City wants to tell the stories of its Black citizens

Many individuals stay unaware of the wealthy historical past engulfing a key Virginia metropolis, and efforts are underway to alter that.

In response to The Washington Publish, officers in Alexandria discovered lower than 30 years in the past {that a} gasoline station was constructed on a large burial floor for Black People who escaped slavery through the Civil Struggle. Elements of the town’s historical past are identified — a church that George Washington and Robert E. Lee frequented continues to be open for worship, for instance — however guests might stroll by means of Black neighborhoods within the metropolis’s bustling downtown and waterfront with out ever studying their names.

Whereas the town has archives stuffed with paperwork relationship again to the 1800s, it neglects to inform the tales of Black Alexandrians who’ve lengthy been the topic of authorized discrimination. Rose Dawson, director of the Alexandria Library, determined about six months in the past that she would change that.

The library’s particular collections part incorporates greater than 50,000 footage, plans and manuscript collections on the histories of Alexandria and Virginia. Dawson began an try to extend these collections after talking with a former library board member and requesting photographs and papers that inform the historical past of the Black group from the town’s residents and their descendants.

Lots of of individuals confirmed up on the metropolis’s first Black Household Reunion on Saturday. Invoice Euille, the town’s first Black mayor, and Char McCargo Bah, a genealogist with deep roots within the Black group, aided the outreach initiative.

“Now we have holes in our historical past that, fairly actually, had been intentional in a variety of locations,” stated Alexandria Mayor Justin Wilson, in accordance with WUSA9 Information.

The reunion venue — in entrance of the Kate Waller Barrett department library — was house to one of many nation’s earliest sit-ins to denounce segregation in 1939 and a nod to Alexandria’s uncomfortable angle towards the town’s Black historical past, in accordance with The Publish.

Beatrice Cross Taylor, 87, a lifelong resident of Alexandria who stated she is said to a few of the individuals interred within the uncared for Freedmen’s Cemetery, was amongst those that confirmed up on Saturday. Taylor and a handful of different attendees graduated from the segregated Parker-Grey faculties’ last highschool class in 1965.

Taylor that she had gathered classic photographs of the world previously generally known as “Coloured Rosemont” to undergo the library. The historic neighborhood, as soon as a refuge for Black working-class individuals, has vastly modified and is now surrounded by properties fetching over $1 million. 

Taylor and her 69-year-old niece, Yvette Lewis, stated many Black households had left Alexandria as a result of metropolis’s exorbitant property costs. They concurred that it was previous time to take motion to guard artifacts from the town’s Black historical past.

Jimmy Lewis, 76, who has no identified ties to Yvette Lewis, was holding a framed 1964 article from The Publish displaying him as a member of the All-Metropolitan Faculty Boy Squad of prime highschool basketball gamers from the District, Virginia and Maryland. He later performed for West Virginia College and went on to grow to be the inaugural head coach of the WNBA’s Washington Mystics. Janice Lewis Winters, his 84-year-old sister, was with him.

The 2 had been raised in Seminary, a traditionally Black neighborhood near the Virginia Theological Seminary, the place their grandfather served as a sexton. Their mom was a descendant of the Quander household, whose historical past in America dates again to the seventeenth century and features a lady enslaved at Mount Vernon, house to George Washington.

“We’re generally known as a historic city. We find out about George Washington and his hanging out at Gadsby’s [Tavern]. We find out about Robert E. Lee, that this was his childhood house,” Dawson stated, in accordance with The Publish. “However while you go to name out African People who performed a significant half within the historical past, you don’t get any names.”

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