Of the Montpelier Foundation Board’s 25 members, 14 now represent descendants of the enslaved population at the fourth U.S. president’s former estate. File photo.
After nearly two months of tension that included firings of high-level staff and public accusations of game-playing and racism against the Montpelier Foundation, the dispute between the foundation board and the Montpelier Descendants Committee has ended. At the May 16 foundation board meeting, the board voted in 11 new members recommended by the MDC, two more than had been previously promised.
“This historic and unprecedented vote by the Board of Directors means that the Foundation has achieved its long-sought goal of parity on the Board for descendants of Montpelier’s formerly enslaved population,” the foundation said in a release. “It has been a long and not always easy process to get to this point, but one result of the process has been the identification of an incredibly gifted and renowned slate of new Board members.”
“I just think all of us are surprised, thrilled and, you know, want to commend the board members, whatever their motivations were throughout,” says Greg Werkheiser, attorney for the MDC. “In the end, they took a hard vote. They did the right thing. And now, you know, the really hard work of rebuilding and restoring Montpelier’s finances, its reputation, its staff. That’s the next chapter.”
The stage for dispute was set last summer when the foundation board voted to rewrite its bylaws giving MDC authority to recommend at least half of the board members. In late March, the board reversed that historic vote and blamed the MDC for being uncollaborative.
“That’s not partnership. It’s not collegiality,” said former board chair Gene Hickok in an early April interview. Hickok resigned from the board at the Monday meeting.
Dozens of historic organizations, including the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which owns Montpelier, condemned the foundation’s actions. Remaining Montpelier staff released a fiery statement alleging the board was putting historic preservation work at risk and violating federal law. Those employees and the MDC demanded the reinstatement of staff who’d been fired for speaking out in support of the descendants and a change in leadership.
Werkheiser says the new board will act quickly to rehire fired staff but declined to comment on the future of Montpelier’s embattled CEO Roy Young. Hickok and Young declined to be interviewed.
The 25-member foundation board now includes 14 people representing descendants of the enslaved at Montpelier. Among those new members are journalist Soledad O’Brien, UVA McIntire School of Commerce Dean Nicole Thorne Jenkins, and the Reverend Cornell William Brooks, Harvard professor of the practice of public leadership and social justice and former NAACP president and CEO.
“As our nation grapples with and even grieves over the racial injustices of this day, the work of the Montpelier Foundation is all the more important: teaching the lessons of the living legacy of President James Madison, studying the past and possibilities of our Constitution, and sharing across our Republic and beyond the ongoing story of those enslaved at Montpelier,” Brooks said in an MDC statement released after the May 16 vote.
The new board members were selected from a list of 20 names MDC recently put forth for consideration. Werkheiser says the nine individuals who were not named to the board will serve on an advisory council.
“It’s just further testament to the kind of egolessness of a lot of these public servants that they are willing to stay at the table, not sit on the bench,” he says. “They’re willing to put their shoulder to the wheel here as well. And trust me, all of them are going to be needed, as well as the returning staff, to put Montpelier back together again as quickly as possible.”
Courteney Stuart is the host of “Charlottesville Right Now” on WINA. You can hear her interview with Greg Werkheiser at wina.com.
A dispute between the Montpelier Descendants Committee and the Montpelier Foundation board has raged since late March. File photo.
Questions linger in Montpelier controversy
With less than a week before the May 16 meeting of the Montpelier Foundation board, initial interviews with 20 candidates put forth by the Montpelier Descendants Committee are underway. But MDC attorney Greg Werkheiser says there are still concerns that the dispute between the two organizations isn’t fully resolved.
“They have refused to answer other questions that would confirm they are done playing games,” Werkheiser says of the foundation.
The controversy over a power-sharing agreement between the foundation and the MDC has raged since late March, when the foundation board reversed a June 2021 decision to rewrite bylaws giving MDC the right to recommend at least half the members of the board as a way to achieve “structural parity” with descendants of enslaved workers. There appeared to be a breakthrough last week when the board announced it would vote on nine new MDC-recommended members at the May 16 meeting, and that all would assume full board membership that day.
In an email, Werkheiser asked the foundation to confirm several points, including that the status of current foundation board members and MDC Chair James French, would not change on May 16.
Werkheiser says the foundation has not answered that question.
In an email, foundation spokesperson Joe Slay says the foundation doesn’t plan to make any public statements in response to MDC questions.
Albemarle County approves plastic bag tax
Stock up on your reusable grocery bags, Albemarle County shoppers—last week, the Board of Supervisors unanimously approved a disposable plastic tax. Starting January 1, stores will charge 5 cents per plastic bag.
The board also approved hikes to the transient occupancy tax for hotel guests, as well as the food and beverage tax. On July 1, the occupancy tax will increase from 5 to 8 percent, while the meals tax will increase from 4 to 6 percent.
The supervisors did, however, vote to decrease the county’s personal property tax rate by 86 cents. The new rate is now $3.42 per $100 of assessed value. And in light of the increase in property values, they opted not to raise the real estate tax rate—it remains 85.4 cents per $100 of assessed value.
These tax hikes come after Charlottesville City Council approved a 1 cent real estate tax and .5 percent meals tax increase last month to help fund the costly renovation of Buford Middle School. City homeowners now pay 96 cents per $100 of the assessed value of their property, while diners pay a 6.5 percent meals tax.
In brief
Closing the book
Last week, Jane Kulow and Sarah Lawson both resigned from the Virginia Festival of the Book. Lawson had worked as the festival’s associate director for several years, while Kulow had served as its program director since 2014, following the retirement of longtime director Nancy Damon. The pair declined to publicly comment on the reason for their unexpected departures.
In the running
Albemarle County Board of Supervisors Chair Donna Price and local emergency department nurse Kellen Squire are running for the Democratic nomination for the newly redrawn 55th District in the Virginia House of Delegates, which includes most of Albemarle County, along with parts of Nelson, Louisa, and Fluvanna counties. The majority of the new district—approved by the Virginia Supreme Court in December—is what was once the 58th District, and has been represented by Republican Delegate Rob Bell for two decades. Squire ran unsuccessfully against Bell in 2017 for the 58th District seat. Bell has not announced if he plans to run for the new seat—however, it may not even be up for grabs yet. If a pending federal lawsuit seeking to force the state to hold House elections this fall under the redrawn maps—filed by former state Democratic Party chair Paul Goldman—is dismissed, elections won’t be held until next year.
Will Rob Bell run in the newly redrawn 55th District? Photo: Amy Jackson
Moving forward
The Charlottesville School Board unanimously voted last week to allow Superintendent Royal Gurley Jr. to begin working with the Charlottesville Education Association on a collective bargaining resolution. Board members have expressed support for collective bargaining, but claimed they need more information on how it will work in the school district. Union supporters hope the board will approve a resolution by the end of the school year.
Correction 5/17: Albemarle County’s real estate tax rate remains 85.4 cents—not 78.8 cents—per $100 of assessed value.
“Essentially what it means is that they’re going to take these new board members and appoint them to the positions, but give them no power. And there’s a couple of reasons they’ve offered for that, none of which passes the smell test, frankly.”
Greg Werkheiser, MDC’s attorney
Your move, Montpelier Foundation. That was the message delivered by the Montpelier Descendants Committee at an April 28 press conference announcing a slate of 20 candidates for nine spots on the Montpelier Foundation board and demanding the reinstatement of fired staff members who led the archaeological work at the fourth U.S. president’s former home.
The MDC’s list of board nominees descended from enslaved workers at Montpelier was offered amid an escalating conflict between the MDC and the foundation board over the board’s June 2021 vote to create “structural parity” with descendants by allowing MDC to recommend at least half the foundation’s board members.
“Throughout the Black community in the country, a lot of folks have been paying attention to the developments at Montpelier,” says MDC’s attorney Greg Werkheiser, co-founder of the Richmond-based Cultural Heritage Partners law firm. “And when we reached out to a lot of the luminaries…across public policy, politics, history, law, journalism, finance, philanthropy, and we said, are you willing to jump into the fray here and help us resolve this and return Montpelier to a reputation of respected leadership? You know, the vast majority of people said yes.”
Among the names on the MDC’s list are journalist Soledad O’Brien; Michael Blakey, National Endowment for the Humanities professor of anthropology, Africana studies and American studies at The College of William & Mary; and Reverend Cornell Brooks, former CEO of the NAACP and professor at Harvard Kennedy School.
Their willingness to serve, Werkheiser says, is “a testament to how important they think that resolution of this situation, this crisis at Montpelier, is not just for Montpelier, but as a representative of the struggle that a lot of cultural sites are going through around the country and what the implications are nationally for solving this problem locally.”
Some claim that Montpelier’s current toxic atmosphere began when Roy Young (right) became CEO in 2020. Foundation board chair Gene Hickok (left) has been under fire since he announced in April that new MCD-recommended board members would be installed in two tranches. Supplied photos.
Much of the conflict’s resolution now rests on the timing of the installation of the MDC-recommended board members. After initially blaming the MDC for the communication breakdown as national outrage mounted in early April, foundation board chair Gene Hickok and Montpelier CEO Roy Young offered a compromise. The board would select nine new MDC-recommended members from a list of 15 names. The catch? The new MDC-recommended board members would be installed in two tranches. Some would be fully installed in July, while the others would take their place on the board in October. MDC wasn’t satisfied with that offer.
“Essentially what it means is that they’re going to take these new board members and appoint them to the positions, but give them no power. And there’s a couple of reasons they’ve offered for that, none of which passes the smell test, frankly,” says Werkheiser. “If they do do that, they would essentially be preserving their voting majority, the current board’s voting majority, for months. And they would have the opportunity, once the press turns its attention away from this controversy, to simply reverse any of the commitments they appear to be making in public now. And they can also continue to fire people as they’ve been doing.”
On Monday, May 2, the foundation appeared to capitulate to the MDC’s demand. “The board agrees to vote on the MDC nominees, as proposed by the Committee, with all assuming active Board membership at the same time,” a new foundation statement reads. Werkheiser responded to the new statement with a request for confirmation that all nine new MDC-nominated candidates will be voted into service and have full voting powers effective at the close of the May 16 meeting; that the only business that will be taken up on May 16 is the vote to install the nine new members; and that the membership status of current board members will not be considered on May 16. He had not received a response from the foundation by C-VILLE Weekly press time.
The new foundation statement does not respond to the MDC’s other demand—that Montpelier staff who were fired after speaking out on behalf of descendants be reinstated.
Those firings have created a “culture of fear,” according to a statement signed by “a majority of full-time and a growing number of part-time Montpelier staff” on the new website, montpelierstaff.com. The staff statement alleges archaeological digs have been abandoned, data is at risk, and it accuses foundation board leadership of violating federal law.
The toxic atmosphere at Montpelier began under the leadership of Young, who became CEO two years ago, according to one of the longtime staff member who was fired.
“It became rapidly clear they had their own ideas,” says Matthew Reeves, who worked at Montpelier for 22 years and served as Montpelier’s director of archaeology and landscaping restoration until his firing April 18. “There wasn’t a lot of time and care spent understanding the institutional history of work we had done with the community.”
Reeves says Young and Hickok were concerned about losing a million-dollar state grant awarded to Montpelier for memorialization of the lives of enslaved workers. That fear led to the board’s historic vote for structural parity with the MDC in June 2021, but Reeves describes it as “contentious.”
“That was a vote that they were forced into not only because of the $1 million grant, but also there were several staff, including myself and [Montpelier Vice President Elizabeth Chew], who threatened to resign if the board vote was no. And this was presented to the board…during that board meeting. And that turned the no vote…into a yes vote. And so this conflict had been simmering for a year by the time that vote happened,” Reeves says.
In an email response, Young claims the data and archaeological sites are being protected by experts, but Reeves says the situation at Montpelier makes it unlikely the archaeological work can continue.
“At this point, it would be very difficult for this board under the current leadership to ever hire archaeologists again,” he says. “You just look at what archaeological organizations all across the nation have written, and censured what Montpelier is doing with the descendant committee. I am not going to rest until all of the…data is safely put away and protected.”
The foundation’s actions have also rattled donors, including Orange County farmer Bill Speidan, who first visited Montpelier as a child in the early 1940s. Speidan says he’s been an annual donor for many years, knows Reeves and the other staff members who were fired, and has been shocked by what has unfolded.
“It’s unconscionable to fire people that have been…with you 22 years doing their job,” he says, noting that Young is the first Montpelier Foundation CEO he’s never met. “I would certainly hesitate to donate further if they do not take advantage of what work Matt Reeves and others have done there,” he says.
The foundation’s new statement doesn’t mention any change in leadership, but it does strike a conciliatory tone. “The path to parity requires a spirit of collaboration,” it reads. “We look forward to that collaboration and to working together for the benefit of Montpelier.”
Montpelier. File photo.
Could the National Trust revoke Montpelier’s lease?
Dozens of national historic organizations have publicly condemned the Montpelier Foundation board’s recent actions. Among them is the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which owns Montpelier and leases it to the foundation in a cooperative agreement.
The agreement was signed October 1, 2000, and provides a lease that renews every five years. That makes the next renewal date October 1, 2025.
C-VILLE Weekly legal analyst Scott Goodman reviewed the lease and says the National Trust may have the power to take action against the foundation.
“In my opinion, nothing prevents the trust from doing anything it wants to do in this situation, given the apparent threat to the viability of Montpelier and arguable inability of the foundation to continue to carry out Montpelier’s mission. Carrying out that mission is the very purpose of the lease,” he explained.
But in an email, National Trust spokesperson Matt Montgomery says the agreement doesn’t allow the trust to revoke the lease.
“It places the ability to revoke with the foundation only,” Montgomery says.
While straight revocation of the lease may be in question, the agreement contains provisions for dispute resolution between the foundation and the National Trust.
In the event of a dispute, the agreement calls for the creation of a task force consisting of three members: one appointed by the foundation, one appointed by the trust, and one appointed by agreement of both. The task force has three months from formation to make a binding recommendation for resolving the dispute.
The National Trust declined to comment on whether it will activate the dispute resolution clause.—Courteney Stuart
A statement from “a majority of full-time staff and a growing number of part-time staff” at the Montpelier Foundation demands immediate parity with MDC and the reinstatement of fired staff. File photo
A dispute between the Montpelier Foundation board and the Montpelier Descendants Committee over a power-sharing agreement reached last summer has now snowballed into what appears to be a full-on revolt by staff at the fourth U.S. president’s historic estate.
“By revoking parity with the MDC and by firing and suspending staff, TMF has attempted to co-opt the meaning of this ancestral space, and in the process has done irreparable harm to the security of and accessibility to these culturally significant resources,” reads a statement released Saturday, April 23, on a new website, montpelierstaff.com, and signed by “a majority of full-time staff and a growing number of part-time staff.”
The controversy erupted in late March when the Montpelier Foundation board voted to reverse its June 2021 decision to rewrite the bylaws granting the MDC the right to recommend at least half the members of the board. The stated goal was to create “structural parity” by giving descendants of the enslaved workers who built and ran Montpelier equal say in determining the future of the site.
The reversal prompted immediate backlash from the MDC, Montpelier staff, and historic preservation groups including the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which owns Montpelier and leases it to the foundation.
Foundation Board Chair Gene Hickok insisted the board would still create structural parity by appointing descendants itself; he blamed the situation on the MDC for refusing to recognize two descendants put forth by the board as contributing to structural parity.
“That’s not partnership. It’s not collegiality. And that’s not what the original understanding of our relationship would be,” he said in an interview earlier this month. Neither Hickok nor Montpelier CEO Roy Young responded to a request for comment for this article.
The situation further deteriorated last week when Young fired multiple high-level staff members including Executive Vice President and Chief Curator Elizabeth Chew and Director of Archaeology and Landscape Restoration Matt Reeves.
According to the statement from remaining Montpelier staff, those firings came in retaliation for public statements in support of the MDC and have created a “culture of fear” for those staff members who remain.
Hickok initially released a statement defending the board’s actions and placing the blame on MDC. After last week’s firings, the foundation board released a new statement with an offered compromise. MDC could put forth a list of 15 people from which nine would be chosen to serve on the board. Half would begin serving July 1 and the other half would be installed on October 1.
MDC attorney Greg Werkheiser said that was a move in the right direction, but he said the delay in installing some of the MDC-recommended board members was a deal-breaker.
“The reason they would do that is because by splitting up these new board members, they maintain their two-thirds majority,” Werkheiser says. “And in those four months, they will not rehire the fired staff. They will fire additional staff. They will take actions against the current serving MDC board members, and they have the power with a two-thirds majority to actually expand the board and dilute any new MDC members they put on.”
The Montpelier staff also reject the foundation’s compromise, and do so using charged language.
“In short, the Board is offering a type of ‘three fifths compromise’ which will allow TMF to retain full control and sideline the MDC as an equal steward of the site,” staff write, referring to the agreement in the U.S. Constitution that said three-fifths of the enslaved population would be counted when determining taxation and representation.
The staff statement describes the devastation wrought by the foundation’s actions.
“TMF has defiled archaeological ethics and museum best practices by endangering the data and research of the site,” it reads. “At present, there are open excavation units that are abandoned mid-excavation. Artifacts and other archaeological samples remain unprocessed.”
The foundation’s actions are not just “unethical and immoral,” the staffers claim, they also violate federal law.
“Archaeology is an inherently destructive science which rests entirely on proper recording and protection of data and the direct involvement of a site’s cultural descendants,” the statement reads. “By leaving this site abandoned and removing staff with institutional knowledge, Montpelier’s ‘leadership’ has put the property’s cultural heritage at risk, the stories at risk, and the ability for this information to be shared at risk.”
The MDC has previously called for Young and Hickok to resign; the National Trust released a statement condemning the firings and suggesting the foundation change leadership.
The National Trust did not respond to a request for comment on whether the Montpelier lease could be revoked.
The Montpelier staff statement repeats the call for foundation leadership to resign and says there is only one acceptable path forward.
“There is no justifiable reason to trust any proposal that does not begin with immediate parity with the MDC and the reinstatement of fired staff who steward Montpelier’s historic resources,” it reads.
Courteney Stuart is the host of “Charlottesville Right Now” on WINA. You can hear interviews with Greg Werkheiser and Gene Hickok at wina.com.
William Lewis’ new book looks at the restoration of Montpelier, and how it became a visual record of both James Madison and the people who were enslaved on his estate. Supplied photo
Timing is everything, and that can certainly be said of Montpelier Foundation co-founder William Lewis’ new book, which traces the history and extensive renovation of the fourth U.S. president’s former home. Montpelier Transformed: A Monument to James Madison and Its Enslaved Community was published Monday, April 11, amid an ongoing controversy over a power-sharing agreement between the foundation and the Montpelier Descendants Committee.
“My hope is that as people read this, they’ll be aware that Montpelier has always been a foundation that was very interested in having descendants be key members of the board,” Lewis says.
Lewis, a retired environmental attorney, began volunteering at Montpelier in the late 1990s after he and his wife bought a nearby property in Gordonsville. His book covers Dolley Madison’s sale of the property in 1844, the Dupont era from 1901-1983, and a legal battle with Dupont heirs that ended with the sale of the property to the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 1987. A decade later, Lewis helped form the new Montpelier Foundation and negotiate the foundation’s lease of the property from the National Trust.
He describes the foundation’s work at Montpelier over the next 20 years as an “impossible dream realized.”
With millions of dollars from philanthropists, the foundation completed a $25 million renovation of the home, built a $9 million visitors center and gallery, as well as The Center for the Constitution in the first decade. It also created a new entryway to the property and renovated a former slave cabin.
The foundation’s original mission, Lewis says, was to present for historic education the life and legacy of James Madison, who is primarily known as the father of the Constitution and the architect of the Bill of Rights.
Lewis says the foundation also wanted to illuminate the less-publicized aspect of Madison’s legacy.
“He owned hundreds of slaves,” Lewis says. “Those slaves were never freed by Madison, even at his death. So the focus of the foundation has been to tell the story and educate the public on the Constitution and Bill of Rights and also present the tragedy of slavery and recreate the slave community.”
To that end, Lewis says, “the second decade was focused on educating about the tragedy of slavery and recreating the slave community that was adjacent to Madison’s home.”
For years, Montpelier has won praise for its unflinching depictions of the lives of enslaved workers who built and operated the presidential estate. That reputation has been marred in recent weeks after the foundation board reversed a decision to achieve “structural parity” with the Montpelier Descendants Committee. The foundation’s late-March vote revoking the MDC’s sole right to recommend descendants to the board sparked national news coverage and criticism from the National Trust and other organizations.
Lewis says he has not been involved with the foundation board’s recent decisions, and has been pained to see the conflict.
“I’d worked for a long time to try to build a relationship with descendants,” he says. “The idea there would be additional descendants [on the board] seemed a wonderful thing.”
Lewis believes any descendant should be eligible to serve on the board. He hopes his book will contribute to the conversations about Montpelier’s place in history and that the foundation and the MDC will resolve their dispute.
“I hope it will result in more representation for descendants on the board,” he says, “and there’s no reason why that won’t be true.”
Courteney Stuart is the host of “Charlottesville Right Now” on WINA.
A statement from “a majority of full-time staff and a growing number of part-time staff” at the Montpelier Foundation demands immediate parity with MDC and the reinstatement of fired staff. File photo
Nearly two weeks after the Montpelier Foundation Board voted to reverse an agreement to share power with the Montpelier Descendants Committee, the force of the backlash has dismayed the board’s leadership. The dispute between the board and the committee has also exposed division among some descendants about the future of the fourth U.S. president’s former home.
“I guess I was disappointed because I don’t think it’s been accurately reported,” says Montpelier Foundation Board Chair Gene Hickok. He insists that despite the recent vote, the foundation board remains committed to restructuring to achieve “structural parity” with descendants of enslaved people at Montpelier and is simply broadening its approach to arrive at that goal.
“And all of a sudden they’re ascribing nefarious motives to the board,” he says, calling it “very disappointing.”
The stage for conflict was set last June when the Foundation board voted to rewrite its bylaws and announced an “unprecedented board restructuring” that would “establish equality with the Montpelier Descendants Committee in the governance of James Madison’s Montpelier.” A foundation press release at the time described the lofty ambition of providing “a national model for resolving historic imbalances in decision-making, power, and authority.”
At the end of March, however, the board voted to reverse course. An attorney representing the MDC says things began to fall apart soon after the June vote.
“What happened after that is that the new CEO and the chairman began the process of actually engaging in the power-sharing, and the descendants asked these reasonable questions like, ‘What kind of changes are we going to make here?’ And that just was met with a real hard line,” says Greg Werkheiser of the Richmond-based law firm Cultural Heritage Partners.
Montpelier Foundation Board Chair Gene Hickok. File photo.
The board’s reversal has been excoriated in the press by Montpelier employees, some of whom allege a toxic work environment created by foundation board leadership. The National Trust for Historic Preservation, which leases James Madison’s Montpelier to the Montpelier Foundation, and the American Association for State and Local History have also criticized the board’s reversal.
“The news of recent board action by the site can be seen as taking a big step backward in the fight for inclusion instead of pushing our field forward in a way that makes a difference at the core of this historic property,” says a statement on the association’s website.
Werkheiser alleges that the board wanted to benefit from the appearance of structural parity with the descendants, but wasn’t committed to the reality of shared power.
“That’s something that is a known pattern to the Black community,” he says. “Which is, we want you to be seen so that we can fundraise off of your presence. But we don’t want to really hear what you have to say.”
“It’s just not true,” says Hickok. He says that tensions came to a head at the board’s November meeting when the MDC leadership refused to recognize one of four descendants, this one selected by the board rather than the MDC. Hickok says as a result of the MDC’s position that the person would not count toward structural parity, she turned down the board nomination.
“So this, as you can imagine, set off this sort of feud between the board of Montpelier and the MDC going forward.”
From there, Hickok says, communication between the two organizations deteriorated further, and he alleges MDC became oppositional and ordered its members not to work with Montpelier staff.
“We received from the MDC a proposal which, in essence, said, ‘We are willing to not litigate.’” He says the MDC then issued an ultimatum that any board members counting toward structural parity would come only from a list of names the MDC provided.
“That’s not partnership. It’s not collegiality. And that’s not what the original understanding of our relationship would be,” Hickok says, noting that even after the recent reversal, the MDC can still recommend board members.
“This is not a case of going back on our word,” he says. “It is a case of trying to find a way to achieve parity when we had two organizations that can’t agree on how best to get there.”
That justification doesn’t satisfy Bettye Kearse, a retired physician and author of The Other Madisons: The Lost History of a President’s Black Family. Kearse is a descendant of enslaved workers at Montpelier who has studied the history of Montpelier and worked on projects with staff since the early 1990s. One of three foundation board members who were recommended by the MDC and appointed in November, she agrees that the committee wants to choose its own candidates for the board, but ascribes different motives to the board’s reversal.
“I don’t think they were really ready to share power with another organization, particularly an organization of African Americans,” she says. “I think they wanted to revise the bylaws in ways that they would have a stronger control over the stories that Montpelier would tell to the American public. So they didn’t abolish parity, but they did cripple the concept.”
The MDC was formed in 2019 and comprises descendants of enslaved laborers from a variety of Virginia sites including Monticello and Highland in addition to Montpelier.
That is one reason Mary Alexander, a direct descendant of Madison’s enslaved manservant Paul Jennings, doesn’t believe MDC should be the sole voice of descendants.
“We have blood ties to Montpelier, and our approach to Montpelier and what we want from that period is very, very different from the other people who are members of the MDC and don’t necessarily have any kind of blood ties to Montpelier at all,” she says of herself and her family. They only want to focus on preserving Montpelier as a place for future generations.
Alexander claims MDC is a political organization, and says she doesn’t share its interest in broader topics including mandating school curriculum, land conservation or “demanding or asking for reparations, or discussions on it.” She says the board’s recent reversal was fair.
“So now the board is acknowledging that the descendants are not one homogeneous group,” she says.
Kearse says she also has a direct claim to Montpelier.
“I have enslaved ancestors and I’m also a Madison descendant, so I have ancestors buried in the family cemetery and in the slave cemetery,” she says. “And so it’s a place that’s very, very important to me. And, you know, to have this battle over who can tell the whole story is just extremely heartbreaking and disappointing, and I see it harming the image, it’s a very positive image, that Montpelier has been able to develop over at least the last two decades.”
Courteney Stuart is the host of “Charlottesville Right Now” on WINA. You can hear her interviews with Gene Hickok, Bettye Kearse, Mary Alexander, and Greg Werkheiser at wina.com.
Adrienne Oliver, an instructional coach for Albemarle County Public Schools, believes all students will be able to see themselves in the history of the United States, once the Reframing the Narrative program is implemented. PC: John Robinson
As protests against police brutality continue around the country, school districts are tackling another form of systemic racism and oppression: whitewashed history. Since last year, Albemarle County Public Schools has been working to create an anti-racist social studies curriculum, elevating the voices and stories of marginalized people and groups, which are often misrepresented by (or entirely excluded from) textbooks. And now, the district is one step closer to implementing the curriculum—called Reframing the Narrative.
Last week, the district’s history teachers—joined by over a dozen partner organizations and more than 100 educators from Charlottesville City Schools, Virginia Beach City Public Schools, and other districts across the state—met virtually to begin constructing a more comprehensive and inclusive U.S. history curriculum as part of the Virginia Inquiry Collaborative.
Fully addressing our country’s legacy of slavery, racism, and inequity is not an easy task, and “dependency on textbooks of any kind will only preserve the status quo and dominant narratives,” says Adrienne Oliver, an ACPS instructional coach who participated in the virtual workshops. “The current state standards continue to uphold such narratives, and so a heavy reliance upon outsourced materials is, in my view, antithetical to our work.”
Rather than find new textbooks (Oliver says she has yet to see an anti-racist one), the curriculum will rely on relevant texts and resources, primary source materials, and classroom discussions and activities—all working to “resist a retelling of dominant narratives and put learning into students’ hands,” says Oliver.
After a team of editors reviews and refines the results of last week’s workshops, inquiry-based U.S. history units, containing learning plans and assessment tools, will be uploaded onto an online platform for ACPS teachers, along with those from CCS and other districts, to use starting this fall.
Under the anti-racist curriculum, all students will be able to see themselves in the history of the United States, examining it from a variety of non-traditional perspectives, says Oliver. Black and brown students, along with others from marginalized backgrounds, may feel more acknowledged and empowered, as they study untold stories of resilience and resistance.
The revamped history courses will also better prepare students, especially those who are white, to deal with uncomfortable issues in our country, points out Bethany Bazemore, who graduated from Charlottesville High School this year.
“The only way as a society we’re going to get past this is if white people learn to be uncomfortable,” says Bazemore, who is Black. “Black people have been uncomfortable for 400 years and counting.”
“You need to understand and reckon with your history to really address the problems of the present,” adds program leader John Hobson. “It’s all connected.”
Last summer, ACPS partnered with the Montpelier Foundation to jump-start the Reframing the Narrative program. With the support of a $299,500 grant from the Charlottesville Area Community Foundation, history teachers from the division participated in professional development workshops at Montpelier, along with other field experiences and learning opportunities, during the school year.
Through these initiatives, educators “are able to understand possibly their own bias, and reflect and grow from there,” says Virginia Beach social studies instructor Nick Dzendzel, a participant in the Virginia Inquiry Collaborative. “It provides a whole new atmosphere inside of a school [or] department for those educators to start pushing for what they know and want to be right for the students—and not just adhering to what’s been done before.”
The CACF grant also helps to pay teachers as they develop the new curriculum outside of school hours, and funds student field trips to Montpelier, “centering the voices and experiences of enslaved people and the descendant community” at the former plantation, says Oliver.
Next year, the process will start over again, as Albemarle teachers update the division’s world geography curriculum for freshmen and world history for sophomores. The following year, the eighth grade civics and 12th grade government curriculums will also get an anti-racist makeover.
In partnership with ACPS and other state school districts, Charlottesville City Schools also began updating its social studies curriculum last summer. Participating teachers (who receive a stipend) have taken professional development courses at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center focused on local Black history, as well as curriculum-writing workshops and field excursions around Charlottesville.
Last year, CCS Superintendent Dr. Rosa Atkins was among those appointed to the Commission on African American History Education, which is currently reviewing the history standards and practices for the entire state. By September 1, the commission will offer recommendations for enriched standards related to African American history, as well as cultural competency among teachers.
The white supremacist violence of August 11 and 12 was a catalyst, says Oliver, but these massive curriculum overhauls were years in the making. Grassroots organizers and activists, along with individual educators, have been advocating for and implementing anti-racist curriculums across Virginia for some time.
“If you’re doing this [alone] in your own classroom, it’s easy to get weighed down by barriers, by administrators, and by parents for working against the grain. It’s hard to do that every day,” says Virginia Initiative participant Sarah Clark, who teaches U.S. history in Virginia Beach. “But when you’re involved in projects like this, it’s like a rejuvenation…I’m not doing it alone.”
