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The Trolly Tours of Fredericksburg trolly passes the slave block in downtown Fredericksburg yesterday.
Jervis Hairston (foreground, center) led the Freedom Trolley Tour of historic slavery sites in the city yesterday afternoon.
Viewing a film at the Fredericksburg Visitor Center preceded a Freedom Trolley Tour of historic slavery sites in Fredericksburg yesterday. |
BY CATHY JETT
Fredericksburg's black history begins, as so much of the city's story does, at its riverfront.
It was here on the shore of the Rappahannock that slave ships such as Capt. John Duncan's Othello began docking and unloading their human cargo in the late 1670s.
"They were put in slave pens, fenced-in areas along the river, before being taken to street corners or busy restaurants to be sold," Jervis Hairston said yesterday on the first stop of a special trolley tour of downtown Fredericksburg.
Sponsored by Germanna Community College for Black History Month, it gave the 32 participants a chance to hear about the blacks--both free and enslaved--who lived, worked and helped shape the city.
As Fredericksburg's first black city planner, Hairston ran across some of their stories as he researched deeds. Others he has learned through reading Ruth Coder Fitzgerald's "A Different Story: A Black History of Fredericksburg, Stafford and Spotsylvania" and the histories
Fredericksburg was a thriving seaport during Colonial days, with blacks working on the docks, in domestic service and a wide range of other activities, said Hairston, now a Silver Cos. vice president.
Some learned to read in a slave school that St. George's Episcopal Church started to help slaves and free blacks participate in religious services. And some earned their freedom after working aboard Fielding Lewis' ship The Dragon, which patrolled the Rappahannock and parts of the Chesapeake Bay during the American Revolution.
But when Gen. Lafayette stopped in Fredericksburg on his grand tour of America after the war, City Council ordered all blacks--free and enslaved alike--off the route of his parade down Princess Anne Street, Hairston said.
Laws regarding blacks grew more oppressive after the 1831 slave rebellion led by Nat Turner. Educating blacks became illegal, and was punishable by two months in jail plus a $50 fine for whites and 39 lashes for blacks. That didn't prevent several courageous women, however, from making sure black children got an education.
Hairston, who has been giving walking tours of black history sites in Fredericksburg for more than a decade, especially loves to tell the story of Maria Richards and her daughter, Fannie Richards. Maria and her husband, Adolph, were free blacks who lived at the foot of George Street where the city parking lot is today.
The couple had 14 children, and were adamant that all of them be educated. This meant they had to attend secret schools conducted in basements around town. Maria Richards even took the drastic step of sending one son off to Washington for schooling, even though that meant it would be illegal for him to return to Virginia.
"Can you imagine a mother sending her son away and risking never seeing him again?" Hairston said.
After her husband's death, Maria and Fannie Richards moved to Detroit where they became involved in the abolitionist movement, along with some of their former free black neighbors from Fredericksburg.
Fannie Richards went on to become the first black teacher in the Detroit school system, and taught Sunday school at the city's influential Second Baptist Church. In 1869, the year the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, she helped finance a lawsuit that successfully desegregated Detroit schools.
Other stops along yesterday's tour included the slave auction block at the corner of Charles and William streets; Shiloh (New Site) Baptist Church, which started a black high school in its basement in 1905; and Free Alley, a narrow dirt path between George and Hanover Streets. It's a remnant of a system of paths that linked predominantly black neighborhoods in town.
Free blacks could walk here without worrying that whites would ask to see their papers and ship them off to some plantation in the Deep South if they couldn't produce proof that they were free, Hairston said.
"There are a lot of good people working on plaques, not only for Freedom Alley, but for Fannie Richards," he said. "You won't see it today, but one day you will."
Yesterday's tour was a first for Germanna, and proved so popular that there were 10 people on the waiting list. It plans to hold more throughout the year, and expand their scope to include information about Kunta Kinte, the real-life hero of Alex Haley's "Roots" who lived in Spotsylvania County, said Jeanne Wesley, the community college's vice president of Workforce and Community and Education.
"Continuing education is a key part of our mission," she said, "and we believe that this sort of personal enrichment class also contributes to the quality of life in the area."
Cathy Jett: 540/374-5407
Email: cjett@freelancestar.com
