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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
It’s a humid but not hot Saturday evening in early May. Jazz floats through the auditorium of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, filling in the spaces between laughter, delighted gasps and conversational murmurs in the next room. Dressed in brown slip-on shoes, relaxed fit jeans, a short-sleeved chambray shirt and a dark blue […]
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 […]
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, […]
She’d been here before. During a recent rehearsal of August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, a feeling of recollection overcame Brenda Brown-Grooms as she recited her lines. She was in character as Bertha Holly, wife of Seth Holly and a boarding house matron who likes to bake biscuits, make coffee and care for her […]
Lights go up on the wood-paneled stage in the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center auditorium to reveal the inside of a jitney cab station in Pittsburgh. It’s early fall 1977 and the Hill District, a group of neighborhoods that have long been the cultural center of black life in the city—full of black-owned homes, […]
It’s the time of year C-VILLE editorial staffers dread most: landing on the final names for our Power Issue, followed by the inevitable complaints that the list contains a bunch of white men. Sure, there are powerful women and people of color in Charlottesville. But when it comes down to it, it’s still mostly white […]
When Charlottesville decided to keep the historic Jefferson School and its prime real estate as a community center rather than selling it for condos, a complicated financial structure was required to make the $18 million rehab of the 1926 high school possible. Four years after the renovated school reopened in 2012, fundraising that was supposed […]
A forthcoming addition to the Downtown Mall will commemorate Vinegar Hill, the historically African-American neighborhood that saw displacement of 158 families when city residents voted to develop the land in the 1960s. Officially called Vinegar Hill Park, this chunk of real estate between the Omni hotel and Main Street Arena will house $15,000 worth of interpretive […]