‘It’s time to start the process to bring it home’
Ugly chapter of Rappahannock history etched into ‘lynching memorial’
In Montgomery, Alabama, there is now a subtle but significant reminder of a disturbing episode in Rappahannock County history. It’s at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice — the so-called lynching memorial, which commemorates over forty-four hundred documented episodes of racially motivated killings intended to terrorize African Americans into subservience between the end of Reconstruction and the beginning of the Civil Rights movement.
These lynchings took place across some eight hundred United States counties, including Rappahannock.
The memorial is a project of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), a Montgomery-based non-profit devoted to challenging myths of white supremacy, exploring their continuing impact on racial and economic injustice, and protecting basic human rights for the most vulnerable people in American society. Their efforts on behalf of juveniles and death row inmates, including exoneration of the wrongly convicted, are the focus of a book and a feature film now in wide release, both titled Just Mercy.
The memorial was conceived, according to the EJI website, “with the hope of creating a sober, meaningful site where people can gather and reflect on America’s history of racial inequality.” Dedicated in 2018, it was modeled on projects used to present disquieting narratives of genocide, apartheid, and horrific human rights abuses in other countries, like memorials to the Holocaust in Europe, in the belief that publicly confronting the truth about history is the first step toward recovery and reconciliation.
Set on six acres overlooking downtown Montgomery, the memorial centers on a large, open-air pavilion about 175 feet on each side. It was designed in collaboration with MASS Design Group, an international firm with a mission “to research, build, and advocate for architecture that promotes justice and human dignity,” including schools and hospitals in Rwanda.
The design for the memorial includes eight hundred boxy, rectangular, rusty steel markers — like coffins — one each for the counties where lynchings took place. They are suspended from a flat roof that hugs the perimeter of the square. Each carries the county name as well as the names and dates of lynching victims. When you first enter the pavilion, the markers are on ground level and you walk among them. But soon the ground falls away, and the markers are hanging over your head, evoking the fates of those who were killed.
Rappahannock’s marker commemorates the lynching of John Fitzhugh on August 2, 1884. According to a dispatch from Orange Court House published in the Alexandria Gazette two days later, “a small band of mounted men quietly made their way to the little jail in the county of Rappahannock, forced an entrance, roused up from his slumbers John Fitzhugh, a brawny negro, and informed him that he must prepare for a speedy death at their hands.”
Although the jailer apparently tried to stop them, Fitzhugh was soon “dangling to the limb of a big oak tree.”
Allegedly armed with an old revolver, Fitzhugh was reported to have attempted “to commit an outrage upon a highly respectable married lady.” A passing youth apparently heard her calls for help
“in time to afford… protection to the lady,” and Fitzhugh was “forced to leave the premises.” But his fate was sealed. “His fiendish attack caused intense excitement in the neighborhood… It was expected at the time that the outraged people would visit speedy and rigorous punishment on the offender.”
Rappahannock’s marker, like all the others, has an identical duplicate that lies in the lawn outside the memorial’s central square. Corresponding counties are invited to engage in a process of acknowledgment and reconciliation by claiming their monument and placing it somewhere in their own community.
EJI plans to work with local partners to find appropriate locations for each monument. They will share historical and educational materials, encourage participation from communities of color, and try to ensure that the process of claiming them helps people engage with this history in a constructive and meaningful way.
The duplicate markers raise questions for communities like ours where racially motivated terror took place. We have started to confront difficult parts of our history, like the forced removals of people in the 1930s from lands that would become Shenandoah National Park. These families now have a memorial along route 211 in Sperryville. Perhaps it is time to acknowledge another shameful episode in the county’s past?
This would be consistent with resolutions passed last year by the Virginia House and Senate. According to a report in this paper on Feb. 14, 2019, “HJ 655, approved by the House, and SJ 297, passed by the Senate, ‘call for reconciliation among all Virginians’ regarding racial terror faced by African Americans during Jim Crow.”
“According to the identical resolutions, the state will document the lynchings and call further attention to them with historical markers.”
“The goal, the language states, is to ‘develop programming to bring awareness and recognition of this history to communities across the state, that such awareness might contribute to the process of healing and reconciliation in Virginia’s still-wounded communities and for families and descendants affected by lynchings’.”
EJI fought hard to install the first historical markers in Montgomery in 2013, which acknowledge the city’s prominent role in the domestic slave trade. The organization’s commitment to a fuller account of the legacies of slavery has grown from there and resulted in a robust counter-narrative to the city’s boast of being the “Cradle of the Confederacy.” It is equally the birthplace of the modern Civil Rights movement, an initiative that continues to bear fruit. Rappahannock plays a small part in the story there. It’s time to start the process to bring it home.
A resident of Flint Hill, Beardsley until July was director of Garden and Landscape Studies at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. Trained as an art historian, with an AB from Harvard and a PhD from the University of Virginia, he’s written extensively about contemporary design, landscape, and African American culture — all three fields woven into the lynching memorial. His exhibitions have included “Black Folk Art in America.” Beardsley has taught in departments of landscape architecture at the University of Virginia, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard University, where he was adjunct professor at the Graduate School of Design from 1998 to 2013.