Hidden History of Arlington County by Charlie Clark

Author:Charlie Clark [Clark, Charlie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, State & Local, South (AL; AR; FL; GA; KY; LA; MS; NC; SC; TN; VA; WV), Photography, Subjects & Themes, Historical
ISBN: 9781625859235
Google: _8kmDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Published: 2017-01-15T15:57:28+00:00

150 YEARS ON HALLS HILL

The historically black community of Halls Hill/High View Park kicked off a series of look backs in January 2016 to mark its sesquicentennial (1866–2016).

At the Mount Salvation Baptist Church, I witnessed a stirring program in the company of some two hundred congregants, county board members, Arlington history buffs and one veteran of the 1959 integration of Stratford Junior High, Michael Jones.

The program was anything but dry and dusty. The main event, a local history lecture, was bookended with prayers and gospel hymns (“The Lord Is Blessing Me”) and a reading of an 1857 court deposition about a slave named Jenny. She was convicted of murdering the wife of namesake plantation owner Bazil Hall by pushing her into a fire.

Carmela Hamm performed living history in laborer costume, quoting the “crystal stairs” reference in a poem by Langston Hughes and imploring young people to “plant a seed” to preserve their heritage.

Halls Hill, as explained in a handout, was created after emancipation when Bazil Hall sold three hundred acres to former slaves for ten to fifteen dollars an acre, which laborers then worked typically for fifty cents a day.

But the Sunday formal talk was broader. Lauranett L. Lee, founding curator of African American history at the Virginia Historical Society, recalled how, as the only black student in her fourth-grade class, she shied away from history after reading in the Virginia history text that “slaves were happy.”

The Richmond-based society that now employs her was founded in 1831—the year of Nat Turner’s rebellion—to house the records of “elite white families,” Lee said. But thanks to modern technology, her society’s Unknown No Longer online database contains thousands of records of Virginia slaves. The original documents are “crumbling and fading, with chicken-scratch writing,” Lee said. “At 5:00 when the society closes, the names stay with me, and I have nightmares about the daily assaults” on enslaved people.

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