Tag: margaret o’bryant

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Saying goodbye: Margaret O’Bryant on 30 years at the historical society

After more than 30 years of managing its vast historical collection, Margaret O’Bryant has bid the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical society adieu. PC: John Robinson

For most of her life, Margaret O’Bryant has called the library home. After receiving a master’s degree in library science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she worked in libraries at Ferrum College, Lenoir-Rhyne College, and UVA, later moving to the reference department at the Jefferson-Madison Regional Library.

While at the public library in 1987, O’Bryant also volunteered with the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society, helping to move its collection from a space on Court Square to the former McIntire Library on Second Street SE, where the society planned to dedicate a room to its archival collection. A year later, the society received funding from the city and county to create a formal librarian position, which O’Bryant eagerly applied for—and got.

Now, after more than 30 years of managing its vast historical collection, O’Bryant has bid the society adieu. She officially retired at the beginning of this month, and is now working on clearing out her things and preparing the library for whoever takes her place. We sat down with her to reflect on her time there. (Responses have been edited for length and clarity.)

C-VILLE: How has Charlottesville changed since you started working at the society?

Margaret O’Bryant: I think the nature of historical attention has changed over this period, in ways that are good, and that are a little more disconcerting in ways to some people. There’s been more attention given to a whole spectrum of history in the community.

What’s the strangest inquiry or request you’ve ever gotten?

This isn’t necessarily strange, and I don’t mean this negatively. But we get roughly 1,300 to 1,500 people per year who come here in person to do research, and the largest percentage of those people are here to do genealogical research. It’s always been interesting how things are passed on in a family about their background or history…and it’s frequently not entirely accurate. It can be amusing, and sometimes can be a little more difficult for people. They have to deal in one way or another with the fact that things are not always what they had thought it had been. It’s an interesting phenomenon.

What’s your favorite memory of working at the society?

I will always remember fondly the reception the society and JMRL put together in December, when the society named the reading room here after me…it was quite moving.

What will you miss the most about your job?

It’s usually the people that you work with that you miss more than anything else. I’ve certainly had a lot of wonderful relationships with the people that I work with and for, and also the people who come here to do research…I’ll also miss the whole process of looking for things, trying to see where they can be found, and finding whatever it is that may be helpful.

Now that you’re retired, what are you going to do next?

I told my husband I don’t want to make any specific plans for several months…but I would like to do some additional travel, both within the country and some foreign travel. As far as locally…I may do some things at the society as a volunteer. That would only be if the new librarian and director are comfortable having me around!

Margaret O’Bryant, in brief

Education: Bachelor’s degree in classical languages from the College of William & Mary, master’s degree in library science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

First job in Charlottesville: Drove volunteers around for Charlottesville’s retired senior volunteer program.

Famous use of the society’s resources: “Finding Your Roots,” a PBS genealogical documentary series hosted by acclaimed historian Henry Louis Gates Jr.

 

Correction February 19: the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society receives around 1,300 to 1,500 visitors per year, not 13,000 to 15,000 as originally reported.

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In brief: Bright lights, progressive progress, zero patients

Charlottesville's dark skies are getting less dark. Photo: Skyclad Aerial

Blinded by the light

Everyone’s afraid of the dark. But night is fundamental to the delicate balance of life on Earth—so says UVA astronomer and artificial light expert Ricky Patterson, who gave an illuminating presentation on the dangers of light pollution at a Sierra Club event at the downtown library this week.

More people, more cars, and bigger cities means there’s more light in the sky, and all that artificial light hurts the planet’s wildlife. Trees bloom before the spring and die before they should. Fireflies don’t flash in the bright evenings, so they can’t find each other to mate. Baby sea turtles, who have evolved over millions of years to crawl out of the beach sand and toward the glimmering reflections of stars on the ocean, now hatch and totter off toward the glowing lights of Florida’s nightclubs. Humans in urban areas can’t fall asleep properly with too much light around.

Charlottesville’s bright future threatens to contaminate the fragile wilderness areas in the darkness on the edge of town. Shenandoah National Park “becomes less and less night-friendly as we grow,” Patterson said.

Patterson urged attendees to highlight the issue at upcoming planning commission and City Council meetings. Sean Tubbs, of the Piedmont Environmental Council, says the event was inspired in part by C-VILLE’s reporting last year on light pollution in Belmont. Charlottesville’s lighting ordinance was written in the late ’90s, before the popularization of LEDs, and Patterson says it’s “really ineffective in the current world.” 

Progressive progress

Our newly-blue state legislature has had a busy week: On Monday, Virginia became the 38th state to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, which could mean the amendment gets added to the U.S. Constitution. The day after gun-rights activists rallied in Richmond, Democrats moved forward with their “red flag” law, which allows authorities to take away firearms from citizens deemed a threat to themselves or others. (GOP state Senator Amanda Chase called those in support of the bill “traitors.”) In party-line votes,

the Senate also voted to ban LGBTQ conversion therapy directed at those under 18 and codify rights for transgender students. Additional bills advanced that would eliminate Lee-Jackson Day as an official state holiday and make Election Day one instead.

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Quote of the Week

“You associate Kobe with so many great memories of watching NBA Finals. Whenever an iconic hero like that passes, it makes everybody sort of step back and realize how precious life is, your own mortality.”

­—UVA men’s basketball coach Tony Bennett, reflecting on the death of Kobe Bryant

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In brief

False alarm

Two patients in central Virginia were thought to be carrying the deadly coronavirus that has led to the shutdown of a major Chinese city—but tests came back negative, per the Virginia Department of Health. The virus, which manifests as a respiratory illness, hasn’t been confirmed in Virginia yet, but it does spread from person to person. Wash your hands, everybody.

A chalk mural on the free speech wall asks for statue removal.

Monumental art

As two bills proposing local control over Confederate monuments make their way through the General Assembly, activist group Take ’Em Down Cville made its feelings clear with a 10-panel chalk mural on the Free Speech Wall. Created by local artist Ramona Martinez, the mural, which was unveiled on Sunday, features a broken tiki-torch and a plea for a more inclusive future, including tips for what you can do. Martinez also drew Queen Charlotte and York the Explorer, who she believes should be honored instead.

Floor it

Rev your engines: The State Senate voted this week to increase the threshold for a reckless driving offense from 80 to 85 miles per hour. Until now, doing 81 in a 70 has been a Class 1 misdemeanor, on par with domestic violence and punishable by up to a year in jail. (Don’t burn rubber on your way home from work today, though. The bill won’t become law until summer, pending Governor Northam’s approval.)

Closing the book

On February 1, Margaret O’Bryant, the first—and only—librarian and head of reference resources at the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society will be officially retiring. For more than 30 years, she has helped thousands of people research Virginia history and genealogy.

 

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Statue standoff: Group suggests park names

Stonewall Jackson. Staff photo

While a court injunction currently prevents the statue of Robert E. Lee from being moved, the city is moving full speed ahead in an effort to change the names of local parks named for Confederate heroes.

After fielding suggestions from almost all committee members, the Charlottesville Historic Resources Committee decided on four names each for both Lee Park and Jackson Park to recommend to City Council.

For Lee Park, the committee recommended Community Park, Central Park, Market Street Park and Festival Park. For Jackson Park, it suggested Court Square Park, Courthouse Park, The Commons and Memory Park.

Most committee members agreed it was important to suggest names that had conceptual or geographical connotations to promote inclusivity rather than names referring to a single person or historical figure.

Committee member Margaret O’Bryant, who served on the Blue Ribbon Commission on Race, Monuments and Public Spaces, suggested names such as Community Park and Central Park, saying that each “expresses a centrality of our community” and in their neutrality apply to all facets of the Charlottesville population.

Committee co-chair Edwina St. Rose abstained from each vote, however, and said at the beginning of the meeting that she thought the committee should not make a recommendation.

“I believe the council has already seen quite a number of recommendations,” St. Rose said.

City Council recently received more than 2,000 suggestions through an online survey, which showed the top results as Lee Park and Jackson Park, although the survey allowed more than one submission per person and some suggest it was loaded with those who oppose any kind of name change.

Committee member Dede Smith said any future survey effort would have to be formulated in a way to allow one vote per person, calling the City Council survey a “good idea” but “flawed.”

“I don’t think we can put a lot of weight on what actually we saw,” Smith said.

St. Rose also called for a more “democratic” selection process that would be powered by Charlottesville residents, such as a referendum. “I don’t understand this process,” she said.

While the meeting was open to the public, the committee did not field any public comments because that will take place at an upcoming City Council meeting.

After the meeting, some attendees said they were disappointed by the lack of opportunity to comment. Karenne Wood, a member of the Monacan Nation, said she attended because she heard that Monacan Park—one of the more popular suggestions from the online survey—would be one of the names discussed, but she was unable to offer the tribe’s support of the name during the meeting.

Charlottesville resident Jalane Schmidt also wanted public comment and said she thought the suggestions offered at the meeting did not confront the history of each park.

“The recommendation of the [Blue Ribbon Commission], which the City Council did affirm, was that these parks were to be transformed,” Schmidt said, “and the full history…of how these spaces bolstered white supremacy was supposed to be revealed.”

Lisa Woolfork, another attendee, similarly called the selection process “tepid” and said it did nothing to recontextualize or challenge each park’s history.

“If all we might get is a renamed park, that name should be potent,” she said. “It should not be vague. It should not be general. I found this entire process frustrating and only in effect reinforcing the power dynamics that brought this problem to a head in the first place.”

Even with this process moving forward, there are those who still disagree with renaming the park. Historian and Charlottesville resident Arthur Herman says remembering the history of why the Confederate generals were commemorated in the first place is important.

“The sense of duty, the sense of honor, the courage, the sacrifice that they and other Confederate soldiers and veterans served were important virtues irrespective of the nature of the cause they served,” Herman says. “These men were not men who donned white sheets and marched with the KKK. These are not monuments dedicated to men like that.”

City Council will decide on the renaming of both parks at its June 5 meeting.

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Blue Ribbon commissioners identified

The Blue Ribbon Commission on Race, Memorials and Public Spaces will meet for their first session June 16. Rammelkamp Foto

Nine members appointed to serve on Mayor Mike Signer’s Blue Ribbon Commission—created to make a recommendation to City Council on how to treat race, memorials and public spaces after a major controversy regarding the General Robert E. Lee statue in Lee Park—now have about half a year and $10,000 to make it happen.

“I think the biggest problem will be that a lot of people think there are people who have already made up their minds,” says commission member Frank Dukes, a long-time mediator and UVA faculty member trained in facilitation who founded the University & Community Action for Racial Equity almost a decade ago. “This is going to be a learning process. I think people will join us in that willingness to learn and keep their minds open.”

Three members, Gordon Fields, Rachel Lloyd and Margaret O’Bryant, were appointed to represent the Human Rights Commission, PLACE Design Task Force and Historic Resources Committee, respectively.

Lloyd, a professional preservation planner and historical landscape architect, says different generations may reinterpret their community’s history over time. In fact, the opinion overload regarding Lee’s legacy in town began when a local high school student petitioned to have the Confederate soldier’s memorial removed and his park renamed.

“I doubt any of us are naive enough to think that the process will be easy or that our recommendations, whatever they are, will be universally popular,” Lloyd says.

O’Bryant has been the librarian at the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society for over 28 years. She says the group’s final recommendation should be reflective of all aspects of the local community. “I hope we can work effectively and constructively without unnecessary disagreement,” she says.

Jane Smith, who says she was “amazed” to learn she was selected out of the 74 people who applied to be on the commission, is eager to work with the group of “dignified, respectful people” who were also chosen, though she says she doesn’t expect them to agree on everything. Going in with a “clean slate,” Smith, who is a retired graphic designer, says, “I love doing history research and so I’m hoping that I can be of use that way.”

Don Gathers works as the front desk supervisor at the Graduate Hotel, is a member of UVA’s Fellowship of Christian Athletes executive committee and is on the deacon board at the First Baptist Church on West Main Street. Gathers says he applied to be on the commission to serve and hopefully unite the community.

“I think everyone wants basically the same things,” he says. “They want better lives for our children, freedom to come and go as they choose and to not have their rights infringed upon due to someone else’s rights.”

Gathers, a Richmond native, grew up around similar controversies surrounding the city’s historic Monument Avenue, where many Confederate leaders are honored.

“I’ve heard the outcries, I’ve heard the problems, the issues, the complaints, the explanations,” he says. “I think the best thing that we individually and collectively as a commission can do [in Charlottesville] is to listen before we formulate any opinion or take any stance one way or the other.”

But commissioner John Mason, a historian and UVA history professor who is descended on both sides of his family from Virginia slaves, has an idea of where he stands.

“I think my starting point is that the memorials are less about the men who are depicted and more about what they symbolize,” he says. “What they symbolize to me is not what they symbolized to the people who put them up.”

Erected as memorials to the “lost cause,” which Mason describes as the story white southerners told themselves to cope with defeat 30 years after the Civil War, he says, “Psychologically, they wanted to tell themselves about the glory of this lost cause. I think it’s a story of sacrifice, valor and dignity.”

He also notes that the Confederate memorials were built at the height of Jim Crow laws, when “things had never been worse for African-Americans.” Before City Council April 18, Mason said the memorials hide history instead of making it more visible.

Not reached were commission members Fields, Andrea Douglas and Melvin Burruss. All nine will meet for their first session June 16.

Correction: The original article incorrectly stated when the commission would first meet.