There’s a story to be told in the tercentennial monument that looms above Historic Jamestowne. And that story is as straightforward as its height. The obelisk is 104 feet tall. That’s a foot of New Hampshire granite in honor of each Englishman who arrived on Jamestown Island in 1607, the year the colony was founded.
The obelisk looks like the Washington Monument, and it was built in 1907 to commemorate the 300th anniversary of Jamestown. The Memorial Church was also built that year, after excavations discovered the foundations of the 1617 church in which the first meeting of a representative legislative body met in English North America in 1619. Absent was any monument to the enslaved Africans who arrived in English North America that same year.
“If you look around this park, this park for over 100 years celebrated one version of Virginia’s story while systematically denying another,” said Mark Summers, Historic Jamestowne’s director of public and youth programs.
As white leaders sought to maintain Jamestown as a sacred birthplace of democracy, black scholars, activists and artists lobbied for the inclusion of their story at Jamestown for decades, or found ways to raise awareness of that history. Summers linked that struggle into the wider Civil Rights movement in a walking tour at Historic Jamestowne Monday. It was the first time Summers had presented his research in the form of a walking tour. He has held lectures on the topic using the same research in the past.
In the 19th century, the Jamestown site became a shrine to Virginia, Summers said, and a private park was established on a donated portion of the island. The federal government founded a national park on the rest of the island in the 1930s.
In 1916, then-Virginia State University president John Gandy led an effort to petition a monument be dedicated at Jamestown to the first enslaved Africans. Preservation Virginia, the nonprofit formerly known as the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities and owner of the site, rejected the request, saying Africans weren’t a notable part of the colony’s story.
“In other words, your history doesn’t matter. We’re not going to celebrate you, or even admit that you were here,” Summers said.
That effort shows members of the African American community were aware of, and lobbying for, their history. Summers reflected on his own education in the 1980s and 1990s, and how the prevailing wisdom was there just wasn’t much known about the first Africans. He noted the discrepancy between history books and reality.
The 1907 commemoration of Jamestown took place in Norfolk in a world’s-fair-like festival that featured exhibits from different communities and countries. The federal government financed an African American building, and black artists, scholars and universities paid for the exhibitions in it. Booker T. Washington made a speech there about Jamestown, and W.E.B. Du Bois criticized the program, Summers said.
Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, an African-American artist trained by Auguste Rodin, contributed works to the exhibition that included depictions of the arrival of the first Africans in English North America.
“The fact that someone like Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, who predated the Harlem Renaissance, was pushing a narrative that ‘we were brought against our will to Virginia’ is a far cry from what I was told growing up,” Summers told his tour group of several dozen people.
A pastor named W. L. Ransome was denied entry to Jamestown because of the color of his skin in 1930, and he wrote a critical letter to the editor to a Richmond newspaper. Summers said he did it to raise awareness of what the site, which restricted access for black people, represented to black people.
Another milestone rolled around in 1957, just a few years after the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision ruled segregation in public schools unconstitutional. Summers argued that to avoid an integrated commemoration of Jamestown’s 350th anniversary, state officials established Jamestown Festival Park on state land to hold ceremonies that could exclude black people. Jamestown Festival Park later became Jamestown Settlement.
More recent anniversary commemorations have sought to provide a fuller picture of the complicated origins of America. The 400th anniversary commemoration in 2007 sought to create a more diverse program, and 2019 commemorated not only the 400th anniversary of representative government but also the arrival of enslaved Africans.
Progress in creating a more inclusive story has been the product of institutions and individuals taking the time to advocate for it. In doing so, they contribute to the telling of a shared American history that doesn’t replace the contributions of Europeans but fleshes them out with the contributions of other peoples.
“It’s up to museums and citizens to keep pushing and pushing for these stories to be told,” Summer said. “That’s not saying we have to take away from John Smith or Pocahontas or anything the English people did. I always tell people, everyone at Jamestown struggled. The English struggled. The Powhatan struggled. Anyone brought here against their will struggled, too.”
Jack Jacobs, 757-298-6007, jojacobs@vagazette.com, @jajacobs_
