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Thread ID: 18830 | Posts: 1 | Started: 2005-06-25
2005-06-25 16:20 | User Profile
[It's good to remember...] :clap:
"Learning" from our legacy
By Shannon Brennan Lynchburg News & Advance June 23, 2005
Gloria Franklin remembers the sting of not being able to go to the carnival like white children, and reading the signs that sent blacks to the rear of the streetcars. She remembers having to climb into a balcony to watch a movie. She remembers white kids yelling, "Hey nigger," as she and other black students walked to Dunbar High School.
She remembers not being able to get a hot dog at the lunch counters in Lynchburg.
"I loved hot dogs and they used to smell so good," she said.
Those memories helped shape a new exhibit at the Legacy Museum of African American History, titled "Deep in My Heart: The Rise of Jim Crow in Central Virginia, 1865-1954," which opens Sunday.
It is a painful reminder of what life was like in a segregated society.
"There are many feelings left over from this period that are just as tangible as things you can touch with your hand," said Dianne Swann-Wright, guest curator of the exhibit.
That's why visitors will see shocking items - including nine white Ku Klux Klan robes - as well as quotations from local people who lived through segregation.
"We're considering feelings to be artifacts," Swann-Wright said.
The exhibit was made possible with grants from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Humanities and community block grants through the city of Lynchburg. The museum has also raised $99,000 of a $100,000 challenge grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities to continue its work of collecting and displaying all aspects of local African-American history and culture.
Franklin is the primary collector for the Legacy Museum, having gathered items for all six shows the museum has had since its opening in 2000.
"I think it's powerful," she said. "Powerful, yes sir. We've come a long way, baby."
As a visitor enters the main exhibit room, the first sight is a door, with a stencil of the words "Colored Men." This rare artifact was a bathroom door in the old Suhling's Tobacco Factory at 1301 Main St. As the building was being renovated last fall, Josh Owen of Landmark Asset Services discovered the door, which had been bricked over.
"This is an especially important artifact," said Carolyn Bell, a member of the Legacy Museum board. "Separate restrooms were a major feature of segregation."
Some of the items in the Jim Crow exhibit are on loan, including the nine KKK robes. This display also includes figurines depicting black women as mammies, men doing menial labor and little boys sitting on toilets.
"They're all meant to demean blacks in some way," Swann-Wright said. "These messages were just as clear as the Ku Klux Klan robes and the rope that winds its way through this part of the exhibit."
The timeline for the exhibit runs from the end of the Civil War when blacks were freed, through the societal-changing Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, which declared that separate was not equal.
The timeline notes that in 1865, Lynchburg sent 150 blacks to Liberia as part of a colonization effort. In 1867, Lynchburg got its own chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.
Bell said that the nation is still grappling with the horrors of lynching and the sometimes lethal ways that whites kept blacks out of the voting booth.
The U.S. Senate recently apologized for its past failures to outlaw lynching, and former Klan member Edgar Ray Killen, 80, was convicted Tuesday of manslaughter in the 1964 killing of three Civil Rights workers in Mississippi who were registering blacks to vote.
"There's the convergence of contemporary events," she said. "Part of the larger point is how we're still dealing with all of this."
One way society is still dealing with this may be through voluntary segregation - in places of worship and entertainment. Today's segregation may be a legacy of the way blacks coped with the degradation of Jim Crow laws, Swann-Wright said. They created their own spaces - their own places to play, reflect and find peace.
"African-Americans didn't just take what was happening to them and do nothing about it," she said.
The separation remains, Swann-Wright said, because very few people are able to cross racial boundaries with open minds.
Bell said it's important for people to understand that this is part of Lynchburg's history.
"I think what a lot of people don't realize is how local this is," she said.
Part of one room in the Jim Crow exhibit, for example, is devoted to pictures and memorabilia of the Ferrell family, who lived on Winston Ridge Road. Their son, who served in Italy during World War II, brought back an Italian bride. But Virginia did not allow interracial marriage, so the couple had to move to Pennsylvania, and could only correspond with his family from afar.
As the exhibit points out, many blacks escaped Jim Crow laws by leaving the South. The Legacy Museum's Franklin was one of them. Her father insisted that she further her education, which she couldn't do in Lynchburg after graduating from Dunbar.
"I didn't even know Lynchburg College existed," she said.
She studied biology at West Virginia State College and became a lab technician. Her career took her to Norfolk and Washington, D.C., before she returned home to the Hill City in the 1960s.
"I found, well, a different Lynchburg," Franklin said. "I could go in restaurants and get a hot dog."
Franklin said she hopes lots of people see the exhibit in the coming year.
"I wish we could reach more young people," she said, then added, "I think that everyone should come to see it."
If you're going
WHAT: 'Deep in My Heart: The Rise of Jim Crow in Central Virginia, 1865-1954'
WHERE: Legacy Museum of African American History, 403 Monroe St.
WHEN: Gala preview ($50) at 6 p.m. Friday; official opening from 2 to 4 p.m. Sunday. The exhibit will remain up for one year. Regular hours are noon to 4 p.m. Thursday through Saturday, from 2 to 4 p.m. Sunday and by appointment.
TICKETS: $2 for adults, $1 for students, seniors
INFO: 845-3455
[url]http://www.newsadvance.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=LNA/MGArticle/LNA_BasicArticle&c=MGArticle&cid=1031783462282&path=[/url]