I Have a Dream

I try never to miss the opportunity to celebrate Martin Luther King Day.

That's why I was at the Maggie Walker historic site for a lecture this afternoon from Kitty Snow about the West Clay streetcar line where her great-grandfather was a motorman from 1909-1934.

Hello, I've lived on West Clay for almost six years now. I was that person calling out, "What block is that?" throughout her talk.

Arriving early, I heard a woman address the speaker, acknowledging their bond, having worked together at the telephone company 30 years ago. As they reminisced, a man in the second row, called out. "Where did you go to high school?" Huguenot High, she responded. He told her he'd been a good friend of her brother.

"That's the thing, " she said, laughing. "You can't be unkind to anyone in this town because they'll end up being someone you know's cousin." Just then a woman spoke up, saying she was knew the speaker's daughter, who had just had triplets.

I was sitting there feeling superior, thinking how grateful I was that I hadn't gone to high school or college in this town when a woman behind me began talking about how she knew the women's brother, even lived near him, and had heard about the stories of the triplets. When she mentioned the twins' father, I recognized the name and suddenly I was in the game.

The father is a musician and someone I know well. All of a sudden, I was one degree removed from all these Richmond stories. Funny how that happens, as I admitted as much to the group.

The talk was fabulous: pictures taken by a streetcar motorman who worked the West Clay line (Oakwood Cemetery to Newtowne) and snapped pictures of people and places along the way.

There were pictures of mule teams working on the Broad Street station (yes, now the Science Museum of Virginia). There were lots of pictures of activity on Bowe and Moore Streets in Carver, including one of Norton Street looking north towards what is now Magpie.

Photos of VUU showed a mostly wooded lot where now buildings stand. The stockyards located behind Newtowne West showed up in photos of pigs and cows being led down Leigh Street and Bowe Streets to slaughter.

Other photos showed drugstores with spittoons, streetcar drivers taking much-needed naps and various Jackson Ward neighbors, black and white, posing for portraits.

It was a fitting tribute to the everyday man, the best possible way to salute Martin Luther King.

After that, we went to Evergreen Cemetery, a huge burial ground for blacks and one I'd only read about. Everywhere you looked were tombstones, most buried behind trees and overgrowth, a testament to the sheer numbers of dead and the complete abandonment of the grounds.

The only ones who hadn't forsaken the cemetery were the lovers or at least the fornicators because we unearthed two used condoms as we sought out graves. Headstones ranged from early 19th century to the 1980s, with some trees growing right through the slabs of stone.

It was a powerful reminder that we only get so much say over the dead and gone. Me, I want to be burned to a crisp and scattered to the four winds.

With the east end in our rear view window, we made a bee-line for the Boathouse, hoping to see the sun set. The end result was even better, a twinkling view up the river toward  downtown, crowned by the Libbie Hill monument.

While it was incredibly bright in the bar, our stools put the sunset at our backs, the TV out of view, and glasses of LaMarca discounted by $3. Not a bad place to end up on a Monday night.

The guy next to us was trying to achieve three weeks in January without alcohol (kudos, buddy) while most other people were taking advantage of discounted pizza. For us, a view of the setting sun was sufficient.

On a day dedicated to a man who sought racial equality, we were more than happy to sit at a bar of people of all races, ages and creeds. Equal opportunity drinkers and talkers, so to speak.

Quoting MLK, I have decided to stick with love; hate is too great a burden to bear. Besides, love holds so much more appeal.

Or perhaps I'm just showing myself to be the hopeless romantic I really am. There can be no deep disappointment when there is not deep love. Or walks in the cemetery and bubbles.

Best Kind of History

I never have to go far to honor Dr. King on MLK Day.

After my walk down to Brown's Island this morning, I knew it was a nice day so I dressed lightly for the walk over to 2 Street, making it all the more surprising when I walked outside and found my front stoop and walkway covered in ice-melt pellets.

So apparently my landlord had come by and put them down in the 61-degree weather anticipating tomorrow's snow showers.

I crunched over them and strolled over to the Maggie Walker House, where I joined a roomful of people eager to hear Nell Draper-Winston, the sister of photographer Louis Draper, talk about "Recovering the Work and Life of Louis Draper."

Mind you, I'd already seen the Louis Draper retrospective at Candela Gallery and the "Signs of Protest" exhibit containing some of Draper's photographs at the VMFA, but here was a real, live person who'd known the talented man who'd left Richmond to forge a name for himself and yet is still unknown here.

Nell was a tiny woman with a clear-cut way of speaking and a quick smile as she talked about growing up in Henrico County with an emphasis on family values and meals where everyone shared their day's activities.

She said her Dad was an avid photographer, documenting the neighbors and the area, but he couldn't manage to interest Louis in taking pictures.

What he did do, though, was give Louis a camera when he left for Virginia State University and that began a lifelong passion for him.

He left Richmond for New York, living in the Bowery, at the YMCA and eventually in a brownstone owned by Langston Hughes, who became a mentor to the young Louis.

Although primarily known as a street photographer, her brother shot images of lots of famous people, like Michael Jackson and Jackie Kennedy-Onassis and photographed for "Life" and "Popular Photography" but Nell said his main joy came from shooting everyday people living their everyday lives.

She finished her talk old-school style, pulling out 11 x 14 photographs her brother had taken and passing them around.

I've been to a lot of photography lectures but it's a singular pleasure to see and hold the actual photo rather than just see it projected on a screen.

There was one of Malcolm X, but Nell said it was done as a study of shadow and light rather than as a portrait. There was another of Miles Davis playing. Several were from Draper's trip to Senegal.

Another study of light and shadow, with the word "Santos" scrawled on the wall, was the one Nell said Louis placed  a copy of in both their parents' caskets.

The gentleman next to me and I lingered over a striking photo of John Coltrane with his sax at the piano.

It was after we looked at the photographs that we learned that Nell had also met Dr. King and been part of the group that picketed Thalhimer's in a show of peaceful resistance.

She'd been going to VUU where they brought in a different minster every year for the Week of Prayer.

The year it was Dr. King, she'd collected her autograph book and patiently waited in the crowd among RPI students, "And they were all this tall and you may have noticed, I'm short."

She was ready to give up on ever getting to the man she described as "the most eloquent speaker I ever heard" when Dr. King told the towering group to hold on because "this young lady has been waiting a long time."

He gave her his autograph and, as she put it, "You couldn't talk to me for the rest of the day."

Yes, on Martin Luther King Day, I am fortunate to meet and hear from someone who actually heard Dr. King talk.

And still has the autograph book to prove it.

A Lesson in Social Engineering

The third time was the charm with the "Matinees with Miss Maggie" film series.

No doubt as part of Black History month, the Maggie Walker historical site right here in fabulous Jackson Ward, is showing culturally relevant films all month.

Today's drew enough of an audience to require moving it to Club 533, just around the corner (and the site of the annual Jackson Ward Christmas party), something another attendee and I found out only when we arrived at the original site.

After getting in our respective cars and motoring the block and a half to 533, we agreed that we'd have been better off walking together in the snow shower.

Inside, we joined several dozen people for a screening of "The Road to Brown," about the brilliant legal campaign that led up to the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education case.

Amazingly, I had never heard of Charles Hamilton Houston, the go-getter responsible for being part of every major civil rights case that went before the Supreme Court for a quarter of a century leading up to the Brown case.

He went around the south taking pictures of the deplorable conditions in "separate but equal" colored schools.

And while I'd heard and read about the joke that was "separate but equal" facilities, I was amazed at how far that doctrine had been taken to enforce the so-called Jim Crow laws.

Separate Coke machines for blacks and whites.

Separate phone booths.

Separate textbook storage facilities.

Think about that. We had to separate black and white textbooks that weren't even being used?

But Houston had a plan.

While dean of the Howard University Law School, he began attracting and teaching a cadre of black lawyers who would help him fight the battles necessary to dismantle the Jim Crow laws.

He decided the first area of attack would be education, taking on equal pay for black and white teachers and equal facilities.

As in no more tar paper shacks for the colored schools.

And one by one, Houston and his talented group (including Thurgood Marshall and Oliver Hill) won cases that set precedents.

So when Brown v. Board of Education came along, they had enough precedents to use to win a unanimous decision by the Supreme Court.

But as we all know (or should know), just because it's law doesn't mean the states choose to obey it.

No, if you're like Virginia, you just circumvent that law with state laws that allow you to continue with the embarrassment of separate but equal.

And it was from that era that the post-film speakers were pulled.

Three former students from the all-black Moton High School in Farmville spoke about the student-led walkout they participated in on April 23, 1951.

The all-white school board had denied Moton funds, despite it then housing 400 kids instead of the 180 it was built for.

One, a fifteen-year old when it began, said she was asked by the organizer, Barbara Johns, to spread the word about the walkout to all the other 8th graders.

And not to tell her parents a word about it.

But being a good girl, she did choose to tell her father.

"He was surprised, but he didn't tell me not to do it," she said.

All three former Moton students spoke of the deplorable conditions at their colored school, rooves that leaked so badly some kids needed an umbrella in class, a pot-bellied stove for warmth, although unless you were near it, you still needed your coat to prevent shivering.

It was a history lesson of the very best kind, courtesy of students who had not only lived through it, but been willing to stand up to make a difference for others.

While I'd gone to the film because I'm a documentary dork I'm a history nerd who wanted to know more about the Brown decision and what preceded it, I'd learned a lot that I should have known before now.

And I say that as one who was actually bussed to a black high school in the lingering years when everyone still acknowledged that we had not yet reached educational equality and thought I knew more than most about the subject.

Yet I'd never heard or read a word about the "man who killed Jim Crow," Charles Houston.

Miss Maggie's matinee changed all that today.

Best Houston quote: "Lawyers are either social engineers or a parasite on society."

Amen, brother.

We all owe you a world of debt.

Celebrating a Survivor

I couldn't make it to the inauguration, but I could celebrate MLK Day.

The Maggie Walker historical site always does something to honor the day and today's program featured a documentary.

Being a documentary dork of the highest order, I made the short trek over to Leigh Street to claim a seat in the visitors' center.

Sydney Shavers was showing her recently-completed film, "Elvira's Eyes," about her great-great-great grandmother.

The film traced the process of seeking information about Elvira Sophia Abernathy, a former slave who lived to be 106 years old.

Sydney had done her research, taking the few documents her family had and using them as the starting point for a road trip to North Carolina to see what she could uncover.

Plenty, it turned out.

Using census records, death certificates, newspaper articles, visits to graveyards and previously unknown relatives' houses, she pieced together an amazing story of Elvira.

Like the fact that she'd been sold for $900 ($21,000 in today's dollars) originally.

That she'd married a mulatto slave in 1864.

That unlike the other slaves on the plantation where she worked, she and her husband had remained after emancipation, eventually becoming sharecroppers.

That she'd had six children and worked as a seamstress.

That up until she turned 100, she was considered to have "retained a remarkable spryness."

A North Carolina newspaper article about her 106th birthday said, "The old darkie can walk without aid and thread a needle."

As part of her research, Sydney attended a family reunion in N.C., meeting relatives and interviewing them for the project.

Several spoke of Elvira's insistence on education, learning to read at a time when slaves weren't allowed to read and insisting on literacy for her children and grandchildren.

After sharing his memories, one older man praised Sydney, saying, "Somebody got to remember what went on in the past."

That message resonated even more poignantly when Sydney said afterwards that two of the older relatives shown in the film had died since she'd filmed them.

She stressed the importance of everyone capturing their family's oral history before it's too late. "Their stories would have been lost otherwise," she said.

It was wisdom out of the mouths of babes, because Sydney is only seventeen and still a high school student.

During the Q & A after the film, someone asked her, "What are your plans for the future? I'd like to vote for you someday."

The whole room applauded.

Wouldn't Dr. King have been proud to hear that remark directed at a young African-American woman on the day our African-American president takes the oath of office to begin his second term?

Even as a complete stranger, I felt pride sitting there, knowing Elvira had handed off the torch to Sydney and her generation.

As Sydney put it, her eyes would be smiling.