So today, this morning, we're looking back to look forward, and we're going to start
with some history.
In 1865 was a historic year.
The Civil War is ending, Abraham Lincoln is dead, and along with 600,000 soldiers, it's
the end of slavery.
And a teacher named Anna Gardner was sent to Charlottesville to open a school for former
slaves.
This is Jefferson School, in honor of President Jefferson, of Thomas Jefferson, you know.
And the latest rage in technology is a process known as photography.
It's in its infancy, but for the next 150 years, the two would be connected, providing
an incredible insight into a historic time.
I want to welcome to the stage this morning Andrea Douglas, she's the executive director
of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center.
We're going to talk, because you've got so much stuff that we want to get on, and I'm
so excited to share it with this crowd.
Now this is not the woman who was sent here to open a school.
No, no, no, no, this is Isabella Gibbons.
Isabella Gibbons was a slave at the University of Virginia, and she was known to be a literate
person.
Her history begins, we come to understand who she is in about 1853.
We know that she was a nurse.
We know that she was a housekeeper in Pavilion 9 at the university.
And we know that why I don't start my story necessarily with Anna Gardner is because the
story that we're trying to tell is a story of African American people in this community
in Charlottesville.
And Isabella Gibbons is in effect the first African American teacher at the Jefferson
School.
She arrives just, the school opens nine months after Emancipation, and Isabella arrives there
after already having been teaching her own class.
1865, four million slaves are freed.
Freedmen's Bureau, which is not a do-gooder organization.
I mean, this is chartered by Congress as part of reconstruction to put everything back together.
And this school is open at a time when there are no public schools.
It's not a philosophy of public education.
If you're a white planter, you're educating your kid in a private school somewhere.
And so the notion that this is the first thing that happens is pretty extraordinary.
Right.
Well, you know, the extraordinary thing about it is, first of all, that the notion that
people are not being educated.
People are being educated.
They're getting their education surreptitiously.
There is a question about how Isabella herself is even educated.
Where is she getting her reading and writing?
We know that she was able to read for all of the slaves at the university, and she taught
people.
Her own daughter, Bella, who we'll see an image of her, says, I would not have known
how to read and write if my mother had not taught me secretly.
The Freedmen's Bureau should be distinguished from the Freedmen's Aid Society, because the
Freedmen's Aid Society are the northern societies.
In the case of Anna Gardner, it's Nantucket, it's Massachusetts, but they're in New York,
they're in Chicago, they're in other places, and they are, in fact, responsible for opening
schools.
And in Virginia, they open almost 300 schools.
Virginia is an interesting place because of the education, the emphasis on education,
and Freedmen's education.
They're teaching teachers here, and they're also teaching freed people.
And the other piece of this story that is interesting is our location.
Place means everything, right?
Monticello on the hill, the University of Virginia here in town.
The question becomes, who are these people?
Where do they go?
What do they do?
What do they look like?
And how do they begin their lives in 1865?
15,000 African-Americans are freed in 1865.
That's 54% of the population of Albemarle County at that point.
And you're piecing together this history, not just from written things, but there's
another amplification of it by sourcing photography.
Yeah.
As a matter of fact, the importance about photography, and what I hope that you all see
in the images, good, bad, or indifferent, is the way these images read.
They're not just looked at, but there's also a sense that people understand that there
image is being taken for a purpose.
And that as you're looking at these images, there is a sense that there is a realization
that they are historic, that they will be historic, and that others will know.
The image that we were just looking at is the image of the first class of Jefferson School
in 1867.
And more than anything, you get to see what black people look like.
And there's a lot of things in that photograph that I might not see that you have learned
a great deal from.
Sure.
Sure.
The thing on the wall is a wreath.
Inside that is another photograph.
It's Abraham Lincoln.
The reason why they're dressed, I mean, think about today, do you know how hot and steamy
it is today?
That's Virginia, right?
Look at how they're dressed.
You've got to ask yourself the question.
All of these young ladies are dressed with collars up to their necks, you know?
Anna Gardner right in the front there is in a great big hoop skirt in the middle of steamy
Virginia, you know?
Where are they getting the clothes from?
This is an image two years after Emancipation.
Well, they're getting the clothes from the Freedman's Aid Society in the North.
That's why they look the way they do.
That's northern dress.
So the other thing that's important about this image is what they hold.
They hold books.
They hold a globe.
They hold diplomas.
They stand very close to each other.
And this kind of order as you look at these images over and over and again, will tell you
something about the people and their sense of aspiration.
And then the importance of this moment in time and education.
And they're really, I believe, looking at these images.
These people are very much aware of their consumption.
Who's consuming this image?
Who's looking at this image?
And how should this image, what should it project?
Where did you find these photographs?
Well, you know, the notion of piecing the story together, these photographs actually
come from Massachusetts, these few.
They're not here.
I think that's the thing is they weren't something that was stowed away in a box in
the Jefferson School.
No, no.
And as a matter of fact, this history, you know, some of the things that you're going
to look at today, they're yearbook photographs.
They're not great photographs, but they're the photographs that define a people when images
fall in and out.
When the nature of the environment that they live in, the moment of the history, does not
allow their image to be taken.
And that the image then becomes very interior.
And so pulling that image out into a popular place means that you have to go into the interior
to get it.
This particular photograph, for instance, this class of 1908, the published images of
the person in the center, Benjamin Tonsler, are not very good.
And the moment that we found this image, I almost fell out of my chair, you know, because
it came out of someone's attic.
And the importance of that is someone held it, someone knew that it was important.
And that is what determines very often how you understand this history, the idea of understanding
that images are historic and tell you something.
Even the size, it's matted and mounted on a sturdy stock, it's probably an 8x10-ish
kind of image.
And this is not a throwaway little vernacular snapshot.
But a lot of these are vernacular to so many people, and you've gone backwards and found
the stories within them.
Yeah.
And I think, again, you know, the mythology of the text that is then verified by the
image is an important relationship.
That we understand, you know, for instance, there's an image here, J.S. Taylor.
Who was J.S. Taylor?
Well, we know he was in the Civil War.
We know that he left the Civil War with $1,000 in his pocket.
And we know ultimately he becomes one of the richest families in Charlottesville, families
of color in Charlottesville.
But no one ever saw what his image was like.
And again, the moment of finding that image that verifies who this person is moves us
out of a space of storytelling into another location that then adds additional clues.
The wonderful part for this group is that we all want our work to last, and we want
it to have meaning beyond what we do with it today.
And this really verifies it.
It really authenticates so much of what we do, and we just don't know how these things
are going to be perceived in 150 or 250 years if they last on whatever medium they're on.
This is a wonderful image just because of what you don't know about what's going on
in it, but there's something happening there in there.
Right.
Well, you know, you look at this young man that far on your far right there.
Something bad happened to those four or five boys right in that corner, and everyone else
is looking forward except one young lady over to the side who's like, you know, and, you
know, where's the teacher?
Well, we know where the teacher is.
She's out.
That's wonderful.
She's daring them to move.
This is one of my favorite pictures of all time.
Now, this is actually at what is now the existing building, which it didn't happen in the beginning.
There were several variations of it, but in the 20s, we now have the building that's either
you've been to for the workshops.
It's sort of across the staples parking lot if you keep going past the omni, but this
is the graduating class.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Unlike a lot of African-American schools, you know, the Jefferson School is not singular,
but it is interesting in its specialness.
One because of its longevity.
One because its history marks really very important pieces, parts of our life, you know.
1870 is when public school education begins in Charlottesville.
You know, the building of the Jefferson School occurs in 1926.
It is in 1929 on the credit of high school.
There are milestones that you can write in this building, and that is partly the reason
why we here in this town, and actually I would argue nationally, should really sort of look
at this school and this place and these images in a particular way.
They are images that allow us to understand the modern history of America, that allow
us to piece together those disparate parts that we are know through history books.
And these aren't the images of history books, but these are the images of real life.
And unlike other images, when you're going to a high school yearbook, what the high school
yearbook does is it pictures that life for us.
We all have high school yearbooks.
We all relate to those high school yearbooks.
So these high school yearbooks then become significant because of their historic import.
And this is a cultural center beyond just the public school.
We talked earlier that if we had looked three in 1926, it very likely could have been at
the Jefferson School.
Sure.
Sure.
This building is built in 1936.
The Jefferson School is built in 1926.
When it's built in 1926, it becomes the center of a community.
It becomes its art center.
It becomes its auditorium.
There was no auditorium before.
There was no meeting place.
There was no place where a group of people could come together and practice their culture
together.
And so what happens beyond that is that businesses and residences build up in the shadow of the
school.
A community is built.
Yes.
And the war may have ended in 1865 on the battlefield, but it continued in schools.
It continued in lunch counters, and for another hundred years you might argue it's still going
on.
Yeah.
I wanted to read something really quickly just to sort of orient ourselves even here.
This comes from the Charlottesville Chronicle in 1865.
It says, the Negroes are free.
They're learning to read, to think as time rolls on, they will aspire more and more.
Today freed men, tomorrow they'll contend for the right to testify in courts, then for
the right to be tried by their peers.
That is to sit on juries and on magistrates' benches, then for the right to practice in
our courts, then to hold office, then to be received in our parlors, and then to marry
our children.
That's 1865, right?
That's 150 years that we're living here, and so think about those images as they resonate
in that.
In 1875, we begin to hear about the building of a community.
We have things that say, we have our first doctor.
We have our first lawyer.
We have these things, so we know about them, but again, the images verify and tell you
what it looks like.
This is the image of Vinegar Hill post-1958.
This is what everybody was worried about, that you'd marry and build houses and a business
and a thriving thing, and when it gets to this point, they say, you know what, this
doesn't work, and we need to fix this.
This is urban blight, right?
Or it's not so much, well, yeah, it's a question of the ebb and flow of community, right?
It's the question of desires that are competing.
It's the question of expedient spaces, I would even argue, because at this moment that you're
looking at this image, this is the change of America.
America is moving to a car community.
The desire here is to increase the prosperity of Charlottesville vis-a-vis the car.
They've just built a brand new highway.
Some of you came down in 1964.
They need to make connections.
This community is in the path of that connection, and there's a level of expediency here.
And so we're looking at Vinegar Hill, which is pretty much where we sit now, the edge
of it.
No, no, Vinegar Hill is west of where we are.
Just a little bit.
How many of you are in the Omni?
Where the Omni is, was Vinegar Hill.
Many of you, right?
Right.
Omni.
And if you're looking to the far end of the image there, the Jefferson School, that
big sort of monolithic building there to the far edge of the image, is the Jefferson School.
And that's three acres of property.
All around it was a community to have that building even.
The community had to lose.
So there is always that relationship between education and space and all of that.
And ultimately, 129 homes are taken down, 29 businesses are lost.
And it becomes the end of a thriving community at that point.
But it's, you know, we all have to be honest with ourselves.
It was at, you know, there is a zenith, that's the history that we write, and then there
is the end.
And we were somewhere in there in that moment, 1958, 1961.
Think of our cultural history here.
These images that time make a little bit more sense for us.
So you have found photography that amplifies what you know about that time, of what's
happening there in relation to the school and the community, and that's what we're
looking at now.
Yeah.
And also, you know, for those of us who are not from Charlottesville, I'm not from Charlottesville.
And I remember when these images were brought to me, and they were images of people.
But as we went through the process of thinking about these images, they became real people,
like I now know who they are.
And the reason why I know who they are is because of the people who live here.
What's the deal with the photographer who made these?
How did that happen?
He came to you?
Yeah.
His name is Gundar's Oswald.
And he took these photographs when he was 16, and he found them in his basement.
He was a student.
He was doing a project.
He was a student at Albemarle Magazine.
He was wanting to be a street photographer.
We know some of those.
Yeah.
I mean, not Albemarle Magazine.
I'm sorry.
Albemarle High School.
My father was a professor at the university.
He was living in a segregated space.
He describes coming to Vinegar Hill as going to him a foreign country.
Right?
So the distance of that.
And all of these images, I have to say, are distance images.
And so there is a level of exchange that's going on here.
Some meaning a market exchange, meaning African American people are buying these, paying for
their images, and defining how they are defined.
These images are a little different from that.
But they still hold a really strong sense, because the public record is not about people.
If anyone wanted to search Vinegar Hill and wanted images of Vinegar Hill, what you'd
find are images of buildings, and the buildings justify urban renewal.
What you don't find are these images, or at least not as readily.
Those again are images that are part of the interior, the part of the private space.
And now they are now part of the public space.
And we know now who these people are.
And that's what matters.
And who is that?
That's Philando.
And Philando had no idea he was even being photographed at the time.
And he's standing next to his cousin Freeman.
And the way I found out about Philando is a friend of mine came in, and someone that
I met as a result of working on the project, and saw the card that he made.
And he said, hey, that's my first child, that's the mother of my first child.
And I was like, really?
I was like, yeah, that's Emma.
That's so cool.
And that led to this.
This is Norman's daughter, Norman Goings is the little boy who's pictured, and that's
his daughter who came to see what her father looked like in 1963, because she hadn't seen
an image of him.
That's very cool.
Right?
That's Freeman holding his own image.
That's wonderful.
Yeah.
And so this process had been an amazing, amazing, amazing process of finding.
Everything about these images is about finding, and everything about these images is about
then, how do they hold up in relationship?
That's Gundar's and Emma and her image.
But what's interesting about the man in the far distance of that image, she is six years
old.
We asked her who that gentleman was.
She didn't know.
Huh.
Right?
She's like, I don't know.
It was just a man who was always there.
It was minding my business.
So we had to go a different route to find him, and that's Mr. Freeman, who's no longer
with us, obviously.
But the process of realizing this history, in my mind and in my sensibility about how
these images work, is that they don't just identify a body of people, but they also work
so very well in telling us who we are.
Well, let's meet back here in another 150 years and do this.
Thank you so much.
Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you so much for being with us today.
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you so much for being with us today.
