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Journey begins: #cvillepilgrimage commemorates, reclaims local lynching

CHS student Zyahna Bryant and Mayor Nikuyah Walker dig up soil from where John Henry James is believed to have died. It will be taken in a pilgrimage to Montgomery to join that of other African Americans who died from lynching around the South. staff photo

About 50 people gathered in the woods beside the train tracks running west of Charlottesville early July 7. The morning was cool and birds could be heard chirping in the quiet—a scene nothing like the one 120 years ago, when a mob yanked John Henry James off a train there at Wood’s Crossing and strung him up on a locust tree.

“Soon I will be done with the troubles of the world.” The Reverend Brenda Brown-Grooms sang the Mahalia Jackson spiritual as participants contemplated the violence that had taken place on the site.

The occasion was to gather soil from property now owned by Farmington Country Club, the first step of a pilgrimage in which approximately 100 Charlottesville citizens will transport it to the recently opened lynching memorial in Montgomery, Alabama—the Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial to Peace and Justice.

“We are embarking on an important journey,” said Andrea Douglas, executive director of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center and one of the pilgrimage organizers. “Today we recognize a murder. We, in doing so, are returning humanity to a dehumanizing act.”

The journey is a way to “commemorate, understand and recognize this act and incorporate it into our DNA and bodies as wrong,” said Douglas.

City and county officials were present for the ceremony, including Mayor Nikuyah Walker, Vice Mayor Heather Hill, councilors Wes Bellamy and Kathy Galvin and police Chief RaShall Brackney, as well Albemarle supervisors Diantha McKeel, Ned Gallaway, Norman Dill, Rick Randolph and Chair Ann Mallek.

UVA professor and pilgrimage organizer Jalane Schmidt recounted the details of James’ slaying. He’d been accused of assaulting a white woman, arrested and taken to spend the night in jail in Staunton because of fears of a lynching. On the train ride back, accompanied by the Albemarle sheriff, a group of around 150 unmasked men boarded the train.

After James was hanged, his body was riddled with 75 bullets, according to the Shenandoah Herald. “Hundreds of people visited the scene with many snatching souvenirs, such as pieces of his clothing,” said Schmidt. No arrests were made.

Walker and Charlottesville High student Zyahna Bryant dug up dirt from the site, and Walker asked all the black people there to come closer, to close their eyes and “yell out a name you’d like to share this moment with.”

Said Walker, “There is no explanation for the violence black bodies have endured in this country. There are no amount of sorry that can make up for the amount of turmoil black people and black families have endured in this country.”

She pointed out the volume of the violence inflicted on James with 75 shots into his body. “Somebody’s son, somebody’s brother, maybe somebody’s father.” She said those same injustices and hate happen every day in this country and in Charlottesville.

“We take this journey to gamble on the ancient notion that the truth will set us free,” said the Reverend Susan Minasian, who is one of three clergy going on the pilgrimage.

Schmidt concluded the ceremony by pouring “a libation for the dead”—Virginia distilled whiskey from a flask—onto the ground where James is believed to have perished.

The mood of participants afterward was somber, with some relief.

“It’s rehumanizing,” says April Burns, whose mother, Joan Burton, grew up across the street at Ednam Farm and had played around the “hanging tree.”

“This was for somebody who never had a funeral,” said Burns.

“In my opinion, slavery was this country’s original sin and we can’t get past it,” said Supervisor McKeel. “It’s haunting us to this day.”

Chief Brackney acknowledged being torn between her race and her job as a cop. “I’m saddened my profession is still part of that,” she said. “I’m also feeling hope that we’re standing on rich soil that allows us to plant our findings forward.”

She added, “We start to own and change the narrative.”

“It was very emotional, being able to be in the spot as a black man,” said Bellamy, who has family members who have been lynched. “I was thinking about the mob and what [James’] feelings must have been to feel the train slow down, and the state of shock and fear he must have felt.”

The murderers took 20 minutes for prayer, “making a ritual of hanging and shooting this man,” said Bellamy.

And he thought of two years ago, when he created a firestorm by saying the city’s Confederate statues should come down. “I wonder if [people] knew this story,” he said.

Being at the lynching site couldn’t help but feel very close to home. “I get letters all the time about how they want to hang me on a tree,” said Bellamy. “My daughters—they send letters to my daughters and want to hang them on a tree.”

One thing Bellamy said he’s seen is the “evolution” of white people. “A lot of white people just didn’t understand how painful this was for us.”

He said, “People’s minds are a lot more open from March 2016 until now.”

Following the Farmington ceremony, the heritage center held a community conversation on lynching and screened “An Outrage,” a documentary by Lance Walker and Charlottesville native Hannah Ayers, who didn’t have Charlottesville on her radar when they started work on a film about lynching. Like a lot of people, Ayers was unaware of James’ murder.

But lynching was much more a part of history than “what we’d been taught,” said Walker.

Supervisor Randolph got a standing ovation for his talk on race—”truly America’s disgrace”—and declared July 12, the day of the lynching, John Henry James Day. “Here we repudiate the vile murder of John Henry James.”

Many of the 100 people who will be leaving on the July 8 pilgrimage were present in the historic African American Jefferson School.

Said Douglas, “I believe this is nothing short of monumental. We’re taking hold of history. We’re examining it critically and rewriting the narrative that’s been incomplete.”

 

 

 

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Confronting a shameful past: Search for 1898 lynching site narrows

Historic researcher Jane Smith believes the 1898 lynching of John Henry James, which took place at a place identified as Wood's Crossing, is located on a strip of land currently owned by Farmington Country Club. A 1919 plat shows the blacksmith shop near where the hanging-by-mob took place. Information courtesy Jane Smith/Google maps

As big a role as history plays in Charlottesville’s identity, some events, like an 1898 lynching, were pretty much buried or forgotten until Jane Smith was doing historical research and going through old issues of the Daily Progress in 2013.

She happened upon this July 12, 1898, headline: “He paid the awful penalty: John Henry James hanged by a mob today.”

James, who was black, was accused of sexually assaulting a young white woman near Pen Park, and had been taken to Staunton to avoid a vengeance-minded mob. When he was headed back to Charlottesville to face a grand jury, a crowd awaited at Wood’s Crossing four miles west of town, hauled him off the train and took him to a small locust tree about 40 yards away near a blacksmith shop, according to the Progress. There he was hanged and his body riddled with bullets for good measure. Sightseers took his clothes—and body parts—as mementos.

Historic researcher Jane Smith is homing in on the site where John Henry James was lynched. Photo by Eze Amos

Smith, who served on the Blue Ribbon Commission on Race, Memorials and Public Spaces, says UVA professor Frank Dukes first brought up the idea of participating in the Equal Justice Initiative, which opened a memorial to victims of lynching in April in Montgomery, Alabama.

The initiative has documented at least 4,000 lynchings in the southern United States, and its Community Remembrance Project is an effort to recognize victims by collecting soil from lynching sites and erecting historical markers.

Charlottesville City Council asked Andrea Douglas, Jefferson School African American Heritage Center executive director, and Jalane Schmidt, UVA religious studies professor, to bring back the memorial for James. They’re arranging a pilgrimage to Montgomery in July to take soil from the lynching site and bring home the coffin-sized memorial to reside in Charlottesville outside the Albemarle courthouse at Justice Park.

The problem was, nobody knew the location of Wood’s Crossing.

“We’ve been in a vortex trying to sort this out,” says Smith. “I think we’ve probably figured out what happened. The crossing is no longer on the main road [U.S. 250] and the owner changed.”

In 1898, Warner Wood owned land that is now Farmington, which was developed in 1927. Smith says in the late 1920s, Ivy Road, which used to run north of the railroad tracks, was realigned and is now south of the tracks. She’s checked maps, plats and railroad schedules, and is convinced that what was once Wood’s Crossing is at the present day Farmington Drive.

Her initial research put the site on Ivy Road three-tenths of a mile west of Farmington Drive near Charlottesville Oil, based on a British rail enthusiast’s table that listed both a Wood’s and a Farmington station. “That was just wrong,” she says. She now believes the stations are the same and changed names after Farmington Incorporated bought the land from Wood’s heirs.

She also found a 1919 plat that shows the blacksmith shop mentioned in the Progress story on a strip of land now owned by Farmington Country Club.

And she says Warner Wood’s will was the “smoking gun” in pinning down the location of Wood’s Station.

Joe Krenn, COO and general manager of Farmington Country Club, says he had a “very productive conversation” with Smith. In an email, he says he’s confident the pilgrimage project team and the club leadership “can determine the accurate site and how to proceed from there.”

The pilgrimage organizers plan a ceremonial soil gathering July 7 with local dignitaries, community members and travelers present when Charlottesville Mayor Nikuyah Walker shovels dirt into the Community Remembrance Project receptacles, which means there’s little more than a month to figure out the lynching site.

Douglas, Smith, Schmidt and a representative from Albemarle County met with Krenn May 25. Schmidt describes the Farmington response as, “We want to help the community.” Krenn will take the matter to the club’s board May 31.

And in further research, Smith found an account that may lead to a still-living person who knew where the locust tree once stood.

The office of Virginia Humanities executive director Matthew Gibson is located near Boar’s Head Inn across from Farmington. “Learning that the site of the John Henry James lynching is across the street from our Charlottesville offices makes this particularly horrific part of our nation’s history feel even more real and tangible,” he says. “As our programming seeks to demonstrate, we can’t move forward together to heal the wounds of slavery, segregation and Jim Crow without an honest acknowledgment of the past that got us here.”

“I think it’s important we get this right,” says Smith. “Something in us makes place very important in the commemoration.”

The Legacy Museum in Montgomery has a wall of clear jars of earth collected from where lynchings took place. “We need to know to join in on that national mourning and commemoration,” she says. “That’s why it’s so important to know where it happened.”

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‘Complicit’: Pilgrimage acknowledges Charlottesville’s legacy of lynching

The Charlottesville pilgrimage participants will collect soil from the site where John Henry James was lynched as part of the Equal Justice Initiative’s Community Remembrance Project that will be displayed at The Legacy Museum. Courtesy Legacy Museum

The lynching of John Henry James in Albemarle in 1898 for allegedly assaulting a white woman was both horrific—and all too common in the era of Jim Crow.

More than 4,400 black men and women were the victims of domestic racial terrorism between 1877 and 1950, according to the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, which opened a memorial to the victims of the nation’s dark history April 26.

Local scholars are organizing a pilgrimage to Montgomery in July to add soil from the site of James’ hanging to the EJI’s community remembrance project and to bring home a memorial “about the size of a coffin,” says UVA religious studies professor Jalane Schmidt.

After a judge ordered the tarps removed from the two statues of Confederate generals, Schmidt asked City Council to expedite the recontextualization of the former Lee and Jackson parks to “challenge the uncontested narrative of the statues,” a Lost Cause narrative that glorifies the Confederacy while minimizing the role of slavery.

Jalane Schmidt asked City Council to hurry its recontextualization of the parks with Confederate generals after a judge ordered the tarps removed. Eze Amos

At its March 19 meeting, City Council asked Schmidt and Andrea Douglas, executive director of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, to proceed with plans to memorialize James’ July 12, 1898, lynching, when a mob estimated at 150 pulled him from a train stopped at Wood’s Crossing, west of town near the current Farmington subdivision. The attackers hanged James from a locust tree, then riddled his body with 75 bullets, according to the Shenandoah Herald.

The hanging “wasn’t enough to satisfy the blood lust of the crowd,” says Schmidt. “They shot him dozens of times.” News accounts say the attackers didn’t bother to cover their faces. After the murder, “the crowd cut off parts of his clothing and body parts—that was common at the time,” she says. So, too, were picnicking at the grisly events and sending postcards to “underscore white supremacy.”

The idea of memorializing the lynching came from the Blue Ribbon Commission on Race, Memorials and Public Places in 2016. UVA’s Frank Dukes brought it up to the commission, but credits Bryan Stevenson, the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, with the idea.

For Dukes, the omission of this part of the area’s history is tied to other aspects of Jim Crow brutality that intimidated and drove away African-Americans, who were 52 percent of the population during the Civil War. “Lynching was the tip of the iceberg of injustice,” he says, and its legacy is seen today in racial disparities in incarceration, education and housing.

“I heard Scottsville was a sundown town,” he says, referring to places where an African-American was expected to be gone before dark. “In our own community there was intimidation and violence.”

The pilgrimage to Montgomery is what the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center “was meant to be,” says director Andrea Douglas. Photo Eze Amos

“It’s important to be able to create a full and inclusive Charlottesville history,” says Douglas, one that includes black people. “Charlottesville didn’t become integrated because white people said it was the right thing to do.”

The pilgrimage is part of a process of discovering that history, she says. “One of the things I hear constantly from both whites and blacks is, ‘I didn’t know.’” Two buses traveling to Montgomery with more than 100 people will provide an “experience grounded in truth and fact.”

City Councilor Kathy Galvin is a supporter. “It’s very important for Charlottesville to understand its own legacy of brutality and racism against African-Americans,” she says. “I think it’s about time 120 years later that we acknowledge [James’] brutal murder.”

Galvin calls the pilgrimage a “sacred act” of recovering the soil where James was lynched and elevating the public’s understanding of what took place. By bringing the memorial back, “It’s a way to make sure we never forget.”

City Council set aside $1 million for the redesign of the parks and $500,000 to support the Blue Ribbon Commission’s recommendations, she says. It also has a discretionary fund to draw from, and at its May 21 meeting, council will decide how much of the six-day journey’s estimated $125,000 cost it will fund.

Albemarle, where the lynching actually occurred, will be discussing its involvement in June, says Board of Supervisors Chair Diantha McKeel. “I’m very supportive but I can’t speak for the board.”

“In 1898 our boundaries were really blurry,” says Galvin. “Our whole region is complicit in this.”

The Road to Montgomery

Organizers Andrea Douglas and Jalane Schmidt are seeking grants and donors to contribute through the nonprofit Jefferson School African American Heritage Center to the estimated $125,000 cost of the July 8 to 13 journey to Montgomery.

Two buses will be rented, and about 33 seats will be reserved for CHS students and teachers, and another group of seats will be available for low-income residents, who will be eligible for scholarships. City Councilor Kathy Galvin says she doesn’t want cost to be an obstacle, particularly for high school students.

Before boarding buses, participants and dignitaries will take part in a soil collection ceremony July 7 at the site of John Henry James’ 1898 murder.

The buses leave July 8, the anniversary of the KKK demonstration here last summer, and will pass through Pelham, North Carolina, headquarters of the white supremacist Loyal White Knights. Also on the agenda for the first day are Lost Cause landmarks Appomattox, where General Robert E. Lee surrendered, and Danville, where the rebel government fled and where the Confederate battle flag still flies along U.S. 29.

The pilgrimage continues to museums and civil rights landmarks in Greensboro and Charlotte, North Carolina, and Atlanta, arriving at the Equal Justice Initiative Legacy Museum and National Memorial to Peace and Justice in Montgomery July 12, the 120th anniversary of James’ lynching.

“The sites we’ll visit will open new eyes,” says Schmidt. “This is a very conscious way of taking the bull by the horns and creating our own narrative.”