UVA professor Frank Dukes points out the Confederate memorabilia for sale at Appomattox, a national park.
Photo Eze Amos
A month ago, around 100 locals set off on two buses to Montgomery, Alabama, carrying soil from the site where John Henry James was lynched in 1898 in Albemarle County. On August 5, nearly 200 people gathered at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center to hear the pilgrims’ report back to the community about what they experienced, what they learned and where they go next with what they brought back from the historic journey.
A common theme emerged: The violent events from last summer’s Unite the Right rally were not isolated events, but part of a continuum of white supremacy dating back to this country’s founding, say pilgrimage participants and organizers.
“Charlottesville has a long history of violent white supremacy,” said Jalane Schmidt, UVA religious studies professor and pilgrimage co-organizer. Along with James’ lynching, she listed the KKK in the 1920s—active at the same time controversial monuments of Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson were erected—sit-ins in the ‘60s to integrate restaurants, and August 11 and 12 last year. “And in all of these cases, police were complicit,” she added.
The journey began on July 8, the anniversary of the KKK rally last year, but Andrea Douglas, executive director of the heritage center and the pilgrimage’s other organizer, pointed out that July 9 was a more significant anniversary—the 150th of the ratification of the 14th Amendment that gave African Americans citizenship, due process and equal protection.
“Those are the same things we’re talking about today,” she said.
The six-day pilgrimage hit civil rights landmarks and museums between Charlottesville and Montgomery, and included Danville, Greensboro, Charlotte, Atlanta and Birmingham. It began with a stop at Appomattox, where a national park depicts the surrender of the Confederacy with remarkably little information about slavery, the issue that had sparked the Civil War, the pilgrims noted.
“They were selling Confederate memorabilia” at a taxpayer-funded national park, reported Frank Dukes, UVA Institute for Environmental Negotiation professor.
Dukes identified the Sweet Auburn district in Atlanta, a historic African American community that has been preserved and works to remain affordable, as a model for Charlottesville. He also mentioned memorials to the legacy of racial terrorism and the civil rights struggle, such as the Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial to Peace and Justice and the Edmund Pettus Bridge. “We don’t have enough of that,” he said.
Multiple people reporting to the community said school curricula is an issue.
Cauline Yates reports back for the Seasoned Saints, the demographic with the most years. Eze Amos
“We’d like to see schools do a better job of teaching black history—and not just at Black History Month,” said Cauline Yates.
Rising Charlottesville High senior Zyahna Bryant echoed the call for “more comprehensive black history” in schools. She, too, pointed out that the lynching of John Henry James “was not one singled-out event,” but is part of a history of white supremacy seen today in mass incarceration and “students of color failed over and over again.”
Bryant said the Real Justice PAC lobbies prosecutors. “I met with [Charlottesville Commonwealth’s Attorney] Joe Platania about how we can get people of color out of the criminal justice system,” she said.
Zyahna Bryant was one of the high school students who made the pilgrimage. Eze Amos
DeTeasa Gathers and Patsy Goolsby were among the 21 faculty and staff UVA sent on the pilgrimage, which they describe as transformative and enlightening, while evoking feelings of anger, pain and shame, empathy and gratitude. “The pilgrimage was hard,” said Goolsby.
“Did I really miss all of this in history?” Gathers asked. “Did I miss what happened to my people?”
“The original sin was not slavery, but the narrative of white supremacy,” said Goolsby. She says European-Americans have a “moral obligation” to work with other white people to understand this history.
The message they bring back to UVA: “Acknowledge people of color’s ability to serve in leadership roles,” said Gathers, to applause from the audience. Blacks have to work twice as hard as whites and “this is UVA’s reality.”
Civil rights is an ongoing effort, she added, and “make sure everyone votes.”
Her husband Don Gathers, chair of the city’s Blue Ribbon Commission on Race, Memorials and Public Spaces and member of the newly formed Charlottesville Police Civilian Review Board, says he was struck by the interactions among the people sharing a journey that affected them “spiritually, psychologically and emotionally.”
The pilgrims visited places where they experienced joy, sorrow, lamentations and anger, “all fueled with clear recognition of the persistence of white supremacy over our history,” he says.
Gathers was moved by “sacred moments”: seeing the struggle for justice, standing in front of August 12 victim Heather Heyer’s picture at the Southern Poverty Law Center, standing in the pulpit at Dexter Baptist Church in Montgomery where Dr. Martin Luther King preached and marching across the Pettus bridge. “We don’t get this kind of learning in schools,” he said.
“The future is long and the work is never done,” said Gathers. “Those on the pilgrimage can no longer sit on the periphery. We are forever changed.”
Soil from the lynching site of John Henry James joins hundreds of others such testaments to hate at the Equal Justice Initiative's Legacy Museum in Montgomery.
Photo Eze Amos
Next to nothing is known about John Henry James—not his age, his family nor his occupation. All that is certain is that he died on July 12, 1898, at the hands of a Charlottesville lynch mob.
And that murder is what led to around 100 people from Charlottesville to travel four days to Montgomery, Alabama, to add, on the 120th anniversary of his death, soil from his slaying site to the collection at the Equal Justice Initiative, which opened a memorial to the nation’s lynchings earlier this year.
Several local officials, including City Councilor Kathy Galvin and Albemarle supervisors Diantha McKeel and Ned Gallaway, as well as 5th District Democratic candidate Leslie Cockburn, flew in for the ceremonial delivery of the soil to the Equal Justice Initiative.
But the biggest headliner was EJI founder, public interest attorney and social justice activist Bryan Stevenson, who, it turns out, had a role in the Charlottesville group ultimately being there.
EJI founder and criminal/social justice activist Bryan Stevenson says white supremacy’s justification of slavery is what got us into the situation we’re in today. photo Eze Amos
That stemmed from his visit to the Virginia Festival of the Book in March 2016—three days before then vice-mayor Wes Bellamy called for the removal of statues of Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.
After Stevenson spoke to the crowd of pilgrims, Bellamy stood up and said he’d been at that book festival event and had asked Stevenson whether Charlottesville should remove its Confederate monuments.
“If you wouldn’t have said yes, we wouldn’t be here now,” said Bellamy.
Stevenson reminded the pilgrims that what happened in Charlottesville August 12 was part of the country’s legacy of racial bias, starting from its earliest days, which made the new nation founded on notions of equality “comfortable with 200 years of slavery.”
Said Stevenson, “We’ve all been infected and compromised and contaminated by this legacy, this history of racial inequality.”
And changing that narrative of white supremacy got to the heart of the pilgrimage to commemorate a victim of racial terrorism. “You are modeling what that change is about,” said Stevenson.
Within the soil transported to Montgomery are the sweat, blood and tears of those who were forced to exist upon it, said Stevenson. “In the soil there is the possibility of something new we can create.”
Kevin McFadden contemplates the wall of lynching soil at the Equal Justice Initiative offices. Many more jars are at the Legacy Museum. staff photo
The delivery of the soil became the much-belated funeral service for John Henry James, and clergy members who have been part of the pilgrimage carried out a requiem for James. There were tears, sobs and a literal “Kumbaya”—singing moment.
Activist Cynthia Neff and 5th District Democratic candidate Leslie Cockburn flew in for the final leg of the Charlottesville pilgrimage. staff photo
The emotional rollercoaster didn’t stop there. Next up was the EJI’s Legacy Museum, which is on a site that imprisoned enslaved black people before going to market during Montgomery’s human trafficking peak.
For pilgrim Anne Lassere, in a week of hitting every civil rights museum between Charlottesville and Montgomery, the Legacy Museum was the most profound because of “seeing the line so clearly drawn from slavery to mass incarceration.”
She’s also glad it used the word “terrorism” in describing the effects of white supremacy in the subjugation of the black population through lynching and daily Jim Crow humiliations.
Mayor Nikuyah Walker photographs statues at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice that depict the stark brutality of selling human beings. staff photo
And then there was the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, both a commemoration of the more than 4,400 known people lynched and a hall of shame to those places where the murders occurred. More than 800 coffin-like rectangles hang bearing a county and state’s name, as well as that of the lynched.
The memorial site itself evokes Maya Lin’s Vietnam memorial. “It’s just sublime,” said Louis Nelson, UVA vice provost and professor of architectural history. “Its simplicity is its genius.”
Each of the 800 hanging blocks at the Equal Justice initiative’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice represents a county in the U.S. where a lynching was documented. Photo Exe Amos
The day began with a couple of other notable civil rights landmarks: the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Civil Rights Memorial Center and Dexter Street Baptist Church, headquarters for the Montgomery bus boycott and congregation of the 26-year-old Martin Luther King.
“What I like about Southern Poverty Law is that they got the story right,” said Susan Bro, Heather Heyer’s mother, who is on the pilgrimage. “She wasn’t a leader. She wasn’t singled out. She was an ordinary citizen.”
Susan Bro at Southern Poverty Law Center notes the day—July 12—is about the lynching of John Henry James, and wonders about his killers praying before the lynching. Photo Eze Amos
At the historic Baptist church with its magnificent acoustics, music inevitably became part of the visit, starting with 15-year-old Dante Walker, son of the mayor, playing the piano as the Charlottesvillians streamed in.
Church tour director Wanda Howard Battle, before instructing the group to hold hands and sing “We Shall Overcome,” said, “I pray that when you leave this place today, you’ll never be the same.”
And that, undoubtedly, was the theme for #CvillePilgrimage.
Read more in next week’s C-Ville Weekly.
Updated July 15.
Day 4 #CvillePilgrimage: Into the belly of ‘Bombingham’
The violence in the civil rights struggle got worse the further into the Deep South one went. It doesn’t get much worse than at 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. Sony Prosper and Abby Cox leave the church. Photo Eze Amos
No matter how many civil rights museums one sees, Birmingham and Montgomery always have starring roles as the hearts of segregation darkness. On July 10, the fourth day on the road to commemorate the lynching of John Henry James, the Charlottesville pilgrimage started in Birmingham with that most heart-rending of civil rights landmarks: 16th Street Baptist Church, where a bombing murdered four girls on a Sunday morning in 1963.
“I don’t think anything moved me more than thinking about those four little girls,” said retired pastor and pilgrim David Garth.
The Charlottesville group learned that during the 1950s and ‘60s, Birmingham’s nickname was “Bombingham.” Bombings were quite the terror tool for white supremacists there, and Bethel Baptist Church, led by activist Fred Shuttlesworth, was bombed three times.
“I thought it was one, but it was repeated bombings,” said Garth.
That surprised Myra Anderson, too. “To hear this church got bombed twice and this other church got bombed, I was like, my God,” she said.
For Anderson, 16th Street Baptist was the hardest of all the sites thus far. “Knowing the history of the church and what happened there—it was overwhelming. My heart felt heavy.”
The church is the center of the African American community, said Anderson, making it all the more appalling that hate would invade that sanctity. During a film about 16th Street, she watched the choir continue to sing and the congregation continue to move forward.
“I cried,” she said. “I cried for my mother and for my grandmother. I just sat there and cried.”
At the same time, “I also felt inspired learning about the role young people played.”
Among sites the pilgrimage has visited like Danville and Greensboro, students played key roles in the struggle for civil rights because many adults feared losing their jobs if they protested unjust laws and treatment. Students, who didn’t have mortgages to pay and families to support, were ready to take up the fight.
Armand Bragg was the tour guide at 16th Street Baptist and an activist as a college student. “I was a freshman in college and happy to get out of class,” he joked—more than once. But that wasn’t the only reason.
“”Dr. [Martin Luther] King could make the hair stand up on the back of your neck,” he said.
Birmingham native Dr. Clifton Latting, whom several on the pilgrimage had met during a trip in May to Charlottesville’s sister city in Ghana, agreed that people would “jump in the fire” if King said to do so.
Latting didn’t protest in high school, he said, because he was afraid and thought white people were cruel—and he wanted to go to college. But he understood the anger that fueled others. “I sat in the segregated part of the bus and I had to stand up if a white person wanted a seat,” he said.
“We couldn’t stop to urinate between Birmingham and Montgomery” because the available restrooms were white only. “Students were the driving spirit that changed that.”
Across the street from the church is the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. For Robert Lewis, pastor at Hinton Avenue United Methodist Church, “That one hit me the hardest of any so far.” That it followed the bombed church probably contributed to that, he acknowledged.
If there’s a civil rights museum, there’s likely a Klan robe like this one at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. Staff photo
When the exhibit reached the inevitable KKK robe, seeing “such clearly orchestrated brutality on the part of whites, I wanted to go around and apologize to every person of color on the trip,” said Lewis. “It made me angry that the onus of responsibility is passed forward.”
He mentioned Dr. Latting: “His view of white people was that they were brutal, violent people—uncivilized.”
Further commemorating white-perpetrated racial terrorism, across the street from the civil rights institute is Kelly Ingram Park, where Bull Connor sicced dogs and turned fire hoses on protesters. Statues depict those low points in humanity.
Art imitates life in Birmingham’s Kelly Ingram Park. Photo Eze Amos
In an interview with a CBS42, Tanesha Hudson said she’d always wanted to come to Birmingham.
“We have to continue the fight our ancestors started for us,” she said.
Tanesha Hudson talks to a Birmingham television station. Staff photo
Being in the actual spaces where civil rights struggles took place galvanized those on the pilgrimage, which took an unscheduled detour to Selma to walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where peaceful protesters seeking the right to vote were savagely beaten by police on Bloody Sunday—March 7, 1965.
Those on the pilgrimage to Montgomery detoured to walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. staff photo
The two-lane roads to Dallas County, which had the lowest percentage of registered black voters in Alabama, made it all-too-easy to imagine civil rights activists being murdered by angry white supremacists.
Driving into Selma, with its many boarded up houses and buildings, Robert King observed from the bus, “So this is what hate did to this town.”.
Walking across the iconic bridge, Rabbi Tom Gutherz reminded, “You’ve got to think of the footsteps.”
A chorus of “Freedom” rang out.
Memorials lined the other side of the bridge. One was to the Tomb of the Unknown Slave, which had sacred objects typical of Western Africa, such as coins, rhythm instruments and cowrie shells, said Jalane Schmidt, a pilgrimage organizer and religious studies professor at UVA. A marker to the multiple victims of lynching had been installed by the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, which was the Charlottesville delegation’s ultimate destination.
The pilgrims gathered on a gazebo near the bridge, held hands and were led in prayer by Don Gathers. Some prayed for the sacredness of the place. Another prayer was in “recognition of those upon whose shoulders we stand.’
Tears were dabbed, “Amen” was sung and then, with a chorus of “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around,” the group got on the bus and headed to Montgomery.
Correction: John Henry James and Fred Shuttlesworth were misidentified in the original story.
Day 3 #CvillePilgrimage: Atlanta and the MLK effect
Miriam DaSilva experiences what it was like to sit-in at a segregated lunch counter. Photo Eze Amos
The cart was difficult, but it was the lunch counter that had many in in tears.
The Charlottesville pilgrimage to the Equal Justice Initiative’s lynching memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, to deliver soil from the site of the mob murder of John Henry James began its third day—July 10—in Atlanta, where it’s all Martin Luther King Jr. all the time. And that means at both the King Center and the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, the travelers got to experience his life and legacy—and his assassination and funeral—twice in one day.
Song is a nonviolent protest tactic, and on at least one of the two pilgrimage buses, song has become part of the journey. As the bus loaded up to leave the hotel, Sojourners’ Reverend Susan Minasian, a member of the pilgrimage’s clergy team, led a round of the South African hymn “Siyahamba”—”We are marching in the light of God”—in both English and Zulu.
At the King Center, Atlanta City Councilor Amir Farokhi, who represents the MLK district, welcomed the Charlottesville delegation.
Atlanta City Councilor welcomed the Charlottesville pilgrims at the King Center. Eze Amos
“I would presume it’s as much about healing as it is about empowerment,” he said of the pilgrimage. “We’re inspired by the work you’re doing. Charlottesville is the tip of the spear.”
Coretta Scott King was responsible for the area where the sprawling center is located becoming designated a historic district, thanks to her friend, President Jimmy Carter. It became a national park this year. She also lobbied to have her husband’s birthday become a national holiday.
In the MLK museum was the wooden cart that carried King’s body through Atlanta drawn by mules for his funeral. Vizena Howard had been to the King Center before, but on this trip, “that cart—that bothered me,” she said.
Elsie Pickett said visiting the King site made her think, “We are still trying to find that dream Martin Luther King preached about in 1963.”
The Charlottesville pilgrims lunched in the Sweet Auburn district, where Coretta Scott King founded the Historic District Development Corporation, a nonprofit community development corporation to preserve and revitalize the MLK Historic District without displacing residents.
“So much of the Charlottesville story has affinity with Atlanta,” said pilgrimage organizer and African American Heritage director Andrea Douglas. “We have that historic fabric. We don’t have that recovery.”
Affordable housing is very much in the mind of Charlottesville—and Atlanta, where the historic district’s redevelopment has had the unintended effect of spawning gentrification.
Mayor Nikuyah Walker noted that when urban renewal claimed the historic black community Vinegar Hill in Charlottesville, the property “was stolen” from its owners.
“We can’t take these trips and kumbaya it” without going back to Charlottesville, having conversations and doing the hard work of coming up with an affordable housing solution, she said.
Some were exhausted by the time the buses reached the National Center for Civil and Human Rights around 4pmm, but that visit turned out to be, for many, the most powerful of the six sites the group had visited so far.
An interactive lunch counter lets visitors experience all too uncomfortably what it was like to be an African American sitting in at a segregated diner. Participants put on headphones, closed their eyes and could feel the hot breath of hate in their ears and menacing kicks to the stools on which they sat.
Most of the pilgrims tried it out and a number left the counter in tears.
“This was a little more emotional to sit down at that table,” said Courtney Maupin. “I ended up crying.”
Courtney Maupin and daughter Jakia after experiencing the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta. Photo Eze Amos
And the “step-by-step exhibits leading up to the assassination of Dr. King, with him doing his eulogy months before, this one was more intense,” she said.
Her daughter, 13-year-old Jakia Maupin, was more impressed with the K(NO)W Justice K(NO)W Peace exhibit the day before in Charlotte at the Levine Museum of the New South, which assembled photographs of more than 50 people shot by police—with no convictions. “That was my favorite,” she said.
Back on the bus, Dona Wylie, 74, felt “overwhelmed with a sense of grief.” She graduated high school in 1962 and was aware of the civil rights struggles going on at that time. “It made me feel so sad we’re where we are, that things haven’t moved more than they have.”
Some solace was to be found at Sweet Auburn Seafood—besides the killer shrimp and grits and peach cobbler. A DJ had set up as the group readied to leave and an impromptu dance party ensued.
The Reverend Susan Minasian says dancing is a spiritual act. Photo Eze Amos
As civil rights activist Joyce Johnson advised at the Beloved Community Center in Greensboro, you’ve always got to have a song you can sing.
Or in this case, a dance.
Rosia Parker boogies on out of Sweet Auburn Seafood. Photo Eze Amos
Day 2 #CvillePilgrimage: First sit-in and Greensboro’s August 12
Joyce and Nelson Johnson’s ‘eerily familiar story” of watching friends and family killed by white supremacists touched pilgrims from Charlottesville. Photo Eze Amos
“Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around.” July 9, the second day of traveling for Charlottesvillians on a pilgrimage to Montgomery, began with a song from Joyce Johnson, a native Virginian who was present in Greensboro when the Ku Klux Klan and Nazis shot and killed five activists at a black public housing complex in 1979.
Johnson and her husband, Nelson, founded the Beloved Community Center. They were Communist Workers Party activists at the time of the murders, and after two white juries found the KKKers not guilty, they organized a truth and reconciliation commission.
Beloved’s focus these days is training and healing, said Joyce Johnson, a mission that struck a chord with the August 12-scarred pilgrims from Charlottesville.
The story of the Greensboro murders by white supremacists and lack of police intervention seemed to activist Don Gathers an “eerily familiar story” 39 years later. While Charlottesville became international news, city fathers in Greensboro preferred not to dwell on November 3, 1979, a date that’s as notorious with the Johnsons as August 12 is in Charlottesville.
Don Gathers is embraced by Beloved Center’s Nelson Johnson. Photo Eze Amos
Much like Danville, which the pilgrimage visited the day before and where Bloody Monday occurred in 1963, many on the trip had not heard of the Greensboro KKK murders.
“My two children saw their Auntie Sandy with a bullet between her eyes,” said Nelson Johnson. The story got worse. Johnson was jailed with a bond double that of the accused Klan killers and “demonized,” he said, with police putting out a false narrative that the incident was a shootout.
The only legal satisfaction for the family of one of the victims was a civil suit that found the Klan and Greensboro police liable, the latter for their deliberate absence, said the Johnsons.
The questions from the Charlottesville contingent Joyce Johnson summarized as, “what do you do?” and “how do you do it?” Said Johnson, “I’ve been there.” She recounted being a 17-year-old from Blackwell outside of Richmond and thinking, “We’ll get the country straight in a few years.”
Albemarle Supervisor Norman Dill at Beloved Community Center in Greensboro. Photo Eze Amos
Community is the key to change, she said. Interact with people. “You use all avenues.” And have a song you can sing.
Nelson Johnson once met with a Klan grand dragon who was coming back to Greensboro. “This was an effort to speak to the soul that was there,” he said. “That may not work for everyone.”
And initiatives like the Charlottesville pilgrimage is another path. “What you’re doing today is almost off the radar,” said Johnson.
Many in the pilgrimage were moved by the Nelsons determination in the fight for civil rights over the years. Sitting in the front row, Ashlee Bellamy could see the emotion and the tears in Joyce Johnson’s eyes. “Here in Greensboro, they’re still dealing with that,” said Bellamy.
A few blocks away is the Woolworth’s where four A&T University students staged the first student sit-in at the segregated lunch counter on February 1, 1960, which sparked a wave of resistance around the country. The former five and dime is now the International Civil Rights Center and Museum,
The original lunch counter is still there and the building itself is an artifact, one that was nearly torn down to build a parking garage, according to the tour guide LT.
“Segregation is the sequel to the movie called slavery,” said LT, who traced the beginnings of the civil rights movement and then went back to expose the racism, hatred and hypocrisy woven into the original fabric of the country, citing the words of Charlottesville’s own slave-owning progenitor Thomas Jefferson: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
Louis Nelson, UVA professor of architectural history and vice provost for academic outreach, has visited the much larger National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, and he said he was impressed with the Greensboro civil rights museum, particularly its depiction of America’s racial terror. Fractured images evoke “the shattered glass of physical violence, and the powerful effect of violence shattering lives and families,” he said.
The decision to exhibit mutilated bodies is one often avoided, he said. “The curators made the decision the season of submitting to delicate sensibilities is over.”
Pilgrimage organizer Jalane Schmidt, who got the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society’s KKK robes out of the closet last summer, studies a Klan hood at the Levine Museum of the New South in Charlotte. Photo Eze Amos
On the road to the Levine Museum of the New South in Charlotte, a gospel sing along began that continued later on as the pilgrimage buses motored to Atlanta.
Updated 7:42am
Updated 9:38am with additional photos
Day 1 #CvillePilgrimage: From Civil War to civil rights
Mayor Nikuyah Walker and Councilor Wes Bellamy pause at the Bloody Monday historical marker in Danville. Eze Amos
Ninety-six Charlottesvillians boarded buses on the anniversary of the July 8 KKK rally a year ago and headed to Loyal White Knights country—but did not stop in Pelham, North Carolina, on the first day of their six-day pilgrimage to deliver soil from the lynching site of John Henry James to the Equal Justice Initiative memorial in Montgomery, Alabama.
Martin Luther King called Danville the worst segregated city he’d seen in the south. It’s where the Confederate cabinet met for the last time before General Robert E. Lee surrendered in 1865. It’s also the site of Bloody Monday, a 1963 civil rights demonstration where 47 protesters were beaten by police.
Confederate president Jefferson Davis stayed in the Italianate mansion that was the home of William Sutherlin. It’s now the Danville Museum of Fine Arts and History, and Civil War history and civil rights history coexist there—at times uneasily.
“That started out bad and turned out well,” said Charlottesville artist LeVonne Yountz.
A film about slave-owning tobacco magnate Sutherlin produced by the Daughters of the Confederacy did not sit well with some in the Charlottesville contingent, including City Councilor Wes Bellamy, who denounced being subjected to a “culturally incompetent whitewashing” on the anniversary of the Klan rally.
Wes Bellamy objects to learning the history of slaveowner William Sutherlin in his mansion, now the Danville Museum of Fine Art and History. Eze Amos
“You’re being disrespectful,” countered Lorie Strother, who said it was unfair to “come into their house and raise hell.”
Lorie Strother found Bellamy’s outburst “disrespectful.” Eze Amos
The mood calmed after a panel of civil rights activists, who were teenagers in 1963, talked about trying to end segregation with peaceful protests that brought movement leaders, including King, to Danville.
Pastor Thurman Echols was 16 and “one of the first to be arrested.” Police went to his house and arrested his mother and father, he said, which happened when the demonstrators were underage.
Dorothy Batson, Carolyn Wilson and Thurman Echols were teenagers in 1963 when peaceful protests in Danville turned violent. Eze Amos
Carolyn Wilson was 15 years old and described being taught by Andrew Young “how to curl up in a ball so you wouldn’t get as severely hurt when beaten.” And she assured the survivors of August 12 that just because she followed King’s practice of nonviolence didn’t mean she didn’t want to beat someone. “We were spat on and rocks were thrown on us,” she said.
Dorothy Batson was 17 when she was dragged from Belk—but had someone ready to step in to lead the demonstration after her arrest. “Be organized,” she advised.
She went on to organize against the poll tax and to teach people how to read and write so they could register to vote, because literacy tests were another way to disenfranchise black voters.
“That’s what we went through,” she said. “It hurt my heart that you wanted to walk out because you didn’t like what you heard.”
A Charlottesville teen said she could see going back to fighting for civil rights, which drew chuckles from the panelists, one of whom said the battle had never ended.
The museum was the site of a battle over a Confederate flag that flew outside in 2015. The building is owned by Danville and the city council refused to allow its removal—until the Charleston church massacre.
Another traveler asked what was being done about all the Confederate flags that went up when the museum flag came down, including the largest one in the country on U.S. 29 that cost $30,000 and is on private property, according to Martinsville Vice Mayor Chad Martin.
“No industries want to come to Danville,” said Pastor Echols, who suggested not supporting business owners that fly the flag.
The buses were loaded and had left the museum when they pulled into a parking lot so pilgrims could see the Bloody Monday historical marker in downtown Danville.
Earlier in the day, the pilgrimage stopped at Appomattox, where Lee surrendered and where former 5th District congressman Tom Perriello and his nephew joined the group for a bit. Perriello recalled first visiting the national park as a Boy Scout, and said the historical retelling had gotten more accurate over the years.
Tom Perriello talks to Susan Bro, and thanks her for trying to turn the death of her daughter Heather Heyer August 12 into something “powerful and positive.” Eze Amos
Historical interpretation was the topic after leaving Appomattox, where the focus was very much on the military history, with very little on the enslaved people who were there. “I would have liked a little bit more,” said Virginia Humanities’ Kevin McFadden.
And his colleague Justin Reid called it a “missed opportunity” and said Historic Jamestowne is “cutting edge” on the interpretation of African American history while Monticello is incorporating that history throughout the site.
Historical interpretation is likely to remain a theme. Next stop: Greensboro, North Carolina, home of the first lunch counter sit-in.
Correction: The original version should have identified Historic Jamestowne as doing historic interpretation that Justin Reid said was “cutting edge.”
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.”
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.”
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 tarpsremoved 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, CityCouncil 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.”
