Black History Month

What Happens to History When African American History Month is Over?

~ Donna Drew Sawyer ~ Leave a comment
Detail of Unsung Founders Memorial by Melinda Stuart via Flickr

I have very mixed feelings about National African American History Month, also called Black History Month, which is why I haven’t added posts to my blog during the month of February. Historian Carter G. Woodson and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History suggested the week that became the month of February’s annual observance of important people and events in the history of the African diaspora. Since the history of African-Americans has been the hidden and marginalized history of the United States of America, I believe there should be full integration of African-Americans in American history. I wonder if giving the history of African-Americans one month on the calendar and “American History” all year all the time, further marginalizes the important people, events, contributions and sacrifices February is supposed to celebrate.

Some say take the month and really celebrate; others say you can’t, in just a month’s time, celebrate or even tell how America became America on the backs of people who still struggle for respect and a fair share of her riches.  I raise these issues though I don’t pretend to have the definitive answer to this historical equity dilemma. What I choose to do is share what I know and what I find out about Black History in America—my history—throughout the year.

Belle da Costa Greene by Paul Cesar Helleu c. 1913

There is so much we don’t know about ourselves that even with one daily revelation, I doubt we’d ever run out of people, events, contributions and sacrifices to share. In just this past year, I wrote about Eugene Jacque Bullard, Maggie Lena Walker, Belle da Costa Greene and important places like Richmond’s Jackson Ward and Evergreen Cemetery, just from the research I uncovered while writing my novel, Provenance.

Detail of the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial in Boston.

For Veterans Day I wrote about the military prowess of African-Americans in America’s fight for freedom—from the Revolutionary War to today. I rejoiced when Provenance was a finalist for the 2016 Phillis Wheatley Award because it was an honor to place in a competition that bears the name of the first published African American female writer.  I said goodbye to Barack Obama, a Black man and one of the greatest Presidents the United States has ever had.

All of these people, places, events, contributions, and sacrifices are too much history for a mere month, so I will continue to write about American history in all of its colorful glory when the spirit and history move me, be it February or any other month of the year.

Evergreen Cemetery – The Significance of a Final Resting Place

~ Donna Drew Sawyer ~ 1 Comment

During slavery, there was little if any dignity for African-Americans – even in death. It was against the law for African-Americans to assemble or meet as a group, so slaves were often buried without ceremony, on non-crop producing land, in graves that were often unmarked. With the end of slavery, African-Americans in the South were free to assemble, live as families, celebrate life and mourn death though segregation now stretched from birth past death; from the place you were born to where you could live, to your final resting place. For approximately 5,000 African-Americans, that final resting place was Evergreen Cemetery.

As early as 1891, just a 26 years after the end of the Civil War, when African Africans in Richmond, the former seat of the Confederacy, buried their loved ones and commemorated their lives with headstones, they did so in Evergreen Cemetery. Really four cemeteries on 59 acres— Evergreen, East End Cemetery, Oakwood Colored Section and the Colored Pauper’s cemetery— were private cemeteries maintained by the Evergreen Cemetery Association. These burial places served as the final resting place for many of Richmond’s prominent African American citizens. It is in Evergreen, designed to be the African American’s community’s equivalent of Richmond’s Hollywood Cemetery which was only for whites, that Maggie L. Walker and John Mitchell, Jr., who I mentioned in last week’s post about Jackson Ward, are buried.

Evergreen Cemetery in Provenance

I learned about Evergreen Cemetery in my research for my novel, Provenance, when a prominent character’s death became a pivotal scene in the book. On his deathbed, my character, Hank Whitaker, reveals to his unsuspecting family that he is really a black man who has been passing for white. His mother-in-law, Charlotte, tries to quickly mitigate the effect that Hank’s news will have on her daughter and grandson. The following excerpts from Provenance is an example of one of the ways used Evergreen to convey how society used race and class to determine the worth of a human being.

If they were going to salvage anything, she would have to move fast. By tomorrow, Hank’s deathbed confession would be rumor. Within three days, the efficiency of gossip in Richmond society would ensure that Hank Whitaker’s passing was all people talked about. Charlotte was not about to wait for talk to turn to action – there were severe consequences for colored folks who tried to pass for white. She’d seen trees bearing the bodies of black men for doing a lot less than Hank had. “They will not take their vengeance out on Maggie and Lance, no matter what Hank did,” Charlotte vowed.

       §›

She looked at the piece of paper crumpled in her hand. She’d gotten the number of an undertaker from a colored nurse in the hospital’s segregated ward.

“Go to the hospital and get him tonight,” she instructed the undertaker after giving him the pertinent details.

“Bury him in Evergreen,” she said referring to the Negro cemetery in Richmond’s East End. She didn’t tell him Hank Whitaker was her daughter’s husband, she told them she was paying for the burial because his family couldn’t afford it. “We’re not having a service. I’ll come around tomorrow to pay whatever it costs.” With that, she had taken care of the inconvenient remains of Hank Whitaker.

§›

She alone had presided over Hank’s burial. With the scent of freshly dug earth in the air, the two gravediggers lowered the plain pine coffin into the new grave.

“Are you sure you won’t be wantin’ a marker for the grave?” the undertaker asked her a second time. “Evergreen’s sixty acres, Mrs. Bennett. If you ever want to find this grave again—” Charlotte shook her head, no, before the man could finish.

“Then will you be sayin’ a few words before they close the grave?” he asked, hoping this woman was not as cold and heartless as she appeared. Again, Charlotte declined.

“Just cover him up,” she said. “Cover him up good.”

Evergreen Cemetery Today

800px-Evergreen_cemetery_rvaEvergreen was founded and maintained by the families of the people who were buried there. Unlike the white cemeteries in Richmond, Evergreen received no public funds or support. As African-American families left the South and integration diminished the need for segregated facilities and services, sacred places like Evergreen soon fell into disrepair. Today Evergreen Cemetery is abandoned, overgrown and vandalized. Abandoned Virginia #22 – Evergreen Cemetery Richmond by Brian Sterowski, filmed in July of 2015, shows Evergreen as it is today.

A recent photo essay in The Nation, Reclaiming Black History, One Grave at a Time by Brian Palmer and Erin Hollaway Palmer, is a powerful statement on the years of official neglect that, along with the English ivy and other invasive plants, have swallowed the East End Cemetery of Evergreen Cemeteries. The history of prominent early 20th century African-Americans and World War II veterans buried there is now further obscured by the indignity of also having their graves buried. A BBC film by Colm O’ Molloy is about photographer, Brian Palmer, who is working to document the graves in East End Cemetery as a way to raise the awareness of this loss of history and heritage.

However bleak the current state of Evergreen Cemetery, there may still be a future to the past this historic site represents. Several historic and civic associations, as well as local college students and community volunteers, are working to save the history that Evergreen represents for all Americans. A video of Evergreen Cemetery Historic Marker Dedication by the National Park Service features magnificent images of Evergreen’s history and a glimpse of what its future could hold.

Here I Lay My Burdens Down: A History of the Black Cemeteries of Richmond, Virginia by Veronica Davis is the resource for more information about Evergreen Cemetery.

Jackson Ward – The Safe Haven of a Segregated Homeplace

~ Donna Drew Sawyer ~ Leave a comment
By Morgan Riley
Houses in Jackson Ward By Morgan Riley

Geography plays a large part in Provenance as my characters search for a place to call home spans   continents. However, the search begins in the Deep South, Richmond Virginia in the early 1900’s, only a few decades after the Civil War. Though African-Americans were freed from slavery, it would be decades before the law ensured their right to live free. So, African-Americans carved out safe havens for themselves; segregated communities were there they lived, loved, played, prayed and thrived, becoming the Homeplace for generations of black families. In Richmond, that place was Jackson Ward, a community on the edge of downtown.

Jackson Ward, nicknamed the “Harlem of the South,” was the largest African American community in Richmond and the center for their commercial and entertainment activity. Because of segregation and in spite of it, communities like Jackson Ward thrived as a self-sustaining economy pulsing with black commerce including banks, retail stores, restaurants, real estate offices, barbers, hair salons and even a nationally renowned theater, the Hippodrome. African-Americans designed, built and lived in row and town homes that are now architecturally important for their cast iron porches and columns. They worshiped in churches that dated back to 1857 and, schools and a library educated the community’s black residents. An armory built in 1895 in Jackson Ward is the oldest in the country built for African American troops.

Jackson Ward, considered the “Wall Street of the South,” had a thriving banking and insurance industry. Residents like John Mitchell, Jr., an early civil rights activist and editor of the Richmond Planet newspaper, founded the Mechanics Savings Bank. Maggie L. Walker, the first woman of any race to charter an American bank, Consolidated Bank & Trust, served as its president. She also founded the St. Luke’s Penny Savings Bank, which helped more than 600 African-Americans become homeowners.

Jackson Ward MarkerIn Provenance, Jackson Ward is home to Mrs. Delora ‘Del’ Holder, a character that resonates with so many readers. She is the moral center of the book, a well of wisdom and humanity that sustains a family in their most difficult time. Del’s home and family in Jackson Ward are what sustained her. While Del is a fictional character, real places like Jackson Ward sustained people of color. In the relative safety of these segregated communities, though many were the target of racial violence, they nevertheless offered communal nurturing and concern that was not available elsewhere. They gave African-Americans an environment in which to exceed the potential others believed they did not have.

Like many black communities, Jackson Ward was diminished, however not completely destroyed when, in the 1950’s, it was divided during the construction of the Eisenhower Interstate Highway system. It was designated a National Historic Landmark district in 1978 and is currently enjoying a resurgence. Maggie L. Walker’s home is a National Historic Site run by the Park Service and there are historic walking tours through Jackson Square.