The film focuses mostly on Haitians currently living in Tijuana, Mexico, who are trying to get to the United States. Many of them left Haiti after a 2010 earthquake devastated the island, and went to Brazil in search of work, but when the economic crisis hit that country, they migrated to Mexico. Now, with U.S. immigration laws tightening and changing, they’re settling in Tijuana, having families and opening businesses.

Showing these rich stories at the Maupintown Film Festival emphasizes that local, personal stories can (and do) carry the same weight as national ones. And Dickerson never forgets the impetus for it all—he still has that copy of Extraordinary Black Americans, and he frequently reads it to his children, ages 3 and 6, so that they, too, might get hooked and have a broader understanding of American history, themselves and the world.

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#BlackOwnedCville and NEA Big Read connect the threads

Lorenzo Dickerson’s photo of Will Taylor is included in the exhibition #BlackOwnedCville and ties in with the NEA Big Read by focusing on African-American entrepreneurship. Courtesy of artist

Throughout this month, an exhibition titled #BlackOwnedCville by local photographer and filmmaker Lorenzo Dickerson is on display on the third floor of the Central Library. Dickerson says he was moved to pursue the project because, “I was curious myself about African-American businesses here locally. Growing up here I knew of some. Like Mel’s Café on Main Street was always a staple.”

But Dickerson had been away for many years, and moving back to Charlottesville in 2015, he says, “sparked my interest even more. …And I wanted to really display them and let others know that these businesses exist so we can support them here locally. I feel like a lot of people just don’t know that they are even there, that they’re providing these services.”

Dr. Benegal S. Paige. Photo by Lorenzo Dickerson
Dr. Benegal S. Paige. Photo by Lorenzo Dickerson

Dickerson’s exhibition is one of 80 events for adults and kids organized and facilitated by Jefferson-Madison Regional Library as part of the NEA Big Read (formerly The Big Read). The program, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, encourages engagement with the community themed around a single book. This year’s selection is the novel Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones. Sarah Hamfeldt, adult programming and reference services manager at JMRL, says that in the past the NEA Big Read options were “heavy on the classics.” But with the introduction of a new category this year called Living Authors, the selection committee at JMRL had the opportunity to choose Jones’ novel and invite her to visit Charlottesville.

Blank bookcover with clipping path

“The book itself is readable and relatable,” Hamfeldt says. “It is much more contemporary in tone than others we’ve done before.” Published in 2011 and set in 1980s Atlanta, Silver Sparrow follows the coming of age of two African-American girls who share the same father, but only one of them knows this. The narrative explores themes of love, belonging and security within the lives of the entrepreneurial, middle-class African-American cast of characters. It was pure serendipity when JMRL reached out to Dickerson and learned that he was putting together a collection of photographs that celebrates the entrepreneurial legacy of the local African-American community.

#BlackOwnedCville began with Dickerson’s next-door neighbor, Will Taylor, owner and operator of Chick-fil-A at Fashion Square Mall. And as Dickerson met more African-American business owners, they gave him names of other people to contact. With the goal of representing a wide array of businesses and services, the exhibition includes restaurateurs, medical professionals, artists and store owners.

“Entrepreneurship is something that’s been important to the local African-American community since emancipation from slavery,” Dickerson says. “A lot of African-Americans directly after emancipation from slavery purchased land and owned their own farms. So it’s always been something that’s important to the community. And of course you had Vinegar Hill and a lot of African-American businesses right here in the center of Charlottesville. So that legacy lives on in these entrepreneurs that are here now.”

Eddie Harris, founder of Vinegar Hill Society Magazine. Photo by Lorenzo Dickerson
Eddie Harris, founder of Vinegar Hill Society Magazine. Photo by Lorenzo Dickerson
Mike and Kim Brown, owners of Brown's. Photo by Lorenzo Dickerson
Mike and Kim Brown, owners of Brown’s. Photo by Lorenzo Dickerson

What ultimately draws him to document the legacy and history of the local African-American community is his love of storytelling. “I used to sit at my grandmother’s feet as a child,” he says, “and ask her to tell me stories of the olden days.” About five years ago, his research into his own family ancestry, coupled with the desire to put together a cohesive narrative for his family, inspired his first film, The Coachman. “And I just fell in love with filmmaking,” Dickerson says. Since then he has made three more films. He has tapped into such a rich local history that the connections he makes during one film become the jumping-off point for the next film.

So many people think, “I don’t have anything to share, I don’t have a story to tell,” he says. His response? “You have a story to tell but you just don’t know it until I ask you the right question.” For the sake of preserving our local history and exploring questions about our future, let’s hope he keeps asking.

Tayari Jones’ Silver Sparrow is this year’s selection for the NEA Big Read. The author appears in Charlottesville to discuss her work on March 17 and 18.

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Getting personal with Lorenzo Dickerson

Lorenzo Dickerson has been making films about local African-Americans for four years. Photo by Eze Amos

Local filmmaker, age 35

Though he only began teaching himself the art of filmmaking four years ago while researching his ancestry, Lorenzo Dickerson’s calling has always been storytelling.

“I enjoy bringing awareness to stories that either have been forgotten or that people have never known about,” says Dickerson about his films. “That’s really where my passion is and what I like to do for the local area—make people aware of the rich history of what’s happened here.”

A member of Western Albemarle High School’s class of 1999, Dickerson pursued a master’s degree in marketing at Strayer University in Herndon. By day, he is currently the web content and social media manager for the Albemarle County Public Schools system. His background lies in figuring out the right story to tell, whether in his day job or in his documentary films, which explore local African-American history.

Dickerson’s fourth film, Albemarle’s Black Classrooms, which premieres this weekend at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, details the history of education for African-Americans in Albemarle County from 1910 to the present, including massive resistance to desegregation in local schools. He speaks with alumni from Burley High School, which combined Jefferson and Esmont high schools and Albemarle Training School into a single high school for black students in the area in 1951. Jackson P. Burley Middle School now stands on the school’s site on Rose Hill Drive.

“The film talks a bit about how schools can sometimes become resegregated due to [white] students leaving public schools to go to private schools,” he says. “The purpose of the film is to bring awareness to the history behind these schools, the people who went there and what they endured during that time.”

His 2016 documentary, Anywhere But Here, a compilation of interviews with African-American male inmates at the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail, was shown at last year’s Virginia Film Festival. And The Color Line of Scrimmage tells the story of the undefeated 1956 football team at segregated Burley High School.

“I’m changing because I’m learning a lot more about the local area and the people who are here,” he says. “It wasn’t taught in schools.”

SHOW TIME: The February 25 premiere of Albemarle’s Black Schools is sold out, but a second showing will take place February 26. Go to maupintown.com for ticket information.

Lorenzo Dickerson’s top five films:

  • Driving Miss Daisy
  • Pride and Prejudice
  • The Help
  • Hidden Figures
  • Slavery and the Making of America