by Joshua D. Rothman (do not cite without permission of author)

(Note to students: This essay was originally written in May 1998 as an effort to describe a semester-long exploration of source materials available on African-American life in Charlottesville and Albemarle County in the early twentieth century. Obviously, it does not discuss every available source, but it is intended to suggest the kinds of information that can be drawn from the particular sources discussed, to provide some very preliminary suggestions about what that information tells us, and to suggest directions for a more substantive essay. As you read, consider what kinds of sources you might use for your own projects and what kinds of questions those sources might enable you to investigate).

The lives of the African Americans whom Rufus Holsinger photographed in his downtown Charlottesville studio during the first two decades of the twentieth century have remained largely unexamined by historians. Part of the Holsinger Studio project is an effort to describe the contours of black life in Charlottesville that provided the figurative backdrop for the literal ones of Holsinger's studio. Preliminary research suggests that African Americans in Charlottesville lived largely excluded from white society and white public events, yet did not live in any clearly defined single community of their own. Rather, blacks traveled in many overlapping and evolving communities, defined not only by residential boundaries and neighborhoods, but also by political districts, clubs, occupations, and other social and economic organizations, all of which were inextricably linked to black individuals' perceptions of their own class status. The essay that follows is a discussion of some of the secondary and primary sources available for a study of Charlottesville's multifocal black communities. It is intended to hint at the often fragmentary and subjective nature of available evidence, and accordingly at both the possibilities for and limitations on a satisfying picture of black Charlottesville in this period.

Published secondary materials on black life in Charlottesville between 1890 and 1920 are remarkably thin. John Hammond Moore's Albemarle: Jefferson's County, published in 1976, is certainly the best historical treatment of Albemarle County over its first two-and-a-half centuries. Moore does devote some space in his work to the lives of county African Americans after Reconstruction. There is valuable information, for example, on black education and the persistent lagging of black educational facilities and training of teachers behind education for white children. Moore also presents a number of interesting tidbits related to the social lives of city blacks, and there is also some useful material on patterns of black residency in the city and on class differences within local black communities.1 There is little in Moore's work, however, that is not readily available in other published sources, especially in the Phelps-Stokes Fellowship Papers, discussed in greater detail below.

Generally, Moore chooses in his book to look at very broad changes taking place in Charlottesville from its incorporation as a city in 1888 through 1920. He writes primarily about the modernization of a small Southern city--transportation improvements like paved roads and the installation of the trolley car, important technological innovations like the telephone and electricity, the growth of the university, and economic changes such as the inception of the tourist industry and the boom in real estate development, as developers bought the remaining large private estates in town, turned them into subidivisions, and sold or rented these smaller lots to new residents. With specific regard to relations between racial groups, however, Moore's conclusion on life under segregation is vague and broad nearly to the point of banality: "White and black lived, for the most part, in separate worlds, usually meeting as servant and master as they had for generations; however, this did not preclude close bonds of personal friendship and interdependence, nor did it prevent the rise of considerable bitterness and even hatred long before segregation laws were effectively challenged." 2

The information available in Moore's book is sparse, but by comparison other useful secondary sources for black life in Charlottesville in the early twentieth century are practically nonexistent. There are a number of pictorial histories of Charlottesville, most notably Cecile Clover and F.T. Heblick, Jr.'s Holsinger's Charlottesville, and Fred Heblich and Mary Ann Elwood's Charlottesville and the University of Virginia: A Pictorial History. Neither book discusses African Americans in any significant way. 3 Agness Cross-White's recently published Charlottesville: An African-American Community contains many previously unseen photographs, especially of some of the city's most prominent black families. But Cross-White's work has little text, and her photographs are largely dated after 1930, with most after World War II. 4

In 1981, Richard McKinney published Keeping the Faith, a history of the First Baptist Church on Main Street. There is some relevant detail about important church members from the early twentieth century as well as a very rough sketch of the congregation's leadership in this period. For the most part, however, a discussion of the church's import to the black community and its role in community influence between the 1880s and World War I is conspicuously lacking, and the bulk of the book's material covers the years after 1914. 5

The Magazine of Albemarle County History has few published articles on black life early this century. Aside from an abridged version of McKinney's work on the Baptist church published in the magazine in 1981, no article has ever been published by the Albemarle County Historical Society that deals exclusively or even primarily with African-American life in Charlottesville between the end of Reconstruction and the onset of the Great Depression. A few articles allude to the presence of African Americans, including Andy Meyers' article on the Charlottesville Woolen Mills strike of 1918, in which the author devotes a paragraph to a discussion of the only black worker at the mills, and an article by Halston Hedges, in which he remembers treating black patients as a medical student and doctor around the turn of the century. 6 But most articles in the magazine touching on this era discuss issues that reflect priorities similar to those of Moore, such as the elaboration of new transportation systems or the politics of Charlottesville's incorporation as a city. 7

Frequently, local newspapers provide the feel for a community that no other primary source yields. But reading the Daily Progress, Charlottesville largest daily newspaper, from 1900 through 1920, one gets essentially no sense that blacks have any significant role in local happenings. Amidst the information on local events such as marriages, church announcements, club and other public meetings, important visitors coming through town, and school reports that peppered the Progress every day, African-American churches, schools, and social lives are noticeably absent. Lest one forget that blacks lived in Albemarle County at all, the Progress never ceased to provide reports about African Americans involved in criminal activities or being the victims of gruesome deaths and other misfortunes.

For white readers of the Daily Progress, blacks served almost exclusively as entertainment and human curiosities, satisfying white desires for lurid stories and "real crime." Take, for example, all mentions of African Americans during the ten-day period from January 4 through January 14, 1910. On January 4, the paper ran a story about a black man on trial for the murder of a man in Alexandria (whose conviction registered as a story on January 8). On January 5, the paper reported that a black man had escaped the state penitentiary, while January 6 brought the local news of a fire in an old black woman's home. January 7 showed that a black man killed a timekeeper in Pennsylvania in a dispute over wages, and on January 8 a "negro boy" from Kentucky who purportedly admitted to assaulting a white woman hanged for his crime. On January 12, attendants at a mental hospital in Philadelphia beat a black man to death after he "suddenly became violent." On January 13, the Progress ran the story of the sheriff of Starksville County, Mississippi, who shot eight blacks as they tried to lynch a man accused of murder. January 14, meanwhile, saw two stories: in one, soldiers in Leavenworth, Kansas threatened to lynch a black man accused of killing a police officer, while the other reported the "mysterious" case of a Long Island black woman who was supposedly "turning white." 8

Editorials published by the Progress, on the rare occasions they discussed African Americans at all, reflected the racism of the white South in the early twentieth century, and focus primarily on the need to keep blacks away from equality in public facilities and, especially in 1900 as the debate over a new state constitution heated up, out of electoral politics. A January 1900 editorial on black education, for example, justified steering blacks toward industrial training:

Even were the negro as capable as the white man of receiving a wholly literary and intellectual training, under existing conditions he would find it impossible to make as good use of such an education as the white man does, because an equal number of channels are not opened to him. It, therefore, profits him more to secure manual training along with his intellectual course for the reason that he can turn it to practical account more quickly and with larger enumeration. 9

Occasionally, the Progress ran reports of local political meetings of African Americans (other than their routine tabloid-esque coverage of African-American crime and punishment, black participation in politics easily aroused the most attention from the Progress, as discussed below) or chose to praise a "respectable" black citizen upon his or her death. For the most part, however, the newspaper perpetuated a highly skewed and selective portrait of black life in the early twentieth century--that there were a few blacks worthy of trust and respect, but that for the most part blacks were unintelligent, poor, full of vice and irrational passions, and subject to criminal tendencies. In short, blacks were only marginally worthy of freedom. Drawing useful information from the Progress is possible, especially with regard to politics, if only to get a sense of the flow of information available to white newspaper readers and of the context of white racism in which black Charlottesvillians lived. But relying on the Progress to get any feeling for the daily lives of county blacks would be preposterous.

Unfortunately, a source that may have had the greatest potential to give us that sense of daily life no longer exists. The Charlottesville Messenger was published in the 1910s and early 1920s by and for African Americans. The paper surely provided a much-needed antidote to the invisibility of and the slander against blacks provided by the Progress, and it probably ran the stories about black social life and the announcements of church and club meetings that the Progress had no concern for including. Perhaps its editors were bold enough to challenge publicly and in writing the pleas of local whites to exclude blacks from the political sphere and to contain the economic advancement of blacks by limiting them to industrial education. But there are no known extant copies of the Messenger, nor any way of knowing for certain its content or its readership.

A search of the archival resources of Alderman Library at the University of Virginia, however, begins to yield some substantive information on the lives of African Americans in Charlottesville. 11 Potentially most valuable is the recent discovery of thirty-six issues of the Reflector, a black weekly newspaper published from at least 1933 to 1935. Consciously designed to bring news to the African-American community that the Progress ignored, the Reflector published black church and school news, letters to the editor, reports of club meetings, and editorials protesting the conditions for black Americans in Charlottesville and elsewhere. Though published after 1920, the Reflector is a treasure trove of information on black life in Charlottesville during the Jim Crow era.

Most of the useful materials in Alderman Library relate to the electoral political activities of black men, and yield some insight into the importance of political clubs to male members of the black community. The Charlottesville Republican Party Papers, for example, while a small collection, contain a list of black voters by ward for 1900. Comprising a few hundred names, the list was compiled at the McKinley and Roosevelt Club Headquarters and, when cross-referenced with other primary sources such as the census or the Charlottesville city directories, may help tell us the class, occupational, and residential status of the black voting population just before legal and constitutional strategies aimed at disfranchisement eliminated most blacks from the polls. 12

Of even greater interest and value are the Cox-McPherson Papers. This collection holds the papers of Leroy Wesley Cox (1845-1938), a white carriage and wagon maker in Charlottesville and the chairman of the local Republican Party from 1901-1922. Some of Cox's papers are simply lists of black and white voters. Many of these lists are partial, undated, or of unclear purpose, making the use of them in any systematic way--for example, to compile full rosters of political club memberships--impossible. Still, those Cox-McPherson lists with dates attached, even without being sure of their completeness, are in some ways of greater analytical value than the Republican Party Papers, for they seem partially to describe the changing circumstances under which African Americans participated in electoral politics in Charlottesville in the early twentieth century and the struggle of black voters against disfranchisement. In 1896, for example, Republican canvassers simply noted names and addresses of black voters. By 1908, however, addresses ceased to be as important as noting when voters paid their poll taxes during the previous three years, without which exercise of the franchise would be impossible by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. The undefined purpose of many of the lists of names makes absolute numbers of black voters during each year very difficult to ascertain from these documents alone, but a 1907 article from the Daily Progress gives some sense of the numbers involved, and indicates the extent to which the African-American vote fluctuated as disfranchisement policies tightened their grip on political life after 1900. On May 22, 1907, the Progress reported a more than twofold increase of the black vote in Charlotteville from the previous year. Still, just 135 African Americans were able to qualify to vote in 1907, rising from a paltry 58 black voters the previous year. 77 black men had voted in 1902. 13

Other lists held in the Cox-McPherson collection are of local Republican committee members, which suggest that a sort of interracial Republicanism operated in Charlottesville, at least on the club and ward levels, into the early twentieth century. 14 But the few pieces political correspondence in the Cox-McPherson papers suggests that black participation in the Republican party was always problematic for Charlottesville's white Republicans who wished to extend the party's base outside of its black base of support. In a letter to Ivy resident J. Snowden Wood in 1896, for example, J.H. Rives at the University of Virginia pointed to a potential Republican crisis, writing that "when I went down the street this morning I was told that certain colored men had been canvassing the city and urging the election of a colored man to the position of City Chairman and a committee composed entirely of colored men." Anxious to put the rumored movement to a quick halt, Rives urged Wood to unite publicly with him and other Republicans "to put down this dangerous movement which has always injured the Republican party and inured to the benefit of the Democratic party." White Republicans in the 1890s wanted black votes but they did not want whites to realize that they cast their lot with black voters if they voted Republican, to the point that men like Rives were willing to disavow black support publicly even as they cultivated it behind closed doors. 15

There were whites who veered away from the duplicity of men like Rives and seem to have accepted black participation in party affairs. In 1900, for example, J. Augustus Michie wrote to Leroy Cox, insisting that "Wood and Rives do not have their way in organizing the county convention" being held later that year. Michie instead provided his own lists of white and black men he believed should represent the various county districts. 16 But however many white men supported black participation in Republican politics, the political climate in the Jim Crow South was such that most Republicans shied away from acknowledging their association with the remaining black Republican voters in the region. By 1920, white Albemarle county Republicans were taking out full-page advertisements in the Daily Progress telling voters that local Democrats were engaging in political trickery by appointing black judges of election in certain voting wards and calling them "Republicans." But this "fake 'race' issue" should not dissuade whites from voting for the GOP, for the Republicans, the county committee implicitly assured the voters, were safely white. 17

For their part, black Republicans--who surely possessed complete awareness of this uneasy and unstable interracial political alliance--refused into the 1920s to be shunted off the voting rolls and out of leadership positions in their own party. One party worker in Lindsays Precinct in Albemarle County reported in 1896 that although getting them together was difficult, black voters there were excited to get their badges signifying membership in the local McKinley and Hobart Club, and were "very anxious to hear good speaking and by the way every thing appears we could I think have a right good meeting." 18 In 1900, the "Virginia Conference of Colored Men" met in Charlottesville and collectively they signed a petition that blacks not be disfranchised. 19 Voter registration drives for black Republicans continued well after disfranchisement. Black women involved themselves in electoral politics as well. Mrs. A.M. Curtis, for example, the "Colored Representative of the Women's Republican Association," signed her name to a Republican broadside encouraging black men to stand up for the Republican party despite Democratic trickery. "Our enemies now in the disguise of friends," Mrs. Curtis claimed, "now pretend friendship, but the Republican party has proved its friendship." 20 Men like George P. Inge, Charles Coles, Jr., J.G. Shelton, and W. E. Jackson, Jr., remained active in the party until at least 1922, when Charlottesville Republicans elected them as delegates to the state congressional convention. But by 1922 what remained of the Republican party in Virginia had cast its lot with white supremacy. At the state convention in Luray, the black members of the Charlottesville delegation were denied seats. 21

Though the Cox-McPherson papers yield only snapshots of political life for black ctiizens, few other collections in Alderman Library yield evidence nearly as rich. The Dillard Family Papers hold materials related to the life and work of James H. Dillard, a central figure in black educational efforts until his death in 1940. Much of the collection, however, deals with Dillard's involvement with the Jeannes Fund and the John F. Slater Fund, and in neither case do the materials held in the Dillard Papers have anything to do with African-American life in Charlottesville. 22 Charles Louis Knight, a sociological researcher, collected statistics on black housing in the mid-1920s in a number of cities, including Charlottesville. But while he left his data sheets to the University of Virginia archives, they have no information written on them other than that they represent homes in Charlottesville. The lack of any identifying features such as the name of a home's residents, the address, or even what neighborhood it lies in renders the data sheets essentially useless. 23

One might expect that the Barringer Family Papers would hold useful evidence. The papers mostly relate to the life and career of Paul B. Barringer. Barringer (1857-1941), professor of medicine and chair of the faculty at the University of Virginia, a founder of the University Hospital, and President of Virginia Tech, also maintained a deep interest in what was commonly referred to in the early twentieth century as the "negro problem" or the "race question." He thought, wrote, and corresponded much on racial issues over the course of his life, but the content of those thoughts and writings are profoundly disturbing. Barringer seems a man obsessed with the quest for Anglo-Saxon "racial purity," the Lost Cause, and finding a new theory of natural history to explain the evolution of human cultures. The products of these fascinations amount to a collection of bizarre white supremacist materials. In a speech on "medical topics," for example, Barringer argued that an interracial sexual union was an "assault upon nature, a criminal violation of natural law." In a draft of an essay entitled "Why Your Father's Fought? A Warning," Barringer tackles American history and ridicules the equalitarianism of the radical abolitionists of the antebellum period, arguing that "the call to recognize the brotherhood of man postulates an equality of men which does not exist. Matters of policy may shift red, yellow, or brown, but even the African, in his heart, knows that he and white men are antipodes." 24

Especially concerned with black crime and interracial sex, Barringer's pretense to use his medical expertise as a foray into racial theory is in keeping with notions of race in the early twentieth century that continued to postulate innate biological differences between "racial" groups of people, but they are nonetheless somewhat frightening to the modern reader. Barringer may have been best known for a speech delivered in 1900 at a conference in Montgomery, Alabama, in which he postulated that the "black race" was doomed to extinction because of high infant mortality rates and disease. The end of slavery, Barringer suggested, had severed the bonds between blacks and whites that had led masters to be responsible for their slaves. The price paid for such a separation was high--"The Sacrifice of a Race." 25 While the Barringer Papers prove to be jaw-dropping if not always stimulating reading, Barringer rarely wrote anything specifically about blacks in Albemarle County. While his writings do give some hint of the kinds of racial antipathy felt by some local whites, it is difficult to make use of Barringer's abstract and broad racial theorizing for any conclusions on the specifics of life in Charlottesville.

The papers of the presidents of the University of Virginia contain little about blacks in Charlottesville specifically as well, but the papers of Edwin Alderman in particular do hold useful background materials on the origins and intentions of the Phelps-Stokes Fellowship Series, the products of which provide crucial documentation of black life in Albemarle County from the early twentieth century through World War II. The Phelps-Stokes Fund, a philanthropic organization based in New York, gave a gift of $12,500 to the University of Virginia in 1911 for the purpose of funding a permanent fellowship in Sociology. One Phelps-Stokes Fellow--a University of Virginia student--was chosen each year, given $500 to undertake a research project on some aspect of black life, and expected produce a written report of his or her findings for publication, in the hope that such research would "assist in improving the condition of the negro." President Alderman, in his announcement of the fellowship, praised its underlying premise, namely that the best way to solve the problems facing African Americans in the United States was through the search for "scientific" and "practical" solutions. "The thing to do," Alderman claimed, "is to take it [the 'negro problem'] out of the nervous system of our people and their emotions, and to get it set up before them as a great human problem,--economic in nature, scientific in character,--to be acted upon as the result of broad, wise, sympathetic study." 26

Between 1915 and 1950, the University of Virginia published 18 research reports written by students under the auspices of the Phelps-Stokes Fellowship Series. Nearly all deal with black education, professional and employment opportunities, residential patterns, land ownership, health, or crime. Because of the proximity of Charlottesville and Albemarle County's black communities to the University, a number of students chose to devote part or all of their research to local studies. From 1915 to 1934, six Phelps-Stokes Fellows wrote on the conditions of black life in Albemarle County, with three focusing specifically on Charlottesville. 27

Though most of the studies were actually undertaken after 1920, the anthropology and sociology students who performed the research for the Phelps-Stokes reports present what are probably the most valuable sources on black life in Charlottesville in the early twentieth century, with information unavailable from any other even remotely contemporaneous source. The reports describe different residential neighborhoods in Charlottesville, from Old Scottsville Road (South Sixth Street), notorious among blacks and whites alike for its extreme poverty and unsanitary conditions, to the "Gas-House" district in the hollow north of Main Street between Second and Fifth Streets, which housed working-class blacks and was known for the stream of stinking refuse that ran from the nearby city gashouse through the streets, to the neighborhoods around Page Street northwest of downtown and between Seventh and Ridge Streets south of Main, where professional and wealthier African Americans lived. 28

The residential patterns the Phelps-Stokes fellows describe reflected class distinctions within the black population, and the fellows frequently contrasted what they characterized as the vice-ridden residents of the "slum" of Old Scottsville Road with the educated upstanding club members and business owners who lived in more "respectable" neighborhoods and who composed the "four hundred"--a name taken on by upper-class African Americans in Charlottesville to distinguish themselves from poorer blacks. Phelps-Stokes reports tell of club life, from cultural organizations like the Taylor Art Club to civic and charity-minded groups like the Progressive Club; of black education at the Jefferson School; of the Vinegar Hill business district which housed barber shops, pool rooms, tailors, insurance companies, dentists and doctors offices, groceries, cleaners, and other businesses, most owned by African Americans; and of religious life centered on the five local Baptist churches. When the findings of all the Phelps-Stokes papers are read together, a complex picture of the black community begins to emerges, better described as multiple communities of African Americans who shared the same city but often not the same economic or cultural interests and priorities. 29

In keeping with the philanthropic spirit of the Phelps-Stokes Fund's bequest, all the fellows appear to have been well-meaning, and they detailed the conditions under which Albemarle's black citizens lived in the hopes that their reports might draw attention to and bring alleviation of some of the worst deprivations faced by African American. In his report on the county neighborhood of Red Hill which lies southwest of Fry's Spring, for example, William Lester Leap wrote "the negro standards of living are slowly rising. But when the incomes are small, such progress is necessarily slow. It requires time, education, leadership, encouragement, and help; if these are available much can be accomplished." 30 In concluding his report on black housing, Charles Louis Knight took the space to deplore the living arrangements of many blacks and called on local governments to improve public services and zoning codes, on black leaders to "uplift the race," and on lenders to help improve the rate of black home ownership. 31 Robert Lightfoot, meanwhile, in his study of black crime in Charlottesville, not only found that whites committed many more violent crimes than blacks and discovered large disparities between the severity of sentencing of black criminal offenders and the leniency granted whites, but he also argued that given the economic and educational deprivations faced by blacks, their crime rate was surprisingly low. "When these factors," he wrote, "are considered in connection with the 'we-don't-want-the-niggers-to-get-away-with-anything' attitude which is held by a great many white people, the Negro question changes from 'Why do the Negroes commit so many crimes?' to 'Why do they commit so few?'"32

But the Phelps-Stokes Papers must be read with a severely critical eye. Even as they called for reform, many of the fellows wrote in a fashion that suggests they believed they described a certain objective reality of black life and that, as Alderman claimed, "practical" and "scientific" ideas properly applied would fix the conditions laid out in their reports. 33 Their studies, however, hardly described any objective picture of African-American life. Rather, one finds that the reports of the Phelps-Stokes fellows reflect the intellectual tenets and the preconceived understandings of most Southern sociologists about African Americans in the early twentieth century. Vernon J. Williams, Jr., in his work on sociological attitudes toward African Americans, argues that from the turn of the century through World War II, sociologists moved away from a rationalization of "castelike arrangements" in the United States and towards advocacy and support for assimilation of blacks into the American mainstream. This change, however, was slow and gradual, and ideas about the "natural," immutable inferiority of blacks only died slowly over the course of the first four decades of the twentieth century. While Southern sociologists, Williams suggests, did slowly adopt Boasian ideas about cultural determinism as an alternative to racial determinism, they tended to lag behind their disciplinary colleagues in accepting the possibility of black equality. "Most Southerners," Williams writes, "tended to hold that there were significant mental difference between blacks and whites; yet despite this tendency, their writings reflected the tension between the hereditarian and environmental perspectives." 34

Underlying the Phelps-Stokes papers is the notion that economic conditions for blacks could be alleviated and that change from a caste system was possible, but a cultural (and sometime vaguely biological) racism is present as well. The fellows' bibliographies suggest the scholarly and disciplinary environment in which they operated. In Lightfoot's study of black crime, for example, he cites both E. Franklin Frazier's study of the black family in Chicago and E.B. Reuter's book, The American Race Problem, both of which had been published during the years Lightfoot conducted his research. While both scholars set out to undermine the notion of a scientific foundation to race that relegated blacks to a predetermined inferior status, inherent in both their works is a presumption that the closer a black family approached middle-class white standards of hard work, stable two-parent families, and temperance, the closer they came to a kind cultural superiority conducive to economic and social success in America. The theories of men like Frazier and Reuter are reflected in Lightfoot's study, as he tied higher crime rates in areas like Old Scottsville Road not only to economic and educational circumstances, but also to bad attitudes. "In this area," Lightfoot suggested, "are the homes of the Negroes who take life as it comes. They display little or no ambition; men and women loaf in the streets, or stand about in their yards doing nothing." 35

Helen Camp de Corse, meanwhile, used Frazier's studies but also Howard Odum's 1910 work, Social and Mental Traits of the Negro, in which the Southern sociologist argued that while changes in the economic conditions of blacks could help improve their status, blacks were also inherently impulsive, tended toward pleasure and leisure which led to laziness and inactivity, extreme in responses to stimuli, lacked self-control, and were superficial and irresponsible. 36 In her own work, de Corse focused heavily on moral issues, criticizing blacks for perceived high rates of illegitimacy, the absence of two-parent homes, and juvenile delinquency. Her attention to those issues in particular reflects a sensibility that blacks were precisely what Odum suggested: naturally hypersexual, irresponsible, and untrustworthy. De Corse, like the other Phelps-Stokes scholars, seems to have believed these circumstances were mostly products of culture rather than of biology (even Odum's work indicated the tension between the two notions of racial difference), and were amenable to change if blacks were willing to make the effort to approximate middle-class moral standards. Nonetheless, her tone is condescending, pitiful, and occasionally self-righteous, all of which suggest that she viewed poor African Americans as projects, susceptible to possible improvement through moral and economic uplift, rather than as people who lived in an environment of racism that often trapped them in their poverty regardless of their aspirations.

The sources discussed thus far all present different obstacles for a historical interpretation of black life in early twentieth century Charlottesville, from the skewed presentations of blacks in the Daily Progress to the too few moments of fragmentary insight yielded by private collections, to the problematic interpretive lens through which Phelps-Stokes fellows understood their subjects. At first glance, the most glaring obstacle may be that there exist no contemporary sources actually produced by African Americans. There are, however, some oral histories given by blacks from Charlottesville, both published and on tape in the collection of the Woodson Institute. Many of these histories recall a time after the 1920s, but when considering a time period and a population about whom sources are so elusive the oral documents cannot simply be discarded. For starters, to attempt to write this history without some black perspective when these perspectives are available is flawed and intellectually dishonest. The experience of any group of people is most effectively conveyed by the people themselves, and the reports of blacks from Charlottesville are frequently outstanding in their expressions and descriptions of the nuances of social relations, and in confirming or modifying reports from other sources about, for example, the racial compositions of particular neighborhoods and the kinds of economic circumstances of those who lived in them.

Most importantly, perhaps, these oral histories add the kinds of anecdotal evidence crucial to anyone trying to capture the sense of a place, its feel, and its subtleties. Compare, for example, the descriptions of the Old Scottsville Road neighborhood in the Phelps-Stokes papers with the personal story about that neighborhood told by Rev. Carter Wicks in his interview from earlier this year. Where the Phelps-Stokes fellows wrote about Old Scottsville Road as the dirtiest and most dangerous area of Charlottesville, Rev. Wicks said the following about his parents' feelings: "In our social lives, we discriminated, cause my father and mother, if I told them we was going to a party down on Scottsville Road, they'd tell me 'you ain't goin' nowhere,' because they knew the section and just going to get in a lot of trouble, and they wouldn't let me go. Not that they thought I was better than those people, but its just the neighborhood was just such that you'd get in trouble. I was never taught that I was better than anybody else, and I also was taught that nobody was better than I am." Here, Wicks not only confirms and enhances the notion that this area deserved its reputation, but also, rather self-consciously, the idea that blacks did in fact "discriminate" between themselves based on class distinction and senses of the danger that awaited those who ventured into the "wrong" neighborhoods. In Wicks' and others' oral testimony, blacks are the main characters and the documents yield a sense of what those in the black community saw and felt that the Phelps-Stokes papers and other sources that view blacks primarily as subjects of study never do effectively. 37

Oral histories can allow for the reconciliation of evidence transmitted through any number of subjective lenses, but oral interviews are no less subjective in their own way. Memories are always selective and imperfect and while we still do not entirely understand the neurochemical processes of memory, it is clear that memories are frequently hazy, inaccurate, and consciously or unconsciously altered to conceal that which is painful, to enhance the role of the teller, or simply to make anecdotal recollections fit the overall narrative the teller is choosing to recreate. Taking oral histories, some of which recall events from sixty or seventy years earlier, at face value is thus no less problematic than accepting the validity of sociological data from the same time period. History is often memory, but memory is not the reflection of an objective reality.

I hope to correct for some of the fogginess and fragmentary nature of the sources not only by comparing them against one another, but by using evidence from the 1910 census and from Charlottesville city directories published between 1895 and 1920 to compile demographic profiles of the black population in Charlottesville. Among other categories, the census records names, numbers and relations of people within households, the nature of individuals' work or business, literacy rates, and home ownership. Census takers also took note, in the margins of the census sheets, the names of streets from which the records on the page come. Currently, the census records of all African Americans in Charlottesville are being logged onto computer to enable manipulation of the data and to allow for some conclusions to be drawn about family and household size as well as employment and residential patterns. In the future the entire census could be put into a database program, and perhaps censuses from 1900 and 1920 can be added, to enable better comparisons with the white population and to note changes taking place over time.

The Charlottesville city directories contain less information than the census, but they do record names, employment, and both home and work addresses. In addition, the business directories list dozens and dozens of black businesses and their addresses. Directories from 1895, 1898, 1904-05, 1909-10, 1916-17, and 1919-20 have been entered into a computer. They have an advantage over the census not only in their more manageable sizes but also in that they exist for more than half the years between 1895 and 1920, which allows for the close tracking of changes over time in work and living patterns. My hope for both the census and the city directories is to be able both to glean evidence to support or contradict the conclusions drawn by observers like the Phelps-Stokes fellows and the providers of oral histories and to build a foundation for this study that lies on less subjective ground than those sources. In particular, I am excited by the possibilities for creating a map of black Charlottesville that can display residential distribution of African Americans both generally and by occupation (which may in turn be suggestive of conclusions about class) as well as the locations of black churches, schools, cemeteries, club buildings, and businesses. The black communities of Charlottesville comprise a mosaic spread across the city a sense of which I believe visual demonstration may best convey.

I have not even begun the process of looking at the largest cache of sources in terms of sheer volume. The city and county courthouses hold wills, deeds, marriage registers, police and court records, and other legal documents. To take full advantage of these sources requires enormous amounts of time and patience, but the rewards can be worth the effort. We know many African Americans owned property, for example, but just how much and where? Did black business owners own or rent buildings on Vinegar Hill? What can we learn about black interaction with the criminal justice system? What can wills tell us about patterns of inheritance? I strongly encourage a steady mining of these kinds of sources to complement and add to the portrait of a city being painfully drawn to date from fragmentary sources--smatterings of anecdotal information, occasional newspaper reports, undated and incomplete lists of voters, and names and descriptions of neighborhoods where people lived.

1 John Hammond Moore, Albemarle: Jefferson's County, 1727-1976, (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1976). On black education, see pp. 323-329. On residential patterns, class differences, and social life, see pp. 423-432.

2 Moore, pp. 423-424.

3 Holsinger's Charlottesville: a collection of photographs by Rufus W. Holsinger,. Cecile Wendover Clover, and F.T. Heblick, Jr., eds., (Charlottesville: Art Restoration Services, 1995 [2nd ed. of 1976 publication]; Fred T. Heblich and Mary Ann Elwood, Charlottesville and the University of Virginia: A Pictorial History, (Norfolk: Donning Company, 1982).

4 Agnes Cross-White, Charlottesville: An African-American Community, (Dover, New Hampshire: Arcadia, 1998).

5 Richard I. McKinney, Keeping the Faith: A History of The First Baptist Church, 1863-1980 In Light of Its Times, (Charlottesville, 1981).

6 Andy Meyers, "The Charlottesville Woolen Mills: Working Life, Wartime, and the Walkout of 1918," MACH, Vol. 53 (1995), pp. 71-114; Halstead S. Hedges, "A Doctor's Reminiscences of Albemarle County," MACH, Vol. 3 (1942-43), pp. 5-16.

7 See, for example, Edward M. Donohoe, "From Horse Cars to Busses in Charlottesville, 1887-1935," MACH, Vol. 12 (1951-52), pp. 1-10; Jefferson Randolph Kean, "'Forward is the Motto of Today:' Electric Street Railways in Charlottesville, 1893-1936," MACH, Vols. 37-38 (1979-1980), pp. 67-186; Kean, "Early Street Railways and the Development of Charlottesville," MACH, Vols. 33-34 (1975-76), pp. 1-52; Gayle M. Schulman, "'Shall We Become a City?' The Story of Charlottesville's Incorporation as a City in 1888," MACH, Vol. 46 (1988), pp. 1-16. Other articles dealing with this time frame include A. Robert Kulthau, and Beulah O. Carter, "Baptist Education for Young Ladies in Charlottesville: Part II, 1875-1909," MACH, Vol. 54 (1996), pp. 29-68; L. Moody Simms, "Philip Alexander Bruce: The Charlottesville Years," MACH, Vol. 29 (1971), pp. 69-79; James P.C. Southall, "Reminiscences of Charlottesville in the 1880s," MACH, Vol. 4 (1943-44), pp. 24-34; Lilyan Sydenham, "Reflection of National Dramatic Trends in Charlottesville, 1900-1935," MACH, Vol. 13 (1953), pp. 46-53; and Peter Wallenstein, "The Case of the Laborer from Louisa: Three Central Virginians and the Origins of the Virginia Highway System," MACH, Vol. 49 (1991), pp. 19-48.

8 The Daily Progress, January 4-14, 1910.

9 Ibid., January 15, 1900.

10 Ibid., October 23, 1900. On July 31, the Progress, a staunchly Democratic organ, had aligned itself clearly with forces calling for disfranchisement, reprinting from the Lynchburg News, classic rhetoric defending the elimination of the black vote in Virginia: "the white people of Virginia are not unfriendly to the negroes. The desire to exclude illiterates from the polls is not prompted by unkindness. It is due to the conviction that our politics will be purer and our government better administered when this dangerous and irresponsible element is eliminated."

11 A survey of the archival materials at the Library of Virginia and the Virginia Historical Society proved almost entirely fruitless. The VHS had no collections of interest. The Library of Virginia holds some county records, but many of these are available at the courthouses in downtown Charlottesville. The LOV does hold the War History Commission Records, which the State of Virginia created shortly after World War I. The Commission interviewed veterans about their personal lives before the war, their war experiences, and their reflections on their military service. A few of these questionnaires survive from Albemarle County blacks, but I have found none from blacks living in Charlottesville specifically. (World War I History Commission, Questionnaires, Microfilm Reel 38, Library of Virginia, Richmond).

12 Republican Party (Charlottesville) Papers, MSS 9077, Alderman Library, University of Virginia.

13 Cox-McPherson family papers, 1892-1922, MSS 38-11, Alderman Library, University of Virginia, Box 1; Daily Progress, May 22, 1907 and Oct. 4, 1902. By 1902, in the wake of a new Virginia state constitution designed in part to keep black voters off the rolls, the Progress felt compelled to "explain" to its readers how it was possible that those 77 black voters still qualified to vote. The paper, assuring its readers that not just any black man could qualify, indicated that at least 60 qualified via their ownership of property. Of the others, one was a graduate of Hampton and qualified under the understanding clause, another was the son of a Confederate soldier, and a third "was a very worthy and prosperous citizen." The Progress indicated, lest any white citizen worry, that 27 black men in one ward were disqualified under the understanding clause. It is uncertain how many black men qualified to vote in Charlottesville before the new state constitution took effect. One list from May 1896 in the Cox-McPherson papers contains 44 names of registered voters, but it seems likely that this is a list either of just one ward or of the voters registered at a particular registration drive, as suggested by the absence of the names of men like J.T.S. Taylor and George Inge and others who sat on local Republican committees in 1896 and who were certainly voters.

14 Both black and white Republicans served on ward committees in Charlottesville, and the minutes of a number of Republican party meetings from 1896 indicate that whites and blacks worked together on party business. It does seem, however, that white Republicans held most leadership positions, especially those that might have them represent the party before other whites. Thus, L.W. Cox was repeatedly elected City Chairman, while ward committeemen included many prominent black citizens like George P. Inge, Charles E. Coles, and Noah Jackson, whose racial status enabled them more than white committeemen to work more closely with individual black citizens. (Cox-McPherson Papers, Box 2)

15 Rives to Snowden, Cox-McPherson Papers, Box 1, July 13, 1896. The cynicism of his own schemes never seems to have occurred to Rives, who on April 20, 1896, found himself, after the unanimous adoption of a resolution submitted by black Republican George P. Inge, selected by the City Committee of Republicans to serve as delegate to the St. Louis national convention. (City Committee Minutes, April 20, 1896, Cox-McPherson Papers, Box 2).

16 Michie to Cox, Cox-McPherson Papers, Box 1, March 20, 1900. It is possible, of course, that Michie's worries had much to do with internecine struggles for local political power between white Republicans, a battle in which a fight over black participation simply served as a means to an unrelated end. Still, that there could be such a fight at all indicates that African American support mattered to white Republicans and that men like Michie and Rives understood its significance.

17 See Cox-McPherson Papers, Box 1. In a public exchange of letters in the Progress, the Secretary of the Albemarle County Committee accused the Democratic Electoral Board of appointing African Americans as judges of election and calling them Republicans without the approval or knowledge of the Republican party. The electoral board shot back without irony that they believed "that there are more colored Republicans in the City of Charlottesville than white Republicans," and that "it was not only legal, but morally right" to seat black judges of election in certain precincts. (Progress, November 1 and November 5, 1920).

18 William Wilkey to L.W. Cox, February 20, 1896, Cox-McPherson Papers, Box 1.

19 Progress, August 23, 1900.

20 undated "Appeal to Colored Voters," Cox-McPherson Papers, Box 1. Black women could not vote, obviously, until 1920. It is unknown how many women in the whole city qualified in 1920, but the Cox-McPherson collection notes that in Charlottesville's first ward, where few blacks lived, three women--Maggie P. Burley, Mamie J. Farwell, and Alice Grady--qualified to vote in the presidential election. (Cox-McPherson Papers, Box 2).

21 See assorted documents, March-July 1922, Cox-McPherson Papers, Box 1.

22 Dillard Family Papers, MSS 9498, Alderman Library, University of Virginia. Dillard also sat on the board of the Phelps-Stokes Fund, but not until well into the 1930s, and the papers relevant to his involvement with that organization largely consist of reports of meetings of the Board of Trustees.

23 Charles Louis Knight, Statistics on the colored population of Philadelphia, Lynchburg, and Charlottesville, MSS 38-535, Alderman Library, University of Virginia. Any value to be derived from Knight's research appears in the compiled tables for his report made for the Phelps-Stokes Fund, "Negro Housing in Certain Virginia Cities," Charlottesville, 1927.

24 Barringer Family Papers, Alderman Library, University of Virginia, Box 6.

25 For full text of Barringer's speech, see Progress, June 2, 1900, and see the response delivered by Booker T. Washington in Century magazine, discussed in Progress, July 31, 1900.

26 Presidents Papers, RG2/1/2.472, subseries I (Office Administrative Files, 1904-1914), Box 20. The fellowship series began inauspiciously as H.M. McManaway, the first fellow, was selected in 1912 but never delivered his report. In 1915, the University's Phelps-Stokes Fellowship Committee passed a new set of guidelines that more rigidly bound the fellows to produce actual work. It became mandatory that preference in selection of the fellow be given to graduate students, and the responsibilities of the fellows were more clearly defined. In addition, the committee passed a rule that full payment of the fellowship not be issued until the fellow's thesis was complete and in the possession of the committee. (Presidents Papers, RG2/1/2.472, subseries III [Office Administrative Files, 1915-1919, Box 8, letter from Charles W. Kent, Prof. of English Literature, to Alderman, 10/15/15]).

27 The six studies relevant to Charlottesville include: Samuel T. Bitting, "Rural Land Ownership among the Negroes of Virginia with Special Reference to Albemarle County," 1915; Knight, "Negro Housing," 1927; Marjorie Felice Irwin, "The Negro in Charlottesville and Albemarle County, an explanatory study," 1929; William Lester Leap, "Red Hill Neighborhood: life and race relations in a rural section," 1933; Helen Camp de Corse, "Charlottesville: a study of Negro Life and Personality," 1933; Robert Mitchell Lightfoot, "Negro Crime in a Small Urban Community," 1934.

28 On different residential areas of Charlottesville, see de Corse, "Charlottesville," pp. 7-10; Irwin, "Negro in Charlottesville, pp. 18-22; Lightfoot, "Negro Crime," pp. 7-11.

29 These kinds of materials fill much of the reports of de Corse and Irwin in particular, and I imagine that much of the final version of this paper will be suffused with more detailed descriptions of all the areas touched on above. Pulling together these materials more systematically and at greater length here, however, is perhaps a superfluous task, as the information still to be gleaned from the census and from city directories is intended to help confirm or modify many of the conclusions drawn by the fellows about class divisions and residential patterns and, in turn, to help bolster the argument that the "black community" in Charlottesville was multifocal and imagined. "Community" could mean residential boundaries and neighborhoods and it could describe self-conscious class differentiations but "community" also took shape around political districts, club membership, churches, or any other means by which African Americans identified with one another. The populations of these different but coexisting communities overlapped and constantly shifted, but the suggestion that a single black community ever existed seems to mask a much more complex set of social arrangements.

30 Leap, "Red Hill," p. 153.

31 Knight, "Negro Housing," pp. 134-138.

32 Lightfoot, "Negro Crime," p. 61.

33 Vernon J. Williams, Jr. argues that in the early-twentieth century, sociologists began to embrace the use of empirical data in order to seem more objective, scientific, and authoritative. The Phelps-Stokes reports accordingly are often stuffed with pages and pages of charts and tables ranging from the obviously important, such as birthrates, to the more esoteric, such as the number of gardens in front of black homes. (Williams, From a Caste to a Minority: Changing Attitudes of American Sociologists Toward Afro-Americans, 1896-1945, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1989, p. 81).

34 Williams, pp. 1-3, quote on p. 96.

35 Lightfoot, "Negro Crime," p. 11.

36 Williams, pp. 43-45.

37 Interview with Rev. and Mrs. Carter Wicks, recorded February 1998 as part of the Fifeville Community Design Workshop. Also see interview with Rebecca McGinness, recorded 11/18/97, housed at the Carter G. Woodson Institute. For published oral histories, see Wilma T. Mangione, ed., From porch swings to patios: an oral history project of Charlottesville neighborhoods, 1914-1984, Charlottesville: City of Charlottesville, 1990, and Ridge Street Oral History Project: A Supplement to the Survey of the Ridge Street Historic District and Proposal for Local Designation, Charlottesville, 1995.