Slavery & Free Negroes, 1800 to 1860
Historical Background

Slavery was primarily a labor system based on oppression and violence. Slaves were forced to work. At the same time, despite the cruelty, slaves created families and culture (song, dance, religion and education). This diverse and complex institution was not static. Instead the dynamic system evolved and changed over time and place. For example, life for a southern Virginia slave working tobacco in 1710 was not the same as life for a northern Virginia slave laboring on a wheat farm in 1850. Contrary to popular conceptions of slavery, many slaves did not pick cotton or live on Gone with the Wind-like plantations. Societies that allowed slavery also varied. In Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America, Ira Berlin distinguishes between slave societies where slave labor dominated the economic, political, and social world and societies with slaves – those in which there was not a total dominance of slavery.

In the 1650s and 1660s Virginia and Maryland had been societies with slaves, in which slaves had provided some labor. By the end of seventeenth century, they were being transformed into slave societies, in which slaves formed the bulk of the subordinate labor force. Laws passed in the 1660s had formally recognized slavery and begun to define it in racial terms – clearly distinguishing between black Africans and white workers. In the two decades before slave importation ended in 1808, planters purchased some quarter of a million Africans, doubling the number they imported in the previous two centuries. In the following years, natural reproduction and the internal slave trade replaced importation and met the demand for workers.

In 1830 a significant portion of Virginia slaves worked on small farms, where a laborer might cook one day and hoe cotton the next. On these farms patterns of labor varied from season to season as owners tried to insure profits and, at the same time, cultivate enough food and raw materials to sustain their own families. In such situations, slaves had more direct interaction with owners and could hope that a successful owner might purchase nearby family members. But slaves on small farms faced great danger. One bad season could cause owners to sell slaves to pay off debts, thus breaking up slave families and contributing to the great internal migration of slaves to sugar or cotton plantations in southern states such as Mississippi and Alabama. Alexandria had one of the largest slave markets in the U.S.

By the 1820s and 1830s throughout the Upper South, including Virginia, residents questioned the profitability of slavery. Many farmers turned from tobacco, which did not grow as well in northern Virginia as it did further south, to other crops, such as wheat, that did not require year-round labor. By the 1840s northern Virginia farmers had diversified and were growing wheat, corn, flax, raising hogs, cattle, and sheep. There was a change to smaller farms and to skilled slaves on plantations. Work was differentiated and skilled. With these skills, slaves had greater power and increased opportunities. They had more leverage to negotiate for better living conditions, less work, and some contracted their labor out.

In 1831-32, the Virginia state legislature considered resolutions that supported the gradual emancipation of slaves or their shipment to Africa. The resolutions received a substantial number of votes but failed to pass. This debate and the defeat of the resolutions was the result, in part, of timing, for in 1831 a major slave rebellion led by Nat Turner, erupted in Virginia. Instead of granting freedom, southern masters tightened their grip on blacks, free and enslaved, and on anyone else who challenged their right to own slaves. In Virginia, fearing the influence of antislavery literature, it became illegal to teach slaves to read. Nonetheless, the existence of such a debate suggests the problems Upper South slaveowners faced in sustaining the institutions of slavery.

What was life like for free Negroes in the South? Often free blacks were highly skilled in occupation, lighter in color than in North. While some lived and worked on small farms, most free blacks lived in urban areas and supported themselves as manual laborers, domestics, petty traders, artisans, or small shopkeepers. Often they formed support networks among themselves, founding their own churches and clubs. But after Nat Turner’s rebellion, whites assumed that the freedom of any blacks could stimulate dangerous notions among slaves. The Virginia legislature passed new restrictions on the activities of free blacks, denying them the right to own firearms, be ordained as ministers or meet for worship without the permission of the local white officials. By the 1830s, free blacks in every southern state found their very presence assailed and sometimes banned. Often the laws that limited them became the same as those after the Civil War.

Although free Negroes have been described as more slave than free, they were not a monolithic group, with different circumstances and choices depending on the region they lived in. In the North even without fear of slave revolts free Negroes had limited political rights, but they were allowed to travel freely, organize their own institutions, publish newspapers, and petition and protest. By 1810 the Upper South contained nearly 100,000 free Negroes, who composed about 8 percent of the black population in the region and almost 60 percent of the free blacks in the U.S. Thereafter repression slowed the number and the proportion declined. Some were freed by their masters who began to see slavery as inconsistent with the principles of the new Republic or who lost economic incentive to keep slaves. In the South there was less immigrant labor competition than in the North, so free blacks had higher economic standing than in the free states. But free Negroes in the Upper South were severely limited in their political and communal activities because whites feared they would instigate slave rebellions. Consequently, they were prevented from voting, sitting on juries, testifying in court, and also barred from travel without permission and meeting without supervision of whites. Free Negroes in the Upper South enjoyed economic advancement at the expense of political activism, and this was even more pronounced in the Lower South.

The William Jasper family, 1808-1870 [Talking Points]
• William Jasper, an African American, was probably born in 1808 not far from George Washington’s plantation in Mount Vernon. He was born a slave on the plantation of William Hayward Foote’s Hayfield plantation. Foote was one of the richest men in Fairfax County—when he died he owned 50 slaves.
• Jasper worked on a plantation that grew wheat and corn, and raised horses, cattle, sheep and hogs. Slaves at Hayfield, including Jasper, are likely to have had skills as farmers, blacksmiths and carpenters.
• Jasper and his family were not sold south to booming cotton and sugar plantations, as were many other slaves.
• According to his will, Foote decided to free his slaves on or soon after his death in 1846. At this time Jasper, in his thirties, was valued by appraisers to be worth $350. Foote’s will also freed Jasper’s wife Sara, in her mid-twenties, and their two daughters who were six and four. They were actually freed in the early 1850’s.
• It is important to note that the Jaspers were free blacks in Virginia before the Civil War. But even as free blacks they faced numerous obstacles. They could not: own a gun, obtain an education, vote, conduct business freely, worship in religious services unless supervised by whites. Also they might be captured by slave traders and sold back into slavery.
• The Jaspers wanted to stay in Virginia near friends and family, so in 1853 and 1858 they chose to register as free blacks in Fairfax County to prove that they were free. This meant they could travel and gain employment.
• In 1860 William Jasper purchased 13 acres of land near the Hayfield Plantation. It is likely that he put together the $200 to pay a white farmer and slave owner for the land from his work as a farmer.
• The Jaspers probably did not stay on their newly bought land during the Civil War – and it is also likely that what they had on this land, including buildings, animals and crops, was lost during the war.

A Look At Virginians During Reconstruction
Historical Background

According to Christopher Clark and Nancy Hewitt, “Both failures and successes were inherent in the task of rebuilding the nation following the Civil War: vigilante violence, often fatal conflict over the right of African American men to vote, courageous African American insistence on self-determination and participation in the political process, and federal intervention in the South to help assure freedpeople’s rights. The Union victory in 1865 had settled two major debates but left everything else in doubt. The United States of America was preserved; slavery was dead, and African Americans were now free. But who would hold and exercise economic and political power in the postwar South? What kind of labor system would replace slavery? Who would lead the South politically? What would freedom mean for the four million former slaves? Answers to these questions were widely contested and would emerge only after two decades of intense political and social struggle, a struggle that contemporaries hopefully called Reconstruction.
Racial conflicts in the former Confederacy continued to disrupt efforts at reunification, and a protracted financial crisis dashed hopes for a quick economic recovery. In response, northern political and business leaders focused their efforts on revitalizing the economy through reconciliation between North and South rather than protecting racial advancement in either region. Thus… the old planter aristocracy – under the protection of a revived Democratic Party – returned to power, controlling a nonslave but still exploitative system of agricultural labor.
The failure of Reconstruction to transform southern race relations shaped the nation as a whole. Still, it was freedpeople who paid the highest price. Outgunned, both figuratively and literally, they were left with few alternatives. Yet they did not give up. Those who remained in the South established a dense network of autonomous community-based institutions, including black schools, churches, and businesses, to keep their democratic hopes alive within an oppressive and racist system.”
(From Clark, Christopher and Nancy A. Hewitt. Who Built America, Volume I, pages 589-590.)

Virginia, 1865-1870
The 1869 Virginia Constitution, unlike previous state charters, mandated public education. Virginia’s position on public education – let alone its position on educating blacks – had been tenuous at best. The state had long resisted a system of free schools, despite the efforts of some of its more famous citizens. Thomas Jefferson’s unsuccessful campaign for free schools had yielded little more than a literary fund for indigent children. All of that changed when Congress passed the Reconstruction Act of March 2, 1867 demanding that southern states ratify new constitutions guaranteeing black suffrage. Once these constitutions met with congressional approval and after the state approved the Fourteenth Amendment, Congress promised re-admittance into the Union.
Responding to the Reconstruction Act, Virginians registered voters and called an election to decide if the state would call a convention to revise the state’s constitution. In 1867 226 Fairfax County blacks registered to vote – voting unanimously in favor of a constitutional convention. In 1869, they returned to the polls and voted for adoption of the Constitution.
At the 1867-1868 Constitutional Convention, education proved to be one of the most hotly debated topics (the state’s war debt was the other top issue). Though delegates largely consisted of northern immigrants and freedmen easily approved a public school system, they were strongly divided over the question of integration. Many northern immigrants viewed public schools as the foundation of a democratic society and a key to reconstruction of the South. The question broke along racial lines. Black members introduced resolutions ensuring equal access to education “without distinction of color.” White delegates never took these suggestions seriously. Even radicals who supported desegregation voted against such resolutions. Mindful of widespread sentiment against mixed schools, they did not want to risk ratification. In the end, while most assumed public schools would be segregated, no language could be agreed upon and the question was not resolved until the legislature revisited the issue in 1870.
While blacks lost their campaign for mixed schools, they still passed a milestone in gaining access to public education. However, as a result of poor political and financial support, Virginia’s first public schools for both blacks and whites were grossly inadequate. Many did not have heat or toilets, schools were small and scattered; also the average term was less than the five months mandated by the Constitution, and attendance, which was not required, was sparse. Despite these conditions – and those for black children were considerably worse than those for whites – still there were now public schools in which both black and white children learned.”

The William Jasper family, 1808-1870 [Talking Points]
• William Jasper, an African American, was probably born in 1808 not far from George Washington’s plantation in Mount Vernon. He was born a slave on the plantation of William Hayward Foote’s Hayfield plantation. Foote was one of the richest men in Fairfax County—when he died he owned 50 slaves.
• Jasper worked on a plantation that grew wheat and corn, and raised horses, cattle, sheep and hogs. Slaves at Hayfield, including Jasper, are likely to have had skills as farmers, blacksmiths and carpenters.
• Jasper and his family were not sold south to booming cotton and sugar plantations, as were many other slaves.
• According to his will, Foote decided to free his slaves on or soon after his death in 1846. At this time Jasper, in his thirties, was valued by appraisers to be worth $350. Foote’s will also freed Jasper’s wife Sara, in her mid-twenties, and their two daughters who were six and four. They were actually freed in the early 1850’s.
• It is important to note that the Jaspers were free blacks in Virginia before the Civil War. But even as free blacks they faced numerous obstacles. They could not: own a gun, obtain an education, vote, conduct business freely, worship in religious services unless supervised by whites. Also they might be captured by slave traders and sold back into slavery.
• The Jaspers wanted to stay in Virginia near friends and family, so in 1853 and 1858 they chose to register as free blacks in Fairfax County to prove that they were free. This meant they could travel and gain employment.
• In 1860 William Jasper purchased 13 acres of land near the Hayfield Plantation. It is likely that he put together the $200 to pay a white farmer and slave owner for the land from his work as a farmer.
• The Jaspers probably did not stay on their newly bought land during the Civil War – and it is also likely that what they had on this land, including buildings, animals and crops, was lost during the war.


The Impact of the Jim Crow Era on Education
Historical Background

In 1877, white southerners moved with great speed to erect a system of segregation and black disenfranchisement and in 1883, the U.S. Supreme Court aided white supremacists by striking the Civil Rights Act of 1875, an act that had banned racial segregation in public transportation and accommodations. In 1887, Florida passed a law requiring segregation in public facilities. The rest of the former Confederate states soon followed. These Jim Crow laws – named for a character in a minstrel show – soon became the norm in all southern states and applied to everything from segregated seating on trains to separate bathrooms, drinking fountains, and graveyards. Whites worked to keep blacks in separate spaces from birth to death, and the differences later proved unjust by every measure.

In the 1896 case Plessy v. Ferguson, the U.S. Supreme Court validated southern legislation, ruling that segregation was not discriminatory in intrastate railroads, provided that accommodations for blacks equaled those for whites. Jim Crow laws, according to the majority, did not violate black civil rights under the Fourteenth Amendment. Since legal ratification of segregation was not enough to keep blacks in subservient roles, southerners resorted to extra-legal action in the form of public humiliations, race riots, convict labor, and lynchings.

Race relations disintegrated in Fairfax County, too. In the 1870s, black landowner William West described “relations between the races in Vienna as ‘very good; a black could go into any white store, and none was prevented from buying land.” In 1873, the town had 632 registered voters, 232 of whom were black. By the 1880s, however, relations between the races had deteriorated significantly and many privileges, including voting rights that William Jasper and Thornton Gray had enjoyed immediately after the Civil War, were denied.

Black disenfranchisement and increased segregation came about in many ways. In Falls Church, whites used gerrymandering to improve their situation. Other places relied on fear to intimidate black voters. Some used the press to counter black ambitions to hold public office. In 1889 the Fairfax Herald, expressing anxiety over a possible nomination of a black for constable in the Providence district, wrote, “[I]t is the suicidal and pernicious policy of electing negroes to office to the injury and detriment of our county, to which we wish to call the attention of the people.” Statutory acts, court rulings, and constitutional amendments provided the legal apparatus to solidify white rule.

Following other southern states, Virginia made black disenfranchisement legal at its Constitutional Convention of 1901-1902. Delegates traveled to Richmond with the chief intent of stripping blacks of their right to vote. In education, delegates rewrote sections of the education clause to legalize racial discrimination in the school system. They did so by approving a substantial loophole in school funding that enabled districts to withhold funds from black schools. Depriving black fathers of the vote and black children of the schoolbook was the intent of the convention and its result.

In 1915, discrimination against blacks could be clearly seen in counties across Virginia. For every dollar spent on educating a black child in Amelia County, $12.37 went to a white child’s education. Educational discrimination was worst in areas with the greatest number of blacks. While African Americans continued their lessons in inadequate one-room buildings – one of which was commonly referred to as “our shoebox” by its students and teachers because it was so tiny – white children often enjoyed much larger schools. Some of them were two stories tall, and some were brick.

Despite these added obstacles, black schools stayed open, and children continued to learn. Black education advanced as the state made more of an effort to improve education generally. School reformers, including northern philanthropists, campaigned for longer terms for both black and white children, improved teacher training, school consolidation and transportation, school libraries, better organization, and local school improvement leagues. Though improvements in education moved at a slower pace for blacks than whites, blacks nevertheless held to their strong values in education.

Black communities realized the power of literacy. As historian James Anderson has noted, “The short-range purpose of black schooling was to provide the masses of ex-slaves with basic literacy skills plus the rudiments of citizenship training for participation in a democratic society. The long-range purpose was the intellectual and moral development of a responsible leadership class that would organize the masses and lead them to freedom and equality.” As discrimination increased, blacks did not alter their education strategy.

Support from the black community for education was crucial. Black community investment in education remained a constant. Examples of community and teacher support are many. These include reports of parents and neighbors providing firewood for the schools, dinner and lodging for teachers, and donating services to warm schoolrooms on cold days, and build a baseball field for the children. Generation after generation, from 1886 to 1932, the Laurel Grove School community supported its little school.


A Child’s Life in a Segregated Society
Historical Background

Segregation was more than an attitude – it was a system supported by both law and custom, and its purpose was to control newly freed African American people. The system of racial domination was carefully constructed to accomplish its goal.
Its economic component was meant to control black labor, and included job discrimination that limited African Americans to agricultural and service jobs. Sharecropping, an essential part of this system, assured white planters of continuing black farm labor by establishing a cycle of debt. This was accomplished by “fixing the books,” debt peonage, vagrancy laws, a credit system, and a convict lease system. These tactics prevented black people from receiving wages due them or moving when their situation worsened. Often these laws were modeled on Slave Codes during slavery.
Politically, segregation disfranchised freedpeople and suppressed black political action – especially the expression of newly gained rights as citizens (14th Amendment) and the right of black men to vote (15th Amendment). Disfranchisement was a two-stage process. First the Ku Klux Klan and other related groups used violence and the threat of violence to suppress black political action. Lynching and other violence was justified by the threat of miscegenation, and the alleged need to protect white women against rape by black men. The second kind of disfranchisement came in the form of laws designed to prevent blacks from voting, including literacy requirements, poll taxes, grandfather clauses, and all-white primaries. These laws were carefully crafted to avoid the 15th Amendment – they could not explicitly use race as a barrier to voting.
A key piece of this system of control was Jim Crow laws and customs. More than a series of strict anti-black laws – it was a way of life that affected whites as well as blacks. There were many state laws touching all aspects of life, including these typical Jim Crow laws:
• Barbers. No colored barber shall serve as a barber (to) white girls or women (Georgia).
• Blind Wards. The board of trustees shall...maintain a separate building...on separate ground for the admission, care, instruction, and support of all blind persons of the colored or black race (Louisiana).
• Burial. The officer in charge shall not bury, or allow to be buried, any colored persons upon ground set apart or used for the burial of white persons (Georgia).
NOTE: Eleven additional Jim Crow laws are available at http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/what.htm
During Jim Crow segregation African Americans were not passive; they responded, resisted and negotiated in a variety of ways. Among the most famous responders were Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois. They represent two different approaches. Washington, born a slave in Virginia, became a well-known educator and founded Hampton Institute in Virginia then Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. In his important and influential Atlanta Compromise Speech of 1895, he stressed accommodation rather than resistance to the racist order under which southern African Americans lived. Acutely conscious of the narrow limitations whites placed on African Americans’ economic aspirations, he stressed that blacks must accommodate white people’s – and especially southern whites’ – refusal to tolerate blacks as anything more than sophisticated menials. In this 1895 speech to the predominantly white audience, Washington said:
“Casting down your bucket among my people, helping and encouraging them as you are… to education of head, hand, and heart, you will find that they will buy your surplus land, make blossom the waste places in your fields, and run your factories. While doing this, you can be sure in the future, as in the past, that you and your families will be surrounded by the most patient, faithful, law-abiding, and unresentful people that the world has seen… [I]n our humble way, we shall stand by you with a devotion that no foreigner can approach, ready to lay down our lives, if need be, in defense of yours, interlacing our industrial, commercial, civil, and religious life with yours in a way that shall make the interests of both races one. In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”
W.E.B. DuBois, on the other hand, was born free and was the first African American to receive a doctorate from Harvard. In 1903 as an influential black leader and intellectual W.E.B. DuBois published an essay in his collection The Souls of Black Folk with the title “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others.” DuBois rejected Washington’s willingness to avoid rocking the racial boat, calling instead for political power, insistence on civil rights, and the higher education of Negro youth. In 1905 DuBois and other middle-class but militant Black intellectuals, including Ida Wells Barnett, and some whites organized the Niagara Movement, and later the NAACP. Included in their “Declaration of Principles” was this statement on the Color-Line:
“Any discrimination based simply on race or color is barbarous, we care not how hallowed it be by custom, expediency or prejudice. Differences made on account of ignorance, immorality, or disease are legitimate methods of fighting evil, and against them we have no word of protest; but discriminations based simply and solely on physical peculiarities, place of birth, color of skin, are relics of that unreasoning human savagery of which the world is and ought to be thoroughly ashamed.”
Many African Americans resisted Jim Crow segregation. Among their strategies and tactics were collective protest, migrating north or west, especially to urban communities, and creating their own institutions, especially educating their children for a better life. Education particularly offered African Americans hope and a sense of possibility. Chafe, Gavins, and Korstad, in their introduction to Remembering Jim Crow, recognize:
• “The extraordinary resilience of black citizens, who individually and collectively found ways to endure, fight back and occasionally define their own destinies…”
• “The enduring capacity of families to nurture each other, and especially their children, in the face of a system so dangerous and capricious that there were no rules one could count on for protection. Under these circumstances parents still managed to convey a sense of right and wrong, strength and assurance.”
• “The incredible variety, richness and ingenuity of black Americans’ responses to one of the cruelest, least yielding social and economic systems ever created.”


The Founding of Laurel Grove and Other “Colored” Schools
in Fairfax County, 1860-1890
Historical Background

Though more than a decade had passed since Virginia had initiated a public education system, Laurel Grove was not started by the local school board. It was not started by the state superintendent. Neither was it begun by the Freedmen’s Bureau nor by Northern philanthropists. Instead former slaves built the school. Parents, grandparents, and neighbors donated the land, materials, and labor. They found teachers in their own community, and they sustained the place of learning. As they did so, their hopes, no doubt, soared, as they dreamed that their children might gain access to a better life than they thought possible for themselves.

They did so because they recognized that literacy brought more power to defend their status as freedpeople, more expertise to help them buy property and start businesses, more independence in religious instruction, and more means to live an independent life. Indeed, literacy shaped African-American identity and informed their conceptions of citizenship, freedom, and success. Their determination and appreciation of education persisted even as former slaveowners regained their hold of economic, political, and social institutions. Though they lost the vote and other rights, they still ensured through their limited resources that the end of Reconstruction would not spell the end of black education. Our national memory of black schools in segregation is deficient, however, if we only remember the harsh injustices. As Vanessa Siddle Walker has argued in her study of an African-American school in North Carolina, a more complete picture also acknowledges the fond memories, good instruction, and parental support. This account of Laurel Grove recognizes both and hence contributes to a historiography of the Jim Crow era that is dynamic, complex, and alert to the cruel deeds and rigid system fashioned by the oppressors as well as the creative ingenuity and resiliency of the oppressed. Laurel Grove and the other “colored” schools founded at this time contributed to the educational achievements of African Americans. Historian James Anderson documents that across the South the African American illiteracy rate dropped from 95 percent in 1860 to 70 percent in 1880. By 1910, it fell to 30 percent.

Laurel Grove, which eventually became a part of the town of Franconia, is situated in the north-central part of Fairfax County. In the 1880s, the area, though close to the bustling grounds of Alexandria and Washington, D.C., was sparsely populated. Dairy herds brought farmers the largest revenue, but many, including Winnie Walker Spencer’s grandfather William Jasper, cultivated small plots of vegetables for their families and sold the surplus in Alexandria markets. Jasper and a few other free black farmers had settled in the region before the Civil War. Their small parcels intermixed with larger plots possessed by white farmers. After the war, the neighborhood, unlike some of the more heavily populated black communities in Fairfax County that emerged during Reconstruction, never drew a large number of African-American residents.

Common to many black schools in the South, Laurel Grove was linked to a church, in this case the Baptist church. For some time, this small group of black farmers and laborers gathered occasionally for open air services near a grove of laurel. Some, including Jasper who owned the land where the laurel grew, also worshipped at Alexandria’s Alfred Street Baptist Church. But walking the almost twenty-mile round trip proved onerous. Attending the nearby white church was not an option, so the neighbors, together with Alexandria pastor L. W. Brooks, established their own house of worship and called it Laurel Grove Baptist. Before erecting a sanctuary, however, the congregation, led by four church trustees—Middleton Braxton, George Carroll, Thornton Gray, and William Jasper—created a school for their children.

Though sketchy, the historical record reveals some about these four trustees. All were native to Fairfax County. All farmed. Middleton Braxton, born in 1853, married Mary Daggs in 1875 and had at least three children. George Carroll, born a couple years after Braxton, was the son of Jane Carroll. She had been a slave of Dennis Johnston, a very large slaveholder. In 1856, Johnston’s heirs freed the Carroll family and allowed them to farm ten acres. This area and land purchases after the Civil War by George Carroll and his wife, Hattie, eventually became known as Carrolltown and lay but a few miles from Laurel Grove. The older trustees, William Jasper—son of Morris and Eliza Jasper—and Thornton Gray—son of Thomzen Gray—were both born around the time that the United States was embroiled in the War of 1812 and not long after America closed its doors to the international slave trade.

Gray, described in 1834 as “a Darke Mulatto about . . . Six feet one Inch High, a Scar over the left eye, a Scar under the . . . lip, a Scar on the thum of the right Hand,” was the “son of Thomzen, a free woman Emancipated by General George Washington.” Unlike Gray, Jasper was born a slave and worked for his master, William Hayward Foote, at Hayfield Plantation. Foote, a very prosperous farmer and lawyer, owned land that had once been a part of Mount Vernon. Jasper’s duties likely included farming his master’s wheat or tending his cattle, sheep, or hogs. Or perhaps he served as a blacksmith, carpenter, or cooper. He may also have plied his trades and rented himself out to gain a little cash. Whatever his assignments on or off the plantation, he escaped what many Virginia slaves feared most: he was not separated from his kin and sold south to work on a cotton or sugar plantation. When Foote died in 1846, his will freed his slaves, including Jasper, his wife, Sarah, and at least two of their children.

Thus, before the Civil War, at least three of the church trustees were free blacks. While this freedom did not equal the freedom of their white neighbors—laws certainly constricted their economic, political, and social mobility—Gray and Jasper made the most of their opportunities. By 1860, each managed to acquire property and farm. Gray established his family on five acres. Across the road, William Jasper purchased his 13 acres from a white slaveowner in 1860.

When the Laurel Grove community decided to create a school, they first needed land. Jasper responded by deeding one-half acre to the Mount Vernon School District in 1881. Other black families donated lumber. Most likely, church treasurer George Carroll was one of several who, after finishing his daily farm chores, felled trees and hauled logs to the school site. Then neighbors erected an A-frame school house that typified the era. Hence with their own land, lumber and labor, these parents expressed hope that African- American liberties and status could be enlarged at the school door.

About the time Laurel Grove students first entered the classroom, the congregation constructed a church. Again, Jasper deeded a half-acre to church trustees and made it possible for the fledgling group to situate its two fundamental institutions side by side. Sacrificing one of his acres testified to the importance he placed on religion and education. For close to fifty years, the school served African-American children within a five-mile radius, and the community, with slim state and county support, maintained operations.

When Laurel Grove School opened its doors in the mid-1880s, it became one of about 80 schools operating in Fairfax County, eleven of which were “colored.” Hence, though black people made up 33% of the population, only 14% of the schools served them. Just six of all schools had more than one room and only 35 percent of school-aged children attended. In the Mount Vernon School District, Laurel Grove was one of five black schools in 1890. The others were Gum Springs, Gunston, Springbank, and Woodlawn. Gum Springs was the oldest, starting in 1865 in the Bethlehem Baptist Church. In 1867, the Freedmen’s Bureau and Woodlawn Quakers helped the community erect a school building on land donated by African American Jane Ford Rogers. Quakers also helped establish Woodlawn School in 1871.

Teacher reports testified to the enthusiasm black parents and community members felt for the Gum Springs School, but many in the white community exhibited a different response. Superintendent Orrin E. Hine reported that public sentiment did not favor the education of freed people or poor whites: “[I]t is barely tolerated and would not be if it were not from fear of punishment.” Black teachers complained repeatedly of white harassment. Numerous resignation letters to the Superintendent of the Freedmen’s Bureau testified of the difficulties. In Gum Springs there was a new teacher every year. Other places in Fairfax County also had problems. Angry individuals engaged in “malicious burning” of the black school near Frying Pan and the “breaking up” of the one by Lewinsville. In 1864, Betsy Read and her father, J.D. Read, started the Falls Church School in one of Fairfax’s three black enclaves called “The Hill.” Shortly after opening the school, a group of enraged Confederate Rangers killed him. Betsy, fearing for her life, fled.

Laurel Grove School, though faced with inadequate facilities and resources, apparently escaped these violent actions. Still, Laurel Grove residents would have surely known of the violence and felt the presence of the Ku Klux Klan in the county. The Klan, hoping to reinstate the antebellum social order through fear and intimidation, organized in Fairfax shortly after black men exercised voting privileges and cast ballots for delegates to the constitutional convention in 1867. Since Jasper and Gray were among those who voted the Radical ticket and helped send a Radical delegation to Richmond, they probably felt the anger of their area’s former slaveowners.

Jasper’s children were probably some of the first students to attend Laurel Grove School. Though Jasper farmed his same acreage in the 1880s, his family life had changed. Sarah had died, and in 1869, William married Georgianna Jackson at Alexandria’s Theological Seminary. A year later the couple gave birth to Richard, the first of two children. Five years later, their daughter, Georgianna, completed the family. These two possibly sat in the first class alongside several of Gray’s eight children.

The first teachers of Laurel Grove were African-American women. So were the last. Indeed, it is likely, that all of the school’s instructors were female, given the feminization of the teaching profession, the black community’s reliance on black women as teachers and the fact that teaching was the only professional role open to black women. In 1890, women comprised 66 percent of the total number of teachers nationwide; in 1920, 86 percent of all teachers were women. In 1910, 76 percent of black teachers were women.

To become a teacher in Fairfax County was fairly easy. The county superintendent gave the exam and rarely rejected a teacher who failed. Nepotism was common. Still, teachers complained. Lillian W. Millan, a white teacher in Fairfax white schools, started teaching in 1891 and recalled the certification process with little fondness: “At first the questions were prepared by our County Superintendent, Mr. M.D. Hall, but later on they were sent out from Richmond. It was always a trying ordeal to take the examination and we usually did a lot of cramming beforehand which always turned out to be about things we were never asked to tell.”

Pedagogical training for teachers began in Virginia in the 1870s. The 1869 Constitution required the Board of Education to establish state normal schools as soon as possible. State Superintendent Ruffner started the process by hosting summer institutes and county meetings. By the beginning of the 1880s, the state opened segregated Normal Colleges for whites and blacks. These schools joined the existing Hampton Institute in training teachers. The Peabody Fund, a northern philanthropy, helped facilitate these institutes. For rural teachers who lacked even basic equipment, these institutes sometimes demanded remarkable creativity. Teachers at a Virginia Institute asked, “How can you teach drawing with a two-by-four-blackboard?” At another institute in South Carolina, an instructor explained: “We strove, too, to avoid another mischievous mistake: the mistake of supposing that expensive apparatus, or, indeed, furniture of any kind (blackboards excepted), are necessary to the illustration of most of the teaching of our common schools.” The teacher continued with examples of resourcefulness: “A base ball did duty in explaining the motions of the earth; . . . sand spread on the floor did duty as relief maps; pebbles picked up on the school grounds furnished the basis of a talk on common sense.”

In the 1880s and 1890s, when the state was in a better position financially, public sentiment swung more in favor of education. Still, in comparison with northern schools, Virginia and the rest of the south disappointed in every category. Thirty years after the inauguration of public education, Virginia schoolchildren were in school about half the time their peers in New England were. While Massachusetts spent $37.76 on each child per year, Virginia spent $9.70. Nationally, the average value of school property per child stood at $24. Virginia spent five dollars. Massachusetts spent $61. Virginia teachers made an average of $168 while those in Kansas made $236 and those in Massachusetts made $566. For blacks the situation was far worse. On average, Virginia’s African-American children received one-third as much school money as the average white child. They had fewer schools, fewer teachers, poorer facilities, and shorter terms. In 1908, seats existed for only 50 percent of black children compared to 83 percent for white children. As historian Louis Harlan concluded, “Considerable evidence supports the charge of W.E.B. DuBois that ‘enforced ignorance’ was ‘one of the inevitable expedients for fastening serfdom on the country Negro.’ By ‘determined effort. . . Negro schools had been made less efficient than twenty years earlier.’”

The Daily Experience of the Laurel Grove School, 1925
Historical Background

In 2002, Marguerite Giles Williams reflected on her years at Laurel Grove “Colored” School in Fairfax County, Virginia. She declared, “I liked to learn and I loved all subjects.” Williams attended the one-room schoolhouse from 1925 to 1932. She walked ten miles daily to join her classmates of varying ages and grades. Together they worked in small confines, shared books and desks, made do without dictionaries, and studied geography without maps. Though they lacked many essentials, they still learned to read, write, add, and subtract. Williams was not alone in her enthusiasm. Winnie Walker Spencer explained that had it not been for Laurel Grove School—which sat on land that was donated by her grandfather William Jasper—she and her siblings would have been without an education. Instead, she proudly stated, the school’s motto proclaimed, “Get an Education and Everything Will Fall in Line.”

By the 1920s, Laurel Grove School teachers had taught children reading and writing for forty years. Though the school remained a one-room building, the public school system now stood on firmer ground. Students, ranging from first to seventh grades, advanced independently. They shared books and older students helped younger ones. A school day was five and one-half hours and the teachers were paid on a basis of a 20-day school month. Since 1918, when Virginia passed the first compulsory attendance law, children aged eight to twelve were required to attend school for at least sixteen weeks.

Laurel Grove and other Fairfax County students benefited from these and other state requirements. In 1920, the county, ranked first in the state with a 96 percent literacy rate. Still, discrimination against black students was the rule. In 1920, the county spent more than double for a white child’s education than a black child’s. It gave white teachers fewer students per class than black teachers and paid white teachers almost twice as much. Mid-decade, the Fairfax County School Board mandated that all schools close on the same date, but this did not mean that all schools operated for an equal number of days. White schools conducted sessions for 160 days and black schools 140 days. In addition, no black child could obtain a high school education in Fairfax County. While secondary curriculum was available in the county since 1907 (one year after the state passed a secondary education law), the schools admitted only white students. The first high school was opened in Clifton, and by 1912, its students moved into a new school building with six classrooms, a library, and an assembly hall. Other towns followed, including Herndon, which built a new $10,000 high school around 1911. By 1924, the school had an athletic director, two basketball and two tennis courts, a baseball diamond, and a 220-yard track. In 1925, the school developed a business curriculum.

Despite this discrimination, former Laurel Grove students, such as Winnie Walker Spencer and Marguerite Giles Williams, recalled their school days with nostalgia. To get to school, they walked through pastures and along country roads. Williams made the five-mile trek from her family’s farm. She left home with her two sisters at 7:30 a.m., met fellow classmate Lily Jenkins along the way, and arrived at school an hour and a half later. By that time, fellow student Dan Baker had the fire lit and other children, including descendants of Jasper and Carroll, would be fulfilling other duties. Each had chores. Some pumped drinking water from the well; others stoked the stove with firewood and straightened the room. During winter, they hung their coats on nails and warmed themselves by the pot-bellied stove.

School began at 9:00 a.m. with devotions and the pledge of allegiance. R. L. Carrington, Lula P. Bueckner, Alma Walker (another Jasper descendant), and other teachers taught their pupils reading, writing, math, geography, history and spelling. “We had good teachers,” Spencer reminisced, “They gave us a good basis. If we misspelled a word, we had to rewrite it fifty times.” For music lessons, the teacher played the piano and the children sang. For lunch, students ate food from home. Marguerite’s grandmother sent bread and butter sandwiches. Sometimes the children brought garden vegetables and the teacher cooked a pot of stew. At recess, they enjoyed sports. “We were ball players,” Mamie Lightfoot said. When they struck up a game, boys who could not attend school regularly because their parents needed their labor on the farm joined them.

Laurel Grove students did not work solely on academic lessons. Spencer recollected sewing samplers, and the County’s “Colored Industrial” teacher Mrs. C.W. Patterson tutored students in other skills, too. In doing so, Patterson followed the dictates of the state supervisor of rural black elementary schools who advocated lessons in basket making, carpentry, cooking, chair caning, sewing, and shoe repair. Giving time to such activities placed Laurel Grove on par with other black schools in the south and positioned it within ongoing debates about what black schoolchildren should learn and who should decide.

In the still rural Fairfax of the 1920s, teachers at white schools also wove industrial and agricultural lessons into their curriculum. But the agenda was different for African-American students. Exposing his era’s racial assumptions, one northern philanthropist made clear the reason. He argued that black persons “will willingly fill the more menial positions, and do the heavy work, at less wages.” This would leave whites “the more expert labor.” His recommendations to African Americans included: “Avoid social questions; leave politics alone; continue to be patient; live moral lives; live simply; learn to work.” Not all northern philanthropists agreed. Some hoped to dismantle white supremacy and viewed education as a tool for social change. Many more, however, took the course of Rockefeller’s General Education Fund and promoted industrial education. The Peabody and Slater Foundations did more than promote; they withheld support if black schools did not teach industrial skills.

Southern segregationists, intent on keeping black people in subservient roles, sided with the extremists. The Fairfax Herald mocked any “ambition to make classical scholars . . . of the negro race.” If blacks were provided books, the editors questioned, who would do “the hewing of the wood, the drawing of the water, and the hoeing of corn.” Not surprisingly, African Americans scorned such messages. They argued that they sent their children to school for intellectual development and a chance to progress, not to learn skills that would keep them beholden to whites. At least one Virginia teacher reported that if parents heard that industrial lessons were planned, they would keep their children at home.

The contest between academic and industrial education was not settled within the black community, however, as demonstrated by the debate between two prominent African-Americans who adopted different strategies to promote progress and equality. Former Virginia slave Booker T. Washington embraced industrial education and a message of hard work, discipline, morality, and service. To move forward, African Americans must accept segregation, avoid political confrontations, work diligently, and gain economic independence. This, he contended, would win white approval. To gain essential skills, Washington called for training in agriculture, domestics, and industrial labor. He started Tuskegee Institute to provide such a forum and encouraged his students to master a trade. W. E. B. DuBois—the first black person to gain a doctorate from Harvard University, founder of the Niagara Movement, leader of the NAACP, and writer for the NAACP newspaper The Crisis—countered Washington’s conciliatory views. Instead, he argued that black people should not bow to segregation but should fight for civil and political rights. He championed African-American rights to higher education and pushed for the development of a talented leadership—the “talented tenth”—to overcome discrimination.

Disputes between Washington and DuBois blurred on the local level. While some children stayed home when industrial lessons were taught, others opted to can vegetables and cane chairs. In practice, teachers taught both academic and industrial subjects and children learned to read, write, sew, and saw. One of the places that showcased both was the county fair. At separate venues, black and white children displayed their achievements in the midst of great excitement and fanfare. During the first decades of the twentieth century, Fairfax County white fairs featured “a brass band, balloon ascensions, comic knife throwing, high-wire walking, health demonstrations, an automobile parade, precision drills, parachute drops, moving pictures, Punch and Judy shows. . . and the prize-winning produce and livestock of the county’s farmers and future farmers.” Reports of the “Colored” Fairs were similar, featuring in 1914, “a full complement of side shows, including the merry-go-round, pony rides and a splendid drill by the uniformed ranks of colored Odd Fellows accompanied by a band of music which discoursed excellent pieces. The exhibits of agricultural produce, of domestic handiwork, fruits and preserves, horses, ponies and cattle, made splendid showing.”

Fairs fostered school pride, as students created school banners and marched in parades. To generate competition and rally community support, the School Board gave schools a holiday and paid teachers to attend fairs with their classes. “One of the high points while at Fairfax was ‘school day’ at the County Fair. We always had a frantic time training children to march in the parade which was composed of all schools in the county, led by the county officials and each teacher was expected to march at the head of her class,” recalled white schoolteacher Lillian Millan, “We also spent a good deal of time and effort preparing an exhibit as there was a special building for the schools and lots of competition from all over the county.” In 1914, not long after the organization of the Fairfax County Colored Fair, County School Superintendent Milton Hall encouraged school participation by appointing an industrial teacher for Mount Vernon District to “teach the children handicrafts for the Fair.” Gunston School student Gladys Bushrod recalled that an industrial teacher helped students make items for the Fair. And she remembered that every year the schoolchildren would go to the fair together, leaving Mason Neck at 4:00 a.m. in a horse-drawn wagon. Georgiana Jasper Walker supported the Fairfax County Colored Fair monetarily and her children and other students at Laurel Grove remembered the events and competitions. Some recalled winning ribbons.

“Colored Fair Association” programs from 1916 and 1924 indicate that students could enter a variety of industrial and academic competitions for cash prizes. Contests in the domestic arts called for baskets, hats, photograph frames, embroidered and crocheted items. Agricultural exhibits featured garden vegetables, canned fruits, and poultry and livestock. Contestants vied for prizes of up to five dollars. To demonstrate their academic proficiency, students wrote essays on “What Good Roads will Mean to Virginia” or created a “Map of Fairfax County locating the Colored Public Schools and Fair Grounds.” Others submitted an illustrated poem, a list of words most often misspelled, an illustrated paper on simple fractions, or a sample of their best penmanship. Winners earned between twenty-five cents and one dollar.

Contest categories revealed local concerns about transportation and scholarly concerns about spelling and mathematics. Most hinted at what was being taught in both black and white schools. At least one essay on “The House Fly and the Importance of Its Extermination” signaled public health concerns that became a national priority during the Progressive Era. This attention to health at the county fair bolstered other health campaigns in the schools. The flu epidemic of 1918 heightened the need to educate school children about the importance of cleanliness and sanitation. In 1919, the Chairman of the Red Cross, R. Walton Moore, started a new public health program that included talks in schools on sanitary toilets, dental dispensaries, and parasite detection. One of the health campaigns that Laurel Grove participated in was a 1927 contest for “colored schools of the county” over “which sold the largest number of tuberculosis seals.” Laurel Grove came in second in the small schools division and was awarded $2.50.

Some literary contests listed in the 1922 “Colored Fair” program targeted African-American concerns and signaled that black educators taught American literature and history courses that included more than Longfellow and Washington. One dollar went to the best prose interpretation of a Paul Lawrence Dunbar poem. Fair officials awarded another dollar for the best essay on “The Life and Works of Harriett Tubman.” These contests indicate that Fairfax’s black schools retained some control over the curriculum, functioned as a place for instilling racial pride. These also points to one likely reason why students years later recalled their time at Laurel Grove with such fondness.

Students explained that their nostalgia for the school was largely because of the warm communal spirit they felt as members of an all-black school. It offered refuge from the Jim Crow world that continually told black children that they were inferior. Segregated fairs did the same. Though celebratory events, county fairs bore the marks of a segregated and racist society. Certainly, this was evident by the fact that they were separated based on race. It was also written into the Dunbar and Tubman contests. More pointedly, the KKK played a strong role in the white fair, even serving as the “drawing cards,” according to county agent Harry B. Derr. Not surprising, as the KKK hosted ceremonies, brought in the Klan band, gave away gold, and shot off fireworks at the fairs’ “Klan Days.” In 1924, Klansmen came in automobiles and executed the rites of their order in front of an electric cross. Thousands flocked to watch and celebrate.

During the 1920s, Jim Crow segregation marked every black child’s school experience across the south. This held true in the separation of schoolhouses and county fairs as well as in the careful demarcation of space that defined everyday public life. For each child, the lessons at times were obvious. One man reported that the first few days of every school year were spent erasing the slurs that white children wrote in textbooks that they knew would be handed down to their peers in black schools. Few certainly could miss verbal taunts and visual cues that marked segregationist attitudes. Neither could they easily miss the KKK displays of racial hatred. In 1924, the Fairfax Herald reported that “members of the Ku Klux Klan from Fairfax and Herndon’ joined other klansmen from the capital area for another ‘spectacular initiation on a hill above Rosslyn.” The newspaper stated that ‘the light from the cross and from the candles carried by the klansmen were plainly visible from Washington and the surrounding country.” E.B. Henderson, because of work as an educator and NAACP leader, received so many angry phone calls that he had his number unlisted. One letter to him, signed by the Klan, threatened that they would wake him, “and after you have been gagged, you will be born to a tree nearby, tied, stripped and given thirty lashes on your ETHIOPIAN back.”

Laurel Grove residents did not report threatening phone calls or letters such as the ones that E.B. Henderson received, escaping, according to oral accounts, much of the racial strife that other parts of Fairfax County experienced. Students also expressed some contentment with their small space. Though a white school was within two to three miles of the Giles’ farm, Marguerite and her sisters still walked ten miles each day to attend Laurel Grove. Years later, she said that she had no idea how the white Pohick school differed from hers, but, she reported, she did not feel deprived. Since she did not know what the white children had, she said there was nothing to miss. For the former students who looked back at their days at Laurel Grove in the 1920s, the little community school offered a warm space of friendship and harmony.

In 1929, when Wilbert Woodson became the county school superintendent, there were 64 schools, 30 of which contained but one room. Many still did not have plumbing. Enrollment stood at 4,742. Teachers numbered 168 and drew an average yearly salary of $779. During the 1930s, school buildings continued to tell the story of discrimination. Most black schools remained tiny. Laurel Grove, valued at $600, had not changed. The exception was Gum Springs. To accommodate its eighty students, the community built a larger school in 1907 and four teachers staffed the building that was worth $4,900. Still, the school fell far short of neighboring high schools: Woodlawn was worth $44,000; Mount Vernon $93,000, and Fairfax $185,000. Annual per capita expenditure for whites was still double that of blacks.

To improve instruction and give more students access to better facilities, Superintendent Woodson consolidated the elementary schools. By action of a special meeting of the School Board in 1932, Williams and six other students were the last to attend Laurel Grove. According to the district’s black supervisor, the student number had decreased because families, drawn by the promise of a better living in Alexandria and Washington, were moving out of the community. Now, the children who remained had to travel to Gum Springs for lessons. The School Board denied entreaties for public transportation.

“Get an education and everything will fall in line.” For many Laurel Grove students, education made a difference. But, it did not guarantee success. Many still faced jobs of menial status in agriculture or on the railroad. Williams, who completed seventh grade in 1932, wanted to continue her education, but her father had neither the money nor the transportation to help her. So she worked as a domestic for two dollars per week. For those dollars, she cleaned, washed and did “just about everything.” She had every other Sunday off. For a short time, she attended night classes, but this was a difficult schedule to keep and since she needed the money, work won over school. At 60 though, she earned her GED.

For those who had the financial means to go to high school, few possibilities existed. Black students still had no county high school to attend and travel to Manassas Industrial School in neighboring Prince William County or to Dunbar, Phelps Vocational Center, Cardozo, or Armstrong in Washington, D.C. was difficult. Not until 1954—the same year that the United States Supreme Court declared segregated schools unconstitutional—did Fairfax County build a high school for its black students. Luther P. Jackson High School opened many years after white students had access to neighborhood high schools and long after E. B. Henderson formed a chapter of the NAACP and started agitating for improved educational opportunities for African Americans. The school serviced the entire county until 1965, when desegregation was finally instituted in Virginia.

For most students, Laurel Grove School provided their only educational opportunity. Jasper’s family proved the exception. At least four of his grandchildren continued their education in Washington and became teachers. Winnie and her sister, Geneva, stayed with relatives to gain access to Armstrong H.S. Then they went to St. Paul Normal and Industrial School in Lawrenceville, Virginia, graduating in 1934. They returned to Fairfax County and taught for several decades. Eventually both obtained their Masters in New York City. Winnie Spencer continued to share Laurel Grove’s motto with her students, and she proudly reported that one of her students, whose parents were illiterate and impoverished, became a college president.

Today, interested individuals can see the schoolhouse as it likely existed in the 1920s. In 1999, the newly created Laurel Grove School Association refurbished the building and established it as a stop on the African-American Heritage Trail. It stands as a monument to a group of determined individuals who created and sustained a place of learning during an era of harsh discrimination and testifies to the belief in and liberating power of education as a strategy for uplift. Though Laurel Grove’s motto promised more than it ever could fulfill and frustrations sometimes upset dreams, the school, nevertheless, offered a sanctuary and shield for black children during the nightmare of segregation and equipped students with literacy, numerical skills, black pride, and a sense of self-worth. In doing so, it created yet one more chink in the racist system of Jim Crow.

Students will build on their understanding of the founding of the Laurel Grove School from previous lessons and use both primary and secondary sources to investigate the daily experience of students at the Laurel Grove School in 1925. High school students will also consider the debate between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois over industrial and academic education for African American students, both nationally and as it affected the Laurel Grove School.

Students will:

1. Analyze primary source photographs, artifacts, and documents to appreciate the daily experience of being a student at the Laurel Grove School.

2. Read, listen to, and discuss oral history (excerpts) from Laurel Grove School students to understand the daily experience of being a student at the Laurel Grove School.

3. Put their observations from primary sources into historical context by consulting secondary sources.

4. Use what they have learned in this and previous Laurel Grove School lessons to create a visual exhibit or and oral presentation to share with students from another class.

High school students will:

1. Read excerpts from Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois, and discuss the relative merits of the their views on educating African Americans during the Jim Crow era.

grades 4, 7, and 11

Grade 4: Virginia Studies

VS.1 The student will develop skills for historical and geographical analysis including the ability to: (a) identify and interpret artifacts and primary and secondary source documents to understand events in history; (c) compare and contrast historical events; (e) make connections between the past and the present; (g) interpret ideas and events from different historical perspectives; (h) evaluate and discusses issues orally and in writing.

VS.8 The student will demonstrate knowledge of the reconstruction of Virginia following the Civil War by: (b) identifying the effects of segregation and "Jim Crow" on life in Virginia.


Grade 7: United States History II – 1877 to the Present

USII.1 The student will demonstrate skills for historical and geographical analysis, including the ability to: (a) analyze and interpret primary and secondary source documents to increase understanding of events and life in United States history from 1877 to the present.

USII.3 The student will demonstrate knowledge of how life changed after the Civil War by: (c) describing racial segregation, the rise of "Jim Crow," and other constraints faced by African Americans in the post-Reconstruction South.

Grade 11: Virginia and United States History

VUS.1 The student will demonstrate skills for historical and geographical analysis, including the ability to: (a) identify, analyze, and interpret primary and secondary source documents, records, and data, including artifacts, diaries, letters, photographs, journals, newspapers, historical accounts, and art to increase understanding of events and life in the United States.

VUS.8 The student will demonstrate knowledge of how the nation grew and changed from the end of Reconstruction through the early twentieth century by: (c) analyzing prejudice and discrimination during this time period, with emphasis on "Jim Crow."

Estimated time is 2, 45-60 minute periods, but feel free to adapt this lesson to your needs.

In 2002, Marguerite Giles Williams reflected on her years at Laurel Grove “Colored” School in Fairfax County, Virginia. She declared, “I liked to learn and I loved all subjects.” Williams attended the one-room schoolhouse from 1925 to 1932. She walked ten miles daily to join her classmates of varying ages and grades. Together they worked in small confines, shared books and desks, made do without dictionaries, and studied geography without maps. Though they lacked many essentials, they still learned to read, write, add, and subtract. Williams was not alone in her enthusiasm. Winnie Walker Spencer explained that had it not been for Laurel Grove School—which sat on land that was donated by her grandfather William Jasper—she and her siblings would have been without an education. Instead, she proudly stated, the school’s motto proclaimed, “Get an Education and Everything Will Fall in Line.”

By the 1920s, Laurel Grove School teachers had taught children reading and writing for forty years. Though the school remained a one-room building, the public school system now stood on firmer ground. Students, ranging from first to seventh grades, advanced independently. They shared books and older students helped younger ones. A school day was five and one-half hours and the teachers were paid on a basis of a 20-day school month. Since 1918, when Virginia passed the first compulsory attendance law, children aged eight to twelve were required to attend school for at least sixteen weeks.

Laurel Grove and other Fairfax County students benefited from these and other state requirements. In 1920, the county, ranked first in the state with a 96 percent literacy rate. Still, discrimination against black students was the rule. In 1920, the county spent more than double for a white child’s education than a black child’s. It gave white teachers fewer students per class than black teachers and paid white teachers almost twice as much. Mid-decade, the Fairfax County School Board mandated that all schools close on the same date, but this did not mean that all schools operated for an equal number of days. White schools conducted sessions for 160 days and black schools 140 days. In addition, no black child could obtain a high school education in Fairfax County. While secondary curriculum was available in the county since 1907 (one year after the state passed a secondary education law), the schools admitted only white students. The first high school was opened in Clifton, and by 1912, its students moved into a new school building with six classrooms, a library, and an assembly hall. Other towns followed, including Herndon, which built a new $10,000 high school around 1911. By 1924, the school had an athletic director, two basketball and two tennis courts, a baseball diamond, and a 220-yard track. In 1925, the school developed a business curriculum.

Despite this discrimination, former Laurel Grove students, such as Winnie Walker Spencer and Marguerite Giles Williams, recalled their school days with nostalgia. To get to school, they walked through pastures and along country roads. Williams made the five-mile trek from her family’s farm. She left home with her two sisters at 7:30 a.m., met fellow classmate Lily Jenkins along the way, and arrived at school an hour and a half later. By that time, fellow student Dan Baker had the fire lit and other children, including descendants of Jasper and Carroll, would be fulfilling other duties. Each had chores. Some pumped drinking water from the well; others stoked the stove with firewood and straightened the room. During winter, they hung their coats on nails and warmed themselves by the pot-bellied stove.

School began at 9:00 a.m. with devotions and the pledge of allegiance. R. L. Carrington, Lula P. Bueckner, Alma Walker (another Jasper descendant), and other teachers taught their pupils reading, writing, math, geography, history and spelling. “We had good teachers,” Spencer reminisced, “They gave us a good basis. If we misspelled a word, we had to rewrite it fifty times.” For music lessons, the teacher played the piano and the children sang. For lunch, students ate food from home. Marguerite’s grandmother sent bread and butter sandwiches. Sometimes the children brought garden vegetables and the teacher cooked a pot of stew. At recess, they enjoyed sports. “We were ball players,” Mamie Lightfoot said. When they struck up a game, boys who could not attend school regularly because their parents needed their labor on the farm joined them.

Laurel Grove students did not work solely on academic lessons. Spencer recollected sewing samplers, and the County’s “Colored Industrial” teacher Mrs. C.W. Patterson tutored students in other skills, too. In doing so, Patterson followed the dictates of the state supervisor of rural black elementary schools who advocated lessons in basket making, carpentry, cooking, chair caning, sewing, and shoe repair. Giving time to such activities placed Laurel Grove on par with other black schools in the south and positioned it within ongoing debates about what black schoolchildren should learn and who should decide.

In the still rural Fairfax of the 1920s, teachers at white schools also wove industrial and agricultural lessons into their curriculum. But the agenda was different for African-American students. Exposing his era’s racial assumptions, one northern philanthropist made clear the reason. He argued that black persons “will willingly fill the more menial positions, and do the heavy work, at less wages.” This would leave whites “the more expert labor.” His recommendations to African Americans included: “Avoid social questions; leave politics alone; continue to be patient; live moral lives; live simply; learn to work.” Not all northern philanthropists agreed. Some hoped to dismantle white supremacy and viewed education as a tool for social change. Many more, however, took the course of Rockefeller’s General Education Fund and promoted industrial education. The Peabody and Slater Foundations did more than promote; they withheld support if black schools did not teach industrial skills.

Southern segregationists, intent on keeping black people in subservient roles, sided with the extremists. The Fairfax Herald mocked any “ambition to make classical scholars . . . of the negro race.” If blacks were provided books, the editors questioned, who would do “the hewing of the wood, the drawing of the water, and the hoeing of corn.” Not surprisingly, African Americans scorned such messages. They argued that they sent their children to school for intellectual development and a chance to progress, not to learn skills that would keep them beholden to whites. At least one Virginia teacher reported that if parents heard that industrial lessons were planned, they would keep their children at home.

The contest between academic and industrial education was not settled within the black community, however, as demonstrated by the debate between two prominent African-Americans who adopted different strategies to promote progress and equality. Former Virginia slave Booker T. Washington embraced industrial education and a message of hard work, discipline, morality, and service. To move forward, African Americans must accept segregation, avoid political confrontations, work diligently, and gain economic independence. This, he contended, would win white approval. To gain essential skills, Washington called for training in agriculture, domestics, and industrial labor. He started Tuskegee Institute to provide such a forum and encouraged his students to master a trade. W. E. B. DuBois—the first black person to gain a doctorate from Harvard University, founder of the Niagara Movement, leader of the NAACP, and writer for the NAACP newspaper The Crisis—countered Washington’s conciliatory views. Instead, he argued that black people should not bow to segregation but should fight for civil and political rights. He championed African-American rights to higher education and pushed for the development of a talented leadership—the “talented tenth”—to overcome discrimination.

Disputes between Washington and DuBois blurred on the local level. While some children stayed home when industrial lessons were taught, others opted to can vegetables and cane chairs. In practice, teachers taught both academic and industrial subjects and children learned to read, write, sew, and saw. One of the places that showcased both was the county fair. At separate venues, black and white children displayed their achievements in the midst of great excitement and fanfare. During the first decades of the twentieth century, Fairfax County white fairs featured “a brass band, balloon ascensions, comic knife throwing, high-wire walking, health demonstrations, an automobile parade, precision drills, parachute drops, moving pictures, Punch and Judy shows. . . and the prize-winning produce and livestock of the county’s farmers and future farmers.” Reports of the “Colored” Fairs were similar, featuring in 1914, “a full complement of side shows, including the merry-go-round, pony rides and a splendid drill by the uniformed ranks of colored Odd Fellows accompanied by a band of music which discoursed excellent pieces. The exhibits of agricultural produce, of domestic handiwork, fruits and preserves, horses, ponies and cattle, made splendid showing.”

Fairs fostered school pride, as students created school banners and marched in parades. To generate competition and rally community support, the School Board gave schools a holiday and paid teachers to attend fairs with their classes. “One of the high points while at Fairfax was ‘school day’ at the County Fair. We always had a frantic time training children to march in the parade which was composed of all schools in the county, led by the county officials and each teacher was expected to march at the head of her class,” recalled white schoolteacher Lillian Millan, “We also spent a good deal of time and effort preparing an exhibit as there was a special building for the schools and lots of competition from all over the county.” In 1914, not long after the organization of the Fairfax County Colored Fair, County School Superintendent Milton Hall encouraged school participation by appointing an industrial teacher for Mount Vernon District to “teach the children handicrafts for the Fair.” Gunston School student Gladys Bushrod recalled that an industrial teacher helped students make items for the Fair. And she remembered that every year the schoolchildren would go to the fair together, leaving Mason Neck at 4:00 a.m. in a horse-drawn wagon. Georgiana Jasper Walker supported the Fairfax County Colored Fair monetarily and her children and other students at Laurel Grove remembered the events and competitions. Some recalled winning ribbons.

“Colored Fair Association” programs from 1916 and 1924 indicate that students could enter a variety of industrial and academic competitions for cash prizes. Contests in the domestic arts called for baskets, hats, photograph frames, embroidered and crocheted items. Agricultural exhibits featured garden vegetables, canned fruits, and poultry and livestock. Contestants vied for prizes of up to five dollars. To demonstrate their academic proficiency, students wrote essays on “What Good Roads will Mean to Virginia” or created a “Map of Fairfax County locating the Colored Public Schools and Fair Grounds.” Others submitted an illustrated poem, a list of words most often misspelled, an illustrated paper on simple fractions, or a sample of their best penmanship. Winners earned between twenty-five cents and one dollar.

Contest categories revealed local concerns about transportation and scholarly concerns about spelling and mathematics. Most hinted at what was being taught in both black and white schools. At least one essay on “The House Fly and the Importance of Its Extermination” signaled public health concerns that became a national priority during the Progressive Era. This attention to health at the county fair bolstered other health campaigns in the schools. The flu epidemic of 1918 heightened the need to educate school children about the importance of cleanliness and sanitation. In 1919, the Chairman of the Red Cross, R. Walton Moore, started a new public health program that included talks in schools on sanitary toilets, dental dispensaries, and parasite detection. One of the health campaigns that Laurel Grove participated in was a 1927 contest for “colored schools of the county” over “which sold the largest number of tuberculosis seals.” Laurel Grove came in second in the small schools division and was awarded $2.50.

Some literary contests listed in the 1922 “Colored Fair” program targeted African-American concerns and signaled that black educators taught American literature and history courses that included more than Longfellow and Washington. One dollar went to the best prose interpretation of a Paul Lawrence Dunbar poem. Fair officials awarded another dollar for the best essay on “The Life and Works of Harriett Tubman.” These contests indicate that Fairfax’s black schools retained some control over the curriculum, functioned as a place for instilling racial pride. These also points to one likely reason why students years later recalled their time at Laurel Grove with such fondness.

Students explained that their nostalgia for the school was largely because of the warm communal spirit they felt as members of an all-black school. It offered refuge from the Jim Crow world that continually told black children that they were inferior. Segregated fairs did the same. Though celebratory events, county fairs bore the marks of a segregated and racist society. Certainly, this was evident by the fact that they were separated based on race. It was also written into the Dunbar and Tubman contests. More pointedly, the KKK played a strong role in the white fair, even serving as the “drawing cards,” according to county agent Harry B. Derr. Not surprising, as the KKK hosted ceremonies, brought in the Klan band, gave away gold, and shot off fireworks at the fairs’ “Klan Days.” In 1924, Klansmen came in automobiles and executed the rites of their order in front of an electric cross. Thousands flocked to watch and celebrate.

During the 1920s, Jim Crow segregation marked every black child’s school experience across the south. This held true in the separation of schoolhouses and county fairs as well as in the careful demarcation of space that defined everyday public life. For each child, the lessons at times were obvious. One man reported that the first few days of every school year were spent erasing the slurs that white children wrote in textbooks that they knew would be handed down to their peers in black schools. Few certainly could miss verbal taunts and visual cues that marked segregationist attitudes. Neither could they easily miss the KKK displays of racial hatred. In 1924, the Fairfax Herald reported that “members of the Ku Klux Klan from Fairfax and Herndon’ joined other klansmen from the capital area for another ‘spectacular initiation on a hill above Rosslyn.” The newspaper stated that ‘the light from the cross and from the candles carried by the klansmen were plainly visible from Washington and the surrounding country.” E.B. Henderson, because of work as an educator and NAACP leader, received so many angry phone calls that he had his number unlisted. One letter to him, signed by the Klan, threatened that they would wake him, “and after you have been gagged, you will be born to a tree nearby, tied, stripped and given thirty lashes on your ETHIOPIAN back.”

Laurel Grove residents did not report threatening phone calls or letters such as the ones that E.B. Henderson received, escaping, according to oral accounts, much of the racial strife that other parts of Fairfax County experienced. Students also expressed some contentment with their small space. Though a white school was within two to three miles of the Giles’ farm, Marguerite and her sisters still walked ten miles each day to attend Laurel Grove. Years later, she said that she had no idea how the white Pohick school differed from hers, but, she reported, she did not feel deprived. Since she did not know what the white children had, she said there was nothing to miss. For the former students who looked back at their days at Laurel Grove in the 1920s, the little community school offered a warm space of friendship and harmony.

In 1929, when Wilbert Woodson became the county school superintendent, there were 64 schools, 30 of which contained but one room. Many still did not have plumbing. Enrollment stood at 4,742. Teachers numbered 168 and drew an average yearly salary of $779. During the 1930s, school buildings continued to tell the story of discrimination. Most black schools remained tiny. Laurel Grove, valued at $600, had not changed. The exception was Gum Springs. To accommodate its eighty students, the community built a larger school in 1907 and four teachers staffed the building that was worth $4,900. Still, the school fell far short of neighboring high schools: Woodlawn was worth $44,000; Mount Vernon $93,000, and Fairfax $185,000. Annual per capita expenditure for whites was still double that of blacks.

To improve instruction and give more students access to better facilities, Superintendent Woodson consolidated the elementary schools. By action of a special meeting of the School Board in 1932, Williams and six other students were the last to attend Laurel Grove. According to the district’s black supervisor, the student number had decreased because families, drawn by the promise of a better living in Alexandria and Washington, were moving out of the community. Now, the children who remained had to travel to Gum Springs for lessons. The School Board denied entreaties for public transportation.

“Get an education and everything will fall in line.” For many Laurel Grove students, education made a difference. But, it did not guarantee success. Many still faced jobs of menial status in agriculture or on the railroad. Williams, who completed seventh grade in 1932, wanted to continue her education, but her father had neither the money nor the transportation to help her. So she worked as a domestic for two dollars per week. For those dollars, she cleaned, washed and did “just about everything.” She had every other Sunday off. For a short time, she attended night classes, but this was a difficult schedule to keep and since she needed the money, work won over school. At 60 though, she earned her GED.

For those who had the financial means to go to high school, few possibilities existed. Black students still had no county high school to attend and travel to Manassas Industrial School in neighboring Prince William County or to Dunbar, Phelps Vocational Center, Cardozo, or Armstrong in Washington, D.C. was difficult. Not until 1954—the same year that the United States Supreme Court declared segregated schools unconstitutional—did Fairfax County build a high school for its black students. Luther P. Jackson High School opened many years after white students had access to neighborhood high schools and long after E. B. Henderson formed a chapter of the NAACP and started agitating for improved educational opportunities for African Americans. The school serviced the entire county until 1965, when desegregation was finally instituted in Virginia.

For most students, Laurel Grove School provided their only educational opportunity. Jasper’s family proved the exception. At least four of his grandchildren continued their education in Washington and became teachers. Winnie and her sister, Geneva, stayed with relatives to gain access to Armstrong H.S. Then they went to St. Paul Normal and Industrial School in Lawrenceville, Virginia, graduating in 1934. They returned to Fairfax County and taught for several decades. Eventually both obtained their Masters in New York City. Winnie Spencer continued to share Laurel Grove’s motto with her students, and she proudly reported that one of her students, whose parents were illiterate and impoverished, became a college president.

Today, interested individuals can see the schoolhouse as it likely existed in the 1920s. In 1999, the newly created Laurel Grove School Association refurbished the building and established it as a stop on the African-American Heritage Trail. It stands as a monument to a group of determined individuals who created and sustained a place of learning during an era of harsh discrimination and testifies to the belief in and liberating power of education as a strategy for uplift. Though Laurel Grove’s motto promised more than it ever could fulfill and frustrations sometimes upset dreams, the school, nevertheless, offered a sanctuary and shield for black children during the nightmare of segregation and equipped students with literacy, numerical skills, black pride, and a sense of self-worth. In doing so, it created yet one more chink in the racist system of Jim Crow.

1. In this lesson we will use the KWHL (Know, Want to know, How to answer, Learned) [For ES: this strategy is explained in FCPS’ Learning to Read Social Studies: 4th Grade on p. 41 and the graphic organizer on p. 96.]

2. Draw the KWHL chart on the board or on chart paper.

3. Tell students they will begin by reflecting on what they already know about the Laurel Grove School and that this lesson will focus on the daily experience of students at LGS in 1925.

4. Discuss and record what students know in the “K” column. This can serve as a review of what students learned in previous lessons. Then ask students to think specifically about what daily life at the school might have been like. Students’ responses here might be a blend of what they know and what they think they know.

5. Next generate a list of questions by asking students what they want to learn more about. Record their questions in the “W” column. You can use the list of questions below to prompt students to expand and deepen their thinking.

a. What subjects were studied and how were these subjects studied? What did students learn at the school (or what they remember learning)? [curriculum]

b. What were their teachers like? What makes a “good teacher”? How were they trained? What were their attitudes and expectations of their students? What materials were available to students and teachers? What kind of books did they have – and did they like these books? [resources available]

c. What responsibilities did students have at school – and at home that related to school?

d. Describe students’ relationships with each other – across age, since LGS was a one-room school, between boys and girls. [size and makeup of classes]

e. Describe the trip for students to and from school – how long was it? What was it like?

f. What did students do for fun?

g. What was the food like – did they have food?

h. How did the segregated world around them affect their daily experience as students at the Laurel Grove School?

i. What kind of opportunities for future education and careers did students have?

6. At this point explain that, for How to Answer, students will use the notice/question/context process to examine some primary sources, including photos, an oral history excerpt, and artifacts, as well as a secondary source to discover what daily life was like at the Laurel Grove School in 1925.

7. Have students work in small groups each with primary sources on the daily experience of the Laurel Grove School, and direct them to use the notice and question process that they learned in previous lessons. Give them photos of the restored Laurel Grove School, of an African American Schoolhouse from the early 1900s, and of playing games at recess at the Pole Road School; and the oral history excerpt from Marguerite Giles Williams, a Laurel Grove School student.

8. Reconvene the class and have students report out what they noticed and their questions. Examples from the photos might include: the small one room, potbelly stove, wooden desks, one teacher, students of varied ages, girls playing game outside seem to be having fun and exercise; questions might include how did one teacher manage with such different ages? What did students study? Do for fun? Just girls playing the game? Etc.

9. Expand on the daily experience at Laurel Grove by explaining that, in addition to the lessons that students had and around the school building, they also spent time and energy preparing for the Colored Fair. Use as your primary sources: the 1922 Colored Fair Certificate, Program, Rules and Regulations – including a list of the Literary Work which students presented. Do this as a whole class.

10. Examples of what students might notice and question about the “colored” fair include the variety of activities including craft and farm skills, as well as school-centered skills, clear separation into white and ”colored” [more….].

11. Add students’ major observations to the “L” (Learned) column.

12. Next, to provide the context use the relevant sections of the Historical Background – as Talking Points, or PowerPoint, or whatever method works for you and your students. When this step is completed, add the last set of observations to the “L” column.

13. Elementary and middle school students at this point will use what they have learned in this and previous Laurel Grove School lessons and create either a visual exhibit or an oral presentation to share with students from another class. * One way to do this is to use the guidelines for a National History Day (NHD) project. The NHD theme for 2009 is The Individual in History: Actions and Legacies, which would be appropriate for the story of William Jasper and the Laurel Grove School founders. [Using NHD is one option – good but time consuming. For more information on this see http://www.nhd.org/ Other suggestions for assessment/culminating activity?] High school students can do step #13 now or later. Proceed to an examination and comparison of the views of Booker T. Washington (BTW) and W. E. B. DuBois (WEB).

14. Give students the excerpts from their writings available at • Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta Compromise Speech of 1895, http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/88 • “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others” published within The Souls of Black Folk (1903) http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/40 Additional information can be found in the Historical Background essays in this lesson and lesson 4 (A Child’s Life in Segregated Society) for background information on BTW and WEB. It is important to notice that the debate between industrial and academic education blends somewhat in the Laurel Grove School experience. As students read the excerpts, they should jot down notes with specifics about BTW's and WEB's point of view. Once they have finished reading the excerpts, they can use their notes to complete a Venn diagram. It might be helpful for students to use different colored sticky notes for the views of each person.

15. Use the Instructions for Continuum from Street Law, Inc.’s web site http://www.landmarkcases.org/ (and shown below) to have students take a position on this statement: The best approach to educating African American students during this time (1880s-1930s) was found in the beliefs and writings of – CHOOSE ONE: Booker T. Washington OR W.E.B. DuBois. On one end of the room put a sign saying BTW, and on the other a sign saying WEB, and proceed as directed. Instructions (an example included) is attached.

16. Wrap up: Two assessment options are below.
• Students will consider the motto, “Get an education and everything else will fall in line.” Write a journal entry, oral presentation, or visual display to illustrate if Laurel Grove School and the community helped African Americans meet this goal.
• Suppose Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois are guidance counselors at your school. Both of them visit your class to give advice for next year and your future careers. Using historical information of the individuals, create a T-chart of the advice you would receive from each person. Be specific, including information such as what classes you should take and why, what education (if any) beyond high school you should pursue and why, and what career options you should consider and why. First, complete the activity for the present day. Then, pretend you are an African American who lived in 1925. What are the similarities in what you consider in 2008 and what are differences? This may also be completed in the form of a journal entry.

Books and Media:

1. Linda Sargent Wood. “Get an Education and Everything Will Fall in Line”: The Laurel Grove “Colored” School in Northern Virginia, 1884-1932. Essay, 2006.

2. Robert J. Norrell. Up From History: The Life of Booker T. Washington (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, 2009). Provides evidence modifying accepted thinking about Washington, particularly about his response to the harsh and often violent Jim Crow system he confronted in the South.

Websites:

1. http://www.vahistorical.org/civilrights/education.htm#16 The Virginia Historical Society’s online exhibit The Civil Rights Movement in Virginia has a useful section on the Beginnings of Black Education.

2. http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital The New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture contains an extensive set of photos from the early 1900s on African American schools including those in Virginia.

3. http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/88 and http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/40 The History Matters website created and maintained by George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media (CHNM) contains a wide range of primary source documents in their Many Pasts section, each with a short context explanation. These urls are for the Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois documents listed below.

Primary Sources:

1. Oral history from Marguerite Giles Williams, a Laurel Grove School student.

2. Artifacts, photos from the restored Laurel Grove School

3. Photos: the Interior, African American Schoolhouse, early 1900s and playing games at recess at the Pole Road School, Henrico County, Virginia

4. 1922 Colored Fair Certificate, Program, Rules and Regulations – including a list of the Literary Work which students presented.

5. The Washington-DuBois Debate

• Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta Compromise Speech of 1895, see http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/88

• “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others” published within The Souls of Black Folk (1903) http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/40

Photos of the restored Laurel Grove School

The Colored Soldiers

Colored Fair: Rules and Regulations

Instruction for Continuum activity

Students will understand that at this time society in Virginia was segregated by race, that African Americans established their own churches, businesses, and schools. Yet despite the harsh inequality of the segregated society in which they lived, the African American families, community, and teachers of the Laurel Grove School managed to create and sustain a constructive, challenging and supportive educational environment for the students of the Laurel Grove School.

Students will consider several sources that document the founding of the Laurel Grove School and other African American or “colored” schools in Fairfax County, and recognize both the barriers the founders faced as well as their resources and determination to set up these schools for their children.

Students will:

1. Use secondary sources to identify the people who founded the Laurel Grove School, their motivations, and their resources.

2. Identify both the barriers they faced in establishing these schools and how they dealt with these barriers.

3. Examine and analyze primary sources including: a deed, a map, photos, a drawing, and first hand accounts to understand these “colored” school experiences.

grades 4, 7, and 11

Grade 4: Virginia Studies

VS.1 The student will develop skills for historical and geographical analysis including the ability to: (a) identify and interpret artifacts and primary and secondary source documents to understand events in history; (e) make connections between past and present.

VS.8 The student will demonstrate knowledge of the reconstruction of Virginia following the Civil War by: (b) identifying the effects of segregation and "Jim Crow" on life in Virginia.

Grade 7: United States History II – 1877 to the Present

USII.1 The student will demonstrate skills for historical and geographical analysis, including the ability to: (a) analyze and interpret primary and secondary source documents to increase understanding of events and life in United States history from 1877 to the present; (b) make connections between past and present.

USII.3 The student will demonstrate knowledge of how life changed after the Civil War by: (c) describing racial segregation, the rise of "Jim Crow," and other constraints faced by African Americans in the post-Reconstruction South.

Grade 11: Virginia and United States History

VUS.1 The student will demonstrate skills for historical and geographical analysis, including the ability to: (a) identify, analyze, and interpret primary and secondary source documents, records, and data, including artifacts, diaries, letters, photographs, journals, newspapers, historical accounts, and art to increase understanding of events and life in the United States; (g) apply geographic skills.

VUS.8 The student will demonstrate knowledge of how the nation grew and changed from the end of Reconstruction through the early twentieth century by: (c) analyzing prejudice and discrimination during this time period, with emphasis on "Jim Crow."

Estimated time is one, 1-hour lesson, but feel free to adapt this lesson to your needs.

Though more than a decade had passed since Virginia had initiated a public education system, Laurel Grove was not started by the local school board. It was not started by the state superintendent. Neither was it begun by the Freedmen’s Bureau nor by Northern philanthropists. Instead former slaves built the school. Parents, grandparents, and neighbors donated the land, materials, and labor. They found teachers in their own community, and they sustained the place of learning. As they did so, their hopes, no doubt, soared, as they dreamed that their children might gain access to a better life than they thought possible for themselves.

They did so because they recognized that literacy brought more power to defend their status as freed people, more expertise to help them buy property and start businesses, more independence in religious instruction, and more means to live an independent life. Indeed, literacy shaped African-American identity and informed their conceptions of citizenship, freedom, and success. Their determination and appreciation of education persisted even as former slave owners regained their hold of economic, political, and social institutions. Though they lost the vote and other rights, they still ensured through their limited resources that the end of Reconstruction would not spell the end of black education. Our national memory of black schools in segregation is deficient, however, if we only remember the harsh injustices. As Vanessa Siddle Walker has argued in her study of an African-American school in North Carolina, a more complete picture also acknowledges the fond memories, good instruction, and parental support. This account of Laurel Grove recognizes both and hence contributes to a historiography of the Jim Crow era that is dynamic, complex, and alert to the cruel deeds and rigid system fashioned by the oppressors as well as the creative ingenuity and resiliency of the oppressed. Laurel Grove and the other “colored” schools founded at this time contributed to the educational achievements of African Americans. Historian James Anderson documents that across the South the African American illiteracy rate dropped from 95 percent in 1860 to 70 percent in 1880. By 1910, it fell to 30 percent.

Laurel Grove, which eventually became a part of the town of Franconia, is situated in the north-central part of Fairfax County. In the 1880s, the area, though close to the bustling grounds of Alexandria and Washington, D.C., was sparsely populated. Dairy herds brought farmers the largest revenue, but many, including Winnie Walker Spencer’s grandfather William Jasper, cultivated small plots of vegetables for their families and sold the surplus in Alexandria markets. Jasper and a few other free black farmers had settled in the region before the Civil War. Their small parcels intermixed with larger plots possessed by white farmers. After the war, the neighborhood, unlike some of the more heavily populated black communities in Fairfax County that emerged during Reconstruction, never drew a large number of African-American residents.

Common to many black schools in the South, Laurel Grove was linked to a church, in this case the Baptist church. For some time, this small group of black farmers and laborers gathered occasionally for open air services near a grove of laurel. Some, including Jasper who owned the land where the laurel grew, also worshipped at Alexandria’s Alfred Street Baptist Church. But walking the almost twenty-mile round trip proved onerous. Attending the nearby white church was not an option, so the neighbors, together with Alexandria pastor L. W. Brooks, established their own house of worship and called it Laurel Grove Baptist. Before erecting a sanctuary, however, the congregation, led by four church trustees—Middleton Braxton, George Carroll, Thornton Gray, and William Jasper—created a school for their children.

Though sketchy, the historical record reveals some about these four trustees. All were native to Fairfax County. All farmed. Middleton Braxton, born in 1853, married Mary Daggs in 1875 and had at least three children. George Carroll, born a couple years after Braxton, was the son of Jane Carroll. She had been a slave of Dennis Johnston, a very large slaveholder. In 1856, Johnston’s heirs freed the Carroll family and allowed them to farm ten acres. This area and land purchases after the Civil War by George Carroll and his wife, Hattie, eventually became known as Carrolltown and lay but a few miles from Laurel Grove. The older trustees, William Jasper—son of Morris and Eliza Jasper—and Thornton Gray—son of Thomzen Gray—were both born around the time that the United States was embroiled in the War of 1812 and not long after America closed its doors to the international slave trade.

Gray, described in 1834 as “a Darke Mulatto about . . . Six feet one Inch High, a Scar over the left eye, a Scar under the . . . lip, a Scar on the thum of the right Hand,” was the “son of Thomzen, a free woman Emancipated by General George Washington.” Unlike Gray, Jasper was born a slave and worked for his master, William Hayward Foote, at Hayfield Plantation. Foote, a very prosperous farmer and lawyer, owned land that had once been a part of Mount Vernon. Jasper’s duties likely included farming his master’s wheat or tending his cattle, sheep, or hogs. Or perhaps he served as a blacksmith, carpenter, or cooper. He may also have plied his trades and rented himself out to gain a little cash. Whatever his assignments on or off the plantation, he escaped what many Virginia slaves feared most: he was not separated from his kin and sold south to work on a cotton or sugar plantation. When Foote died in 1846, his will freed his slaves, including Jasper, his wife, Sarah, and at least two of their children.

Thus, before the Civil War, at least three of the church trustees were free blacks. While this freedom did not equal the freedom of their white neighbors—laws certainly constricted their economic, political, and social mobility—Gray and Jasper made the most of their opportunities. By 1860, each managed to acquire property and farm. Gray established his family on five acres. Across the road, William Jasper purchased his 13 acres from a white slaveowner in 1860.

When the Laurel Grove community decided to create a school, they first needed land. Jasper responded by deeding one-half acre to the Mount Vernon School District in 1881. Other black families donated lumber. Most likely, church treasurer George Carroll was one of several who, after finishing his daily farm chores, felled trees and hauled logs to the school site. Then neighbors erected an A-frame school house that typified the era. Hence with their own land, lumber and labor, these parents expressed hope that African-American liberties and status could be enlarged at the school door.

About the time Laurel Grove students first entered the classroom, the congregation constructed a church. Again, Jasper deeded a half-acre to church trustees and made it possible for the fledgling group to situate its two fundamental institutions side by side. Sacrificing one of his acres testified to the importance he placed on religion and education. For close to fifty years, the school served African-American children within a five-mile radius, and the community, with slim state and county support, maintained operations.

When Laurel Grove School opened its doors in the mid-1880s, it became one of about 80 schools operating in Fairfax County, eleven of which were “colored.” Hence, though black people made up 33% of the population, only 14% of the schools served them. Just six of all schools had more than one room and only 35 percent of school-aged children attended. In the Mount Vernon School District, Laurel Grove was one of five black schools in 1890. The others were Gum Springs, Gunston, Springbank, and Woodlawn. Gum Springs was the oldest, starting in 1865 in the Bethlehem Baptist Church. In 1867, the Freedmen’s Bureau and Woodlawn Quakers helped the community erect a school building on land donated by African American Jane Ford Rogers. Quakers also helped establish Woodlawn School in 1871.

Teacher reports testified to the enthusiasm black parents and community members felt for the Gum Springs School, but many in the white community exhibited a different response. Superintendent Orrin E. Hine reported that public sentiment did not favor the education of freed people or poor whites: “[I]t is barely tolerated and would not be if it were not from fear of punishment.” Black teachers complained repeatedly of white harassment. Numerous resignation letters to the Superintendent of the Freedmen’s Bureau testified of the difficulties. In Gum Springs there was a new teacher every year. Other places in Fairfax County also had problems. Angry individuals engaged in “malicious burning” of the black school near Frying Pan and the “breaking up” of the one by Lewinsville. In 1864, Betsy Read and her father, J.D. Read, started the Falls Church School in one of Fairfax’s three black enclaves called “The Hill.” Shortly after opening the school, a group of enraged Confederate Rangers killed him. Betsy, fearing for her life, fled.

Laurel Grove School, though faced with inadequate facilities and resources, apparently escaped these violent actions. Still, Laurel Grove residents would have surely known of the violence and felt the presence of the Ku Klux Klan in the county. The Klan, hoping to reinstate the antebellum social order through fear and intimidation, organized in Fairfax shortly after black men exercised voting privileges and cast ballots for delegates to the constitutional convention in 1867. Since Jasper and Gray were among those who voted the Radical ticket and helped send a Radical delegation to Richmond, they probably felt the anger of their area’s former slave owners.

Jasper’s children were probably some of the first students to attend Laurel Grove School. Though Jasper farmed his same acreage in the 1880s, his family life had changed. Sarah had died, and in 1869, William married Georgianna Jackson at Alexandria’s Theological Seminary. A year later the couple gave birth to Richard, the first of two children. Five years later, their daughter, Georgianna, completed the family. These two possibly sat in the first class alongside several of Gray’s eight children.

The first teachers of Laurel Grove were African-American women. So were the last. Indeed, it is likely, that all of the school’s instructors were female, given the feminization of the teaching profession, the black community’s reliance on black women as teachers and the fact that teaching was the only professional role open to black women. In 1890, women comprised 66 percent of the total number of teachers nationwide; in 1920, 86 percent of all teachers were women. In 1910, 76 percent of black teachers were women.

To become a teacher in Fairfax County was fairly easy. The county superintendent gave the exam and rarely rejected a teacher who failed. Nepotism was common. Still, teachers complained. Lillian W. Millan, a white teacher in Fairfax white schools, started teaching in 1891 and recalled the certification process with little fondness: “At first the questions were prepared by our County Superintendent, Mr. M.D. Hall, but later on they were sent out from Richmond. It was always a trying ordeal to take the examination and we usually did a lot of cramming beforehand which always turned out to be about things we were never asked to tell.”

Pedagogical training for teachers began in Virginia in the 1870s. The 1869 Constitution required the Board of Education to establish state normal schools as soon as possible. State Superintendent Ruffner started the process by hosting summer institutes and county meetings. By the beginning of the 1880s, the state opened segregated Normal Colleges for whites and blacks. These schools joined the existing Hampton Institute in training teachers. The Peabody Fund, a northern philanthropy, helped facilitate these institutes. For rural teachers who lacked even basic equipment, these institutes sometimes demanded remarkable creativity. Teachers at a Virginia Institute asked, “How can you teach drawing with a two-by-four-blackboard?” At another institute in South Carolina, an instructor explained: “We strove, too, to avoid another mischievous mistake: the mistake of supposing that expensive apparatus, or, indeed, furniture of any kind (blackboards excepted), are necessary to the illustration of most of the teaching of our common schools.” The teacher continued with examples of resourcefulness: “A base ball did duty in explaining the motions of the earth; . . . sand spread on the floor did duty as relief maps; pebbles picked up on the school grounds furnished the basis of a talk on common sense.”

In the 1880s and 1890s, when the state was in a better position financially, public sentiment swung more in favor of education. Still, in comparison with northern schools, Virginia and the rest of the south disappointed in every category. Thirty years after the inauguration of public education, Virginia schoolchildren were in school about half the time their peers in New England were. While Massachusetts spent $37.76 on each child per year, Virginia spent $9.70. Nationally, the average value of school property per child stood at $24. Virginia spent five dollars. Massachusetts spent $61. Virginia teachers made an average of $168 while those in Kansas made $236 and those in Massachusetts made $566. For blacks the situation was far worse. On average, Virginia’s African-American children received one-third as much school money as the average white child. They had fewer schools, fewer teachers, poorer facilities, and shorter terms. In 1908, seats existed for only 50 percent of black children compared to 83 percent for white children. As historian Louis Harlan concluded, “Considerable evidence supports the charge of W.E.B. DuBois that ‘enforced ignorance’ was ‘one of the inevitable expedients for fastening serfdom on the country Negro.’ By ‘determined effort. . . Negro schools had been made less efficient than twenty years earlier.’”

1. Brainstorm with students as a whole class about what it would take to found and maintain a school today? Why might a group of people choose to start a school? Record and save students’ ideas on the board or newsprint for later use. • For MS and ES students: to connect this topic to contexts more familiar to students, brainstorm about how their community decides where, when, and how much money to spend equipping schools. This would be a good place to use local newspaper articles, editorials, or letters to the editor about local school funding.

2. Tell students that the focus of this lesson will be the founding of the Laurel Grove School and other “colored” schools in Fairfax County between 1860 and 1890. Explain that students will be asked to examine primary sources – including documents, a map, and photos – as well as secondary sources to understand what it took to accomplish this task.

3. Distribute copies to each student of the 1881 Deed of sale of land from William Jasper to Mt. Vernon District and model the notice/question/context process with students.

4. Have students work in pairs each with paper to write on and ask them to look carefully at the document as you read it aloud and have them write what they notice, and jot down any questions that occur to them as you read.

5. Next have one of each pair report out what they found and record it on the board in two of the two columns: Notice/Question/.

6. Examples of what students might notice: the year, the names of William and Georgianna Jasper, Divers, wording “sum of ten dollars,” half acre, using poles to establish exact location, etc. Students might question: why did the Jaspers deed land to the School Superintendent instead of just using his own land to build the school? How much $10 was worth in 1881, what “in consideration of” and “quiet possession” mean? * Explanation of “quiet possession”: Person A is covenenting (promising/guaranteeing, warranting - pretty much all the same) that he is passing a good title to Person B. Person A is providing an explicit warranty that the title is clear. For example, let's say the land that Person A is selling is actually not his land; it's actually Person C's. Person C comes in and says to Person B, "That's my land. Get off." Because Person A has given Person B a warranty or a covenant that this won't happen, it provides Person B with a specific avenue to go after Person A in the event there's an issue. 7. Next distribute copies to each student of the 1879 Mt. Vernon District map and ask students to use the notice/question/context process.

8. Using what they know and looking carefully at the map, use the same process and ask them what they notice and what questions occur to them. Share these out and record.

9. Examples that students might notice from the map include familiar place names such as Franconia, Mount Vernon, Mount Vernon District, geographic and manmade features, and the name Wm. Jasper. Questions might include: why are there so many names of people on the map? Are these white and/or African American people? [NOTE: provide the option of having students work with the deed and map together.]

10. Use the Historical Background at the beginning of this lesson to tell students about the founding of the Laurel Grove School:
• Who built the school and kept it going?
• Why did these people build and maintain this school?
• What barriers did they face?
• Where did they live and how did they make a living? • Specifically, who were the four “trustees”?
• What resources did this community use to overcome the barriers? This task can be accomplished in a variety of ways including Talking Points on an overhead projector, or by PowerPoint.

11. As you provide the historical context, be sure to make connections with what your students noticed and their questions in the two primary sources.

12. Once students have completed their look at the founding of the Laurel Grove School, explain that they will use a similar process to investigate the founding of several other “colored” schools in Fairfax County.

13. Have students work in small groups and give each group some primary and secondary sources about a particular school.
• There is information in the Historical Background about Gum Springs, Woodlawn, and Falls Church
• There are primary and secondary sources from the brochure African American Landowners, Churches, Schools and Businesses, Fairfax County, Virginia (1860-1900) about Springbank, Falls Church, Ordricks, Gum Springs, Gunston, and the Freedman School.
• The primary sources include:
a. Two photos of schools (Odricks and Falls Church)
b. On Springbank: drawing, handwritten description, report card
c. First hand accounts about Gum Springs and the Freedman School. Ask students working on a particular school to record the kind of documents they used and list the information they got from these documents.

14. For HS students, another option is to set students up in stations of 4-5 students around the room with all available documents.

15. With whatever evidence each group has, ask students to think about, discuss, and fill out the chart (attachment). Students will note where the school was located and how and by whom it was started. They also should consider barriers and what resources were available (Handout also provided at the end of the lesson).

16. Share out these findings so that all students get a sense of what the founding experiences had in common and how they differed.

17. For HS students ask: Do you think the role of the Freedman’s Bureau in these schools was what you expected? Explain your answer.

18. Now ask students to look again at the barriers faced by those who started and maintained these “colored” schools and what they did to deal with these barriers. (For ES and MS students use the handout: Statistics from the Historical Background, at the end of this lesson.)

19. Finally, pull together students’ findings on both Laurel Grove and the other “colored” schools in Fairfax County, 1860-1890, and return to the first task in which students brainstormed about what it would take to found and maintain a school today and why a group of people might choose to start a school. Ask students compare what they expressed with the actual experiences of the “colored” school founders: what are the similarities and differences?

20. Assessments:
• For HS students project the Fairfax County map “Black Population As a Percent of Total Population By Voting Precinct, April 2000” to write a short essay on the following prompt: “Schools and churches are the foundation of communities.” To what extent is this an accurate statement? Use the evidence from this lesson to frame and support your answer.
• For MS students: If the teacher has begun the lesson by examining newspaper articles, editorials, or letters to the editor about local school funding, the assessment might be to have students write their own news article about one or more of the “colored” schools in Fairfax County, focusing on the obstacles presented to the black communities as well as the resourcefulness that caused them to persevere. The article could be written from the viewpoint of a reporter from likely news source of the era, such as the African American Richmond Planet.
• For ES students: Have students make a diorama of a “colored” school and a white school and arrange these for an open house where students will tell the visitors about their project and what they learned. ESOL students could explain what they learned in the language of their choice.

Books and Media
1. African American Landowners, Churches, Schools and Businesses, Fairfax County, Virginia (1860-1900) brochure, text by Guinevere Jones, Brian Sales, Theora Austin, and Edith Sprouse, 2000.

2. Linda Sargent Wood. “Get an Education and Everything Will Fall in Line”: The Laurel Grove “Colored” School in Northern Virginia, 1884-1932. Essay, 2006.

Primary Sources

1. 1881 Deed of sale of land from William Jasper to Mt. Vernon District

2. 1879 Mt. Vernon District map

3. Photos of Odricks and Falls Church “colored” schools

4. Drawing, handwritten description, report card from Springbank “colored” school

5. First hand accounts about Gum Springs and Freedman “colored” schools.

First hand accounts of colored schools

Photos of colored schools in Fairfax County

Map of Fairfax County

Black population by voting precinct

Statistics from Historical Background

NOTE TO MS and ES TEACHERS: Before teaching this lesson, look in your local (county, city) newspaper(s) for articles, editorials, or letters to the editor about local school funding. These will be useful to compare your local school funding issues to those of the Laurel Grove School and other “colored” schools in Fairfax County in the late 1800s.

Students will understand that the African Americans who founded these “colored” schools between 1860 and 1890 faced a host of barriers including laws (particularly but not only during the Jim Crow era), entrenched patterns of discrimination among white people, and the withdrawal of federal supports given during Reconstruction. Students will also understand that the founders’ resources and determination to set up these schools for their children included their strong belief in education as their hope for the future, as well as the land and skills they gave to build and maintain these schools.

Students will recognize that segregation was a system supported by both law and custom that threatened African American people in all parts of their lives. Students will examine photos and other primary sources, read excerpts from oral histories of African American people who lived during segregation, and reflect on how African American people managed to raise, care for, educate, and try to protect their children and young people even within this system.

Students will:
1. Consider both secondary and primary sources to understand the system of Jim Crow segregation.
2. Use a variety of primary sources including photos and especially oral histories to investigate how African Americans manage to raise families in this harsh system.

grades 4, 7, 11

Grade 4: Virginia Studies

VS.1 The student will develop skills for historical and geographical analysis including the ability to: (a) identify and interpret artifacts and primary and secondary source documents to understand events in history; (d) draw conclusions and make generalizations; (e) make connections between past and present; (g) interpret ideas and events from different historical perspectives; (h) evaluate and discuss issues orally and in writing.

VS.8 The student will demonstrate knowledge of the reconstruction of Virginia following the Civil War by: (a) identifying the effects of Reconstruction on life in Virginia; (b) identifying the effects of segregation and "Jim Crow" on life in Virginia.

Grade 7: United States History II – 1877 to the Present

USII.1 The student will demonstrate skills for historical and geographical analysis, including the ability to: (a) analyze and interpret primary and secondary source documents to increase understanding of events and life in United States history from 1877 to the present; (b) make connections between past and present; (d) interpret ideas and events from different historical perspectives.

USII.3 The student will demonstrate knowledge of how life changed after the Civil War by: (c) describing racial segregation, the rise of "Jim Crow," and other constraints faced by African Americans in the post-Reconstruction South.

Grade 11: Virginia and United States History

VUS.1 The student will demonstrate skills for historical and geographical analysis, including the ability to: (a) identify, analyze, and interpret primary and secondary source documents, records, and data, including artifacts, diaries, letters, photographs, journals, newspapers, historical accounts, and art to increase understanding of events and life in the United States; (c) formulate historical questions and defend findings based on inquiry and interpretation; (h) interpret the significance of excerpts from famous speeches and other documents.

VUS.8 The student will demonstrate knowledge of how the nation grew and changed from the end of Reconstruction through the early twentieth century by: (c) analyzing prejudice and discrimination during this time period, with emphasis on "Jim Crow."

Estimated time is two, 1-hour lessons, but feel free to adapt this lesson to your needs.

Segregation was more than an attitude – it was a system supported by both law and custom, and its purpose was to control newly freed African American people. The system of racial domination was carefully constructed to accomplish its goal.
Its economic component was meant to control black labor, and included job discrimination that limited African Americans to agricultural and service jobs. Sharecropping, an essential part of this system, assured white planters of continuing black farm labor by establishing a cycle of debt. This was accomplished by “fixing the books,” debt peonage, vagrancy laws, a credit system, and a convict lease system. These tactics prevented black people from receiving wages due them or moving when their situation worsened. Often these laws were modeled on Slave Codes during slavery.
Politically, segregation disfranchised freedpeople and suppressed black political action – especially the expression of newly gained rights as citizens (14th Amendment) and the right of black men to vote (15th Amendment). Disfranchisement was a two-stage process. First the Ku Klux Klan and other related groups used violence and the threat of violence to suppress black political action. Lynching and other violence was justified by the threat of miscegenation, and the alleged need to protect white women against rape by black men. The second kind of disfranchisement came in the form of laws designed to prevent blacks from voting, including literacy requirements, poll taxes, grandfather clauses, and all-white primaries. These laws were carefully crafted to avoid the 15th Amendment – they could not explicitly use race as a barrier to voting.
A key piece of this system of control was Jim Crow laws and customs. More than a series of strict anti-black laws – it was a way of life that affected whites as well as blacks. There were many state laws touching all aspects of life, including these typical Jim Crow laws:

o Barbers. No colored barber shall serve as a barber (to) white girls or women (Georgia).

o Blind Wards. The board of trustees shall...maintain a separate building...on separate ground for the admission, care, instruction, and support of all blind persons of the colored or black race (Louisiana).

o Burial. The officer in charge shall not bury, or allow to be buried, any colored persons upon ground set apart or used for the burial of white persons (Georgia).

NOTE: Eleven additional Jim Crow laws are available at http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/what.htm

During Jim Crow segregation African Americans were not passive; they responded, resisted and negotiated in a variety of ways. Among the most famous responders were Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois. They represent two different approaches. Washington, born a slave in Virginia, became a well-known educator and founded Hampton Institute in Virginia then Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. In his important and influential Atlanta Compromise Speech of 1895, he stressed accommodation rather than resistance to the racist order under which southern African Americans lived. Acutely conscious of the narrow limitations whites placed on African Americans’ economic aspirations, he stressed that blacks must accommodate white people’s – and especially southern whites’ – refusal to tolerate blacks as anything more than sophisticated menials. In this 1895 speech to the predominantly white audience, Washington said:

“Casting down your bucket among my people, helping and encouraging them as you are… to education of head, hand, and heart, you will find that they will buy your surplus land, make blossom the waste places in your fields, and run your factories. While doing this, you can be sure in the future, as in the past, that you and your families will be surrounded by the most patient, faithful, law-abiding, and unresentful people that the world has seen… [I]n our humble way, we shall stand by you with a devotion that no foreigner can approach, ready to lay down our lives, if need be, in defense of yours, interlacing our industrial, commercial, civil, and religious life with yours in a way that shall make the interests of both races one. In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”

W.E.B. DuBois, on the other hand, was born free and was the first African American to receive a doctorate from Harvard. In 1903 as an influential black leader and intellectual W.E.B. DuBois published an essay in his collection The Souls of Black Folk with the title “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others.” DuBois rejected Washington’s willingness to avoid rocking the racial boat, calling instead for political power, insistence on civil rights, and the higher education of Negro youth. In 1905 DuBois and other middle-class but militant Black intellectuals, including Ida Wells Barnett, and some whites organized the Niagara Movement, and later the NAACP. Included in their “Declaration of Principles” was this statement on the Color-Line:

“Any discrimination based simply on race or color is barbarous, we care not how hallowed it be by custom, expediency or prejudice. Differences made on account of ignorance, immorality, or disease are legitimate methods of fighting evil, and against them we have no word of protest; but discriminations based simply and solely on physical peculiarities, place of birth, color of skin, are relics of that unreasoning human savagery of which the world is and ought to be thoroughly ashamed.”

Many African Americans resisted Jim Crow segregation. Among their strategies and tactics were collective protest, migrating north (or west) especially to urban communities, creating their own institutions, especially educating their children for a better life. Education particularly offered African Americans hope and a sense of possibility. Chafe, Gavins, and Korstad, in their introduction to Remembering Jim Crow, recognize:

• “The extraordinary resilience of black citizens, who individually and collectively found ways to endure, fight back and occasionally define their own destinies…”

 “The enduring capacity of families to nurture each other, and especially their children, in the face of a system so dangerous and capricious that there were no rules one could count on for protection. Under these circumstances parents still managed to convey a sense of right and wrong, strength and assurance.”

 “The incredible variety, richness and ingenuity of black Americans’ responses to one of the cruelest, least yielding social and economic systems ever created.”

1. For HS students an opening activity might be: place students in small groups and give each group a total of three Jim Crow laws. Fourteen examples of Jim Crow laws (including the three included in the Historical Background) are available at http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/what.htm Students should read the laws together and discuss what they think was the intent of each law and its impact on both blacks and whites.

2. Next tell students that they will be using a selection of primary source images to decide/answer the question: what was segregation? And note that we’ll start by working together on the notice/question/context process.

3. Give each student a copy (and possibly have a copy on a smart board or overhead projector) of the three signs without the full caption. For each image provide the place and date where given, but save the full caption until students discuss what they noticed and ask their questions.

4. Direct students to work in pairs and distribute the chart. Request that students begin by thinking on their own. (This is a Think-Pair-Share activity.) Ask students to jot down on the chart what they notice and also make a note of any questions they have. These are purposely open-ended tasks, with the goal being for students to focus and think first on their own, and then to have pairs of students discuss what they found.

5. Examples of things students might notice and question include: these are public signs, likely found in a variety of places commonly used including transportation (trains, busses), housing, hotels and restaurants; it seems important that no one gets these directions wrong (big, clear signs). Questions might include – where were these signs, in the south and/or beyond? What happens if one does not follow these instructions?

6. Reconvene the class as a whole and ask students to share what they noticed and the questions they had, and write their basic points on the board under Notice and Questions. Provide the rest of the caption. For HS students a variation for steps # 4-6 is to complete this activity in a large group setting. Students could call out what they notice about the various signs, and the teacher could record this information in the first column on a T chart under Notice on the board. In the second column, list the Questions the students have. For ES and MS students it would be useful first to scaffold their analysis of the primary source images. This could be done by breaking down the process into four steps:
 Take an overview look at the image
 Divide the image into four parts (a quadrilateral view) and examine each piece separately to note what one actually sees
 Gather together all the information that they actually saw: what is actually there?
 Put their information together and make inferences: what conclusion(s) can they draw?

Best to have the teacher model this first, then teach students to do it, and next have students practice this process independently in their small groups.

7. Have students work in small groups using the same process, and give each group one of the other six primary source images. OR give each small group a set of the six images to work on. Note that once each group will be reporting out what they noticed and their questions – and that together they will be able to hypothesize an answer to the question – what was segregation?
• Drawing/cartoon “One Vote Less”
• Photo of KKK Parade in Washington
• Ballot “No Negro Equality”
• Poll Tax Receipt
• Photo of colored drinking fountain
• Photo of older black woman and little white girl

8. Examples of things students might notice, question, and what was segregation include can be found in attachment, "Chart for Images, Students & Teacher."

9. Reconvene the class as a whole and ask students to share what they noticed and the questions they had, and write their basic points on the board under Notice and Questions. Provide the complete captions for each image.

10. Based on students’ observations and questions ask them to answer the question: what was segregation?

11. The next step is to connect students’ observations and questions to the historical context. Use the Historical Background and the Three-Part Time Line to do this in whatever method makes sense to you and your class. Be sure to acknowledge where students came up with historically accurate conclusions on their own from the primary sources.

12. Once they have a clearer sense of the system of segregation, tell students that they will be working with oral histories. Explain that oral history is the process in which people interview others about their experiences during a particular period, having framed questions thoughtfully and then listen carefully to what they say and record their answers. They will look particularly at what it was like growing up as an African American in this society. There are a variety of oral history excerpts to choose from, and you can select as many as is practical. We have also included a poem. If you choose both the oral history and the poem, best to make the distinction between the two.

13. For HS and possibly MS students it is useful for the teacher to model how to read and/or listen to the oral history excerpts before students begin to work on their own. Written excerpts from some people are also recorded: Olivia Cherry and Charles Gratton. The teacher should select one of these, give students written copies, and have students follow along as they listen. Next work with students and together answer these guiding questions:
a. What happened?
b. Who was involved?
c. What does this piece of history tell us about growing up in a segregated society?
d. What strategies, ways of thinking and acting did people use to deal with the harshness of segregation?

The remaining excerpts could be placed around the room at stations. Students could travel in groups from station to station reading and analyzing the documents by answering the above guiding questions.

14. Distribute copies of one of the oral history excerpts and/or set up speakers with your computer to hear the audio. Direct students to read/ listen carefully to what is happening.
• After reading/listening to the excerpt, ask students to answer the above guiding questions which you can write on the board or a flip chart. ES teachers might read selected oral history excerpts aloud and direct their students to listen to and be able to describe the experience of the child in each excerpt. Then in a language arts lesson, students could select one excerpt and write a journal entry about how they might feel if confronted with a particular situation. Many students by this age have faced – or seen – some form of prejudice or discrimination, so this is a good opportunity to make connections between their struggles and challenges and those faced by young people of a different era. HS students might skip the next activity for the sake of time. It is likely to work better with MS and ES students.

15. Direct students to work in their groups. Directions for students:
• If needed, refer to guidelines for effective group practice, such as noting various roles, the task of including all opinions, listening to each other, etc.
• Distribute copies of one or two excerpts of oral history per group of four or five students so that all students in a group have the same information. They can read it aloud or listen to an audio version, then discuss using the four guiding questions noted above what happened in the story, and what they think the story means in terms of what it was like to live in this society.
• The students’ next task will be to select one of the stories to retell, dramatize or draw/illustrate to share with the whole class.
To dramatize the story, they can use some of the retelling strategies, but the point here would be to have a narrator and perhaps some of the key people in the story speak about and/or act out the events. To draw or illustrate, students would need the appropriate materials (chart paper, markers, etc.), and they would decide on the key people and events, and draw them in sequence (as in a story board) or select one scene. To share their drawing, students would need to narrate some of the key points for emphasis.
• Have each group of students share their stories by using their chosen method, providing support and encouragement as they do this. Best if teachers can note key points made by each group to use in summary.

16. To debrief this activity the teacher should orally go through these questions with students so that they can sort out and reflect on what they have learned about growing up in the Jim Crow era. Specifically:
• What aspects of segregation were most challenging to raising resilient children and youth?
• What did these people value in their lives? • How did these families convey their values to their children?
• How did parents try to protect their children from the harshness of segregation? To what degree do you think they succeeded?

Wrap up
1. The activity above that asks students to work in small groups to read and represent.
2. To assist students in making connections between the experiences growing up in a segregated society and their own lives, have students end this lesson by working on their own and writing in their journals using these sentence stems.
[Note: For elementary students, this can be done as a language arts activity or as a discussion if time is short.]
• From reading, seeing and listening to these stories and presentations, I have learned that/ I will remember that …
• One or two events that stand out for me from these stories is/are … because…
• One thing in these stories that is like my experience growing up is … That is most different from my life experience is …
• The person/people I most admire from these stories is/ are… because…
• If I had lived during this era I probably would have…

3. Once students have completed this activity, ask for volunteers to share any one piece with the whole class.

4. HS students could work in pairs or individually to create a political cartoon on a child’s life in segregated America.
Additional sources to explore the economic aspect of Jim Crow segregation ES students could use this information to teach the cycle of debt in a math lesson, with the teacher making a debt wheel. Use the vocabulary: opportunity and opportunity costs, and credit/debt/debt peonage. From Prof. Wendi Manuel-Scott’s PowerPoint Presentation: Cycle of debt
 “fixing the books”
 “settlin’ time”
 Debt peonage
 Credit system
 Vagrancy laws
 Convict lease system
 Involuntary servitude Sharecropper Contract, 1882

To every one applying to rent land upon shares, the following conditions must be read, and agreed to. To every 30 and 35 acres, I agree to furnish the team, plow, and farming implements . . . The croppers are to have half of the cotton, corn, and fodder (and peas and pumpkins and potatoes if any are planted) if the following conditions are complied with, but-if not-they are to have only two-fifths (2/5) . . . All must work under my direction. . . . No cropper is to work off the plantation when there is any work to be done on the land he has rented, or when his work is needed by me or other croppers. . . . Every cropper must feed or have fed, the team he works, Saturday nights, Sundays, and every morning before going to work, beginning to feed his team (morning, noon, and night every day in the week) on the day he rents and feeding it to including the 31st day of December. ...for every time he so fails he must pay me five cents. The sale of every cropper's part of the cotton to be made by me when and where I choose to sell, and after deducting all they owe me and all sums that I may be responsible for on their accounts, to pay them their half of the net proceeds. Work of every description, particularly the work on fences and ditches, to be done to my satisfaction, and must be done over until I am satisfied that it is done as it should be.
SOURCE: Grimes Family Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in Robert D. Marcus and David Burner, eds., America Firsthand (1992), pp. 306—308. From Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South.

Books & Media

Chafe, William H., Raymond Gavins, and Robert Korstad, eds. Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South. New York: The New Press, 2001. Includes both the book and two accompanying CDs with selections from this oral history collection. Used for the Historical Background and the oral history excerpts.

Manuel-Scott, Wendi. The Civil Rights Movement, Race and the Tradition of Black Protest, and Teaching Jim Crow. PowerPoint Presentations for Fauquier and Alexandria, VA Teaching American History grants, 2005-06, and the Laurel Grove School Curriculum Project, 2008.

Taylor, Mildred. Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. New York: Puffin Books, 1997. This often-read classic is set in the Jim Crow south during this period and told from the vantage point of a child/children. Particularly: an account of what it was like to receive your first books at school and find what was written by white children in the front – and how to cope with this situation in dignity, pp.15-31; and an account of what it’s like to be ignored and dismissed at your local store because of your race – and how children had to carefully weigh their responses, pp. 109-116.

The Great Debaters, a 2007 film that captures both the considerable challenges of living in the Jim Crow south, as well as the strategies that blacks developed for overcoming these challenges. “A wonderful cast and top-notch script elevate The Great Debaters beyond a familiar formula for a touching, uplifting drama.”

Websites

http://americanhistory.si.edu/brown/history/index.html Online exhibition from the National Museum of American History’s exhibit Separate is Not Equal.

http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/what.htm
Offers definitions, explanations, photos, examples of laws and Jim Crow etiquette.

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcrow/
Especially useful sections on Jim Crow Laws, Lynching and Riots, and Jim Crow Stories. The lesson plans and activities are also useful.

http://digitalgallery.nypl.org
The New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture has an extensive digital collection.

Primary Sources:

• Photographs and other images of segregated society

• Photos of restrictive signs

• Drawing/cartoon “One Vote Less”

• Photo of KKK Parade in Washington

• Ballot “No Negro Equality”

• Poll Tax Receipt

• Photo of colored drinking fountain

• Photo of older black woman and little white girl

Chart to Examine Seven Images

• Selected oral history excerpts from Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South

• Bitter Truths: Ralph Thompson on experience as a child (drinking water out, parents shielding children and ice cream with no stools story), Lillian Smith, Charles Gratton (pp. 4-7), Anne Pointer on going to elementary school, housing, baths, clothes, food, and especially pride in selves (pp. 43-47).

• Families and Communities: Maggie Dulin on going to the movies (p. 100), David Matthews on determination of parents to educate their children and daily experience of going to school (pp. 107- 109).

• Lessons Well Learned: Ann Pointer on walking to school and passing white schools (p.155), William J. Coker Jr., on valuing reading (p. 158), Delores Thompson Aaron on good teachers (pp. 169-170).

• Resistance and Political Struggles: Olivia Cherry on the importance of one’s name (pp.296-298).


Poem:
"We Wear the Mask" (1896), by Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906)

WE wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.
Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.
We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!

Students will understand that segregation was a system supported by both law and custom that threatened African American people in all parts of their lives. Even so, many of these people found ways to endure, fight back, and even define their own destinies. Students will recognize that, in a world that seemed unsafe and unpredictable, education offered hope that a better day might come.

In this lesson students will examine the denial of rights of African Americans both nationally and in Virginia, and consider the impact these events had on the lives of individuals and families. Students will investigate what happened to the rights of African Americans after Reconstruction. They will be able to define the terms “discrimination” and “segregation” and recognize how these can and did affect people. Specifically, students will examine some Jim Crow laws and consider the 1902 Virginia Constitution. This lesson works well after students have learned about Reconstruction, and can serve as a transition lesson to their study of the Jim Crow era. It is designed to follow “A Look at Virginians During Reconstruction.”

Students will:

1. Explain what happened to the rights of African Americans after Reconstruction.

2. Define discrimination and segregation and be able to explain how these have and can affect people, working with primary sources (photographs) to accomplish this goal.

3. Understand how the Jim Crow laws and the 1902 Virginia Constitution affected voting rights and education in Virginia.

4. Using primary source photographs and charts, students will assess the differences between white and black schools during the Jim Crow period.

grades 4, 6, and 11

Grade 4: Virginia Studies

VS.1 The student will develop skills for historical and geographical analysis including the ability to: (a) identify and interpret artifacts and primary and secondary source documents to understand events in history.

VS.1 The students will develop skills for historical and geographical analysis including the ability to
a) identify and interpret artifacts and primary and secondary source documents to understand events in history;
b) determine cause and effect relationships;
c) compare and contrast historical events;
f) sequence events in Virginia history;
g) interpret ideas and events from different historical perspectives.

VS.8 The student will demonstrate knowledge of the reconstruction of Virginia following the Civil War by: (a) identifying the effects of Reconstruction on life in Virginia;
(b) identifying the effects of segregation and "Jim Crow" on life in Virginia.

Grade 7: United States History II – 1877 to the Present

USII.1 The student will demonstrate skills for historical and geographical analysis, including the ability to: (a) analyze and interpret primary and secondary source documents to increase understanding of events and life in United States history from 1877 to the present.

USII.3 The student will demonstrate knowledge of how life changed after the Civil War by: (c) describing racial segregation, the rise of "Jim Crow," and other constraints faced by African Americans in the post-Reconstruction South.

Grade 11: Virginia and United States History

VUS.1 The student will demonstrate skills for historical and geographical analysis, including the ability to: (a) identify, analyze, and interpret primary and secondary source documents, records, and data, including artifacts, diaries, letters, photographs, journals, newspapers, historical accounts, and art to increase understanding of events and life in the United States.

VUS.8 The student will demonstrate knowledge of how the nation grew and changed from the end of Reconstruction through the early twentieth century by: (c) analyzing prejudice and discrimination during this time period, with emphasis on "Jim Crow."

Estimated time is 1-2 class periods (45 minutes each), but feel free to adapt this lesson to your needs.

In 1877, white southerners moved with great speed to erect a system of segregation and black disenfranchisement and in 1883, the U.S. Supreme Court aided white supremacists by striking the Civil Rights Act of 1875, an act that had banned racial segregation in public transportation and accommodations. In 1887, Florida passed a law requiring segregation in public facilities. The rest of the former Confederate states soon followed. These Jim Crow laws – named for a character in a minstrel show – soon became the norm in all southern states and applied to everything from segregated seating on trains to separate bathrooms, drinking fountains, and graveyards. Whites worked to keep blacks in separate spaces from birth to death, and the differences later proved unjust by every measure.

In the 1896 case Plessy v. Ferguson, the U.S. Supreme Court validated southern legislation, ruling that segregation was not discriminatory in intrastate railroads, provided that accommodations for blacks equaled those for whites. Jim Crow laws, according to the majority, did not violate black civil rights under the Fourteenth Amendment. Since legal ratification of segregation was not enough to keep blacks in subservient roles, southerners resorted to extra-legal action in the form of public humiliations, race riots, convict labor, and lynchings.

Race relations disintegrated in Fairfax County, too. In the 1870s, black landowner William West described “relations between the races in Vienna as ‘very good; a black could go into any white store, and none was prevented from buying land.” In 1873, the town had 632 registered voters, 232 of whom were black. By the 1880s, however, relations between the races had deteriorated significantly and many privileges, including voting rights that William Jasper and Thornton Gray had enjoyed immediately after the Civil War, were denied.

Black disenfranchisement and increased segregation came about in many ways. In Falls Church, whites used gerrymandering to improve their situation. Other places relied on fear to intimidate black voters. Some used the press to counter black ambitions to hold public office. In 1889 the Fairfax Herald, expressing anxiety over a possible nomination of a black for constable in the Providence district, wrote, “[I]t is the suicidal and pernicious policy of electing negroes to office to the injury and detriment of our county, to which we wish to call the attention of the people.” Statutory acts, court rulings, and constitutional amendments provided the legal apparatus to solidify white rule.

Following other southern states, Virginia made black disenfranchisement legal at its Constitutional Convention of 1901-1902. Delegates traveled to Richmond with the chief intent of stripping blacks of their right to vote. In education, delegates rewrote sections of the education clause to legalize racial discrimination in the school system. They did so by approving a substantial loophole in school funding that enabled districts to withhold funds from black schools. Depriving black fathers of the vote and black children of the schoolbook was the intent of the convention and its result.

In 1915, discrimination against blacks could be clearly seen in counties across Virginia. For every dollar spent on educating a black child in Amelia County, $12.37 went to a white child’s education. Educational discrimination was worst in areas with the greatest number of blacks. While African Americans continued their lessons in inadequate one-room buildings -- one of which was commonly referred to as “our shoebox” by its students and teachers because it was so tiny -- white children often enjoyed much larger schools. Some of them were two stories tall, and some were brick.

Despite these added obstacles, black schools stayed open, and children continued to learn. Black education advanced as the state made more of an effort to improve education generally. School reformers, including northern philanthropists, campaigned for longer terms for both black and white children, improved teacher training, school consolidation and transportation, school libraries, better organization, and local school improvement leagues. Though improvements in education moved at a slower pace for blacks than whites, blacks nevertheless held to their strong values in education.

Black communities realized the power of literacy. As historian James Anderson has noted, “The short-range purpose of black schooling was to provide the masses of ex-slaves with basic literacy skills plus the rudiments of citizenship training for participation in a democratic society. The long-range purpose was the intellectual and moral development of a responsible leadership class that would organize the masses and lead them to freedom and equality.” As discrimination increased, blacks did not alter their education strategy.

Support from the black community for education was crucial. Black community investment in education remained a constant. Examples of community and teacher support are many. These include reports of parents and neighbors providing firewood for the schools, dinner and lodging for teachers, and donating services to warm schoolrooms on cold days, and build a baseball field for the children. Generation after generation, from 1886 to 1932, the Laurel Grove School community supported its little school.

1. Hook: Begin with Orange and Blue Activity. The purpose of this activity is to introduce the concept of discrimination, make it concrete to younger students, and provide an opportunity for students to experience and reflect on it. See “Rules” for Orange and Blue Activity at end of this lesson for set up and instructions. * As an alternate activity, particularly for older students, the teacher can review the Supreme Court case, Plessy v. Ferguson. The class will examine Justice Henry Brown’s opinion and use the primary source to write down information pulled from the document and also historical information the document implies. Justice Brown’s opinion and an example of what students might note are attachments.

2. Using the experiences and reflections of students in the above activity, ask the students to work in pairs to discuss and write what they think discrimination is. Have students compare their ideas to your textbook’s definition. The textbook we used defines discrimination as: an unfair difference in the treatment of people. The American Heritage Dictionary defines discrimination as: treatment or consideration based on class or category, rather than individual merit.

3. Next, provide several copies of each primary source document to the students. The primary sources the students will use are listed below and also are attachments. The students should examine the documents, noting specific information they identify and historic information implied. They will follow the same steps as the alternate “hook” activity. For HS students:
• Letter from Raleigh C. Minor to members of the Constitutional Convention, 1901
• Flyer - "No White Man to Lose His Vote", 1901
• The Daily Progress , October 4, 1902, “The Recent Voter Registration Drive”
• Excerpt from the Virginia Constitution of 1902

4. Once the students have had enough time to analyze the documents, return to a whole group to discuss what the students noticed. Share additional examples of how discrimination affected African Americans. For example, by 1892, no public offices in Virginia were held by African Americans and whites had numerous tactics to prevent African Americans from voting or sway them to vote a certain way. * The first four paragraphs of the Historical Background (up to but not including section on the 1901-02 Virginia Constitutional Convention) include additional examples of Jim Crow treatment at this time.

5. Next, tell students that in 1901-02 some Virginians held a Constitutional Convention to revise the Constitution of 1869.

6. Help students remember what they learned about Reconstruction by asking them to recall key points from the role-play in the previous lesson “A Look at Virginians During Reconstruction.”

7. The students will compare the Constitutions of 1869 and 1902. Create this chart on the board or chart paper and ask students to use what they learned in the previous lesson to help you fill in the 1869 boxes [see attachment].

8. Next provide the information about the 1902 Constitution for boxes 1-4 [answers in italics]. Ask students what decisions (#5) they think were made in 1902, and why. It is important for students to recognize that, without having freedmen and their allies present at the Convention, the gains they made in voting and education were lost or seriously eroded. A chart is attached which outlines information from the Constitutional Conventions in 1869 and 1902.

9. Students will next assess the impact of the Virginia Constitution of 1902 on the lives of Virginians. To do this they will examine early 20th century photos of both white and colored Virginia schools, and a comparative chart of teachers’ salaries. NOTE: The steps below are based on photos of colored and white schools in Halifax County, Virginia, and the average monthly salaries of colored and white teachers compared.

10. Give each student a copy (and possibly have a copy on a smart board or overhead projector) of the photos of colored and white schools in Halifax County, Virginia.

11. Direct students to work in pairs but first, on their own, look closely at each photo and jot down on paper what they notice about each photo and also make a note of any questions they have. These are purposely open-ended tasks, with the goal being for students to focus and think first on their own, and then to have pairs of students discuss what they found.

12. Examples of things students might notice and question include: that the colored school is small, possibly one or two rooms, built of wood, with few windows, one door; a roof that may well leak; seems likely to be hot in summer and cold in winter, etc. On the other hand the white school is a much larger, three-floor structure made from brick, stone, and concrete, with large windows and doors; likely that it is comfortable year-round, etc. Students might question what it was like to be a student in each one and how it affected their lives as students, what parents of the colored students did about these circumstances, etc.

13. Reconvene the class as a whole and ask students to share what they noticed and the questions they had, and write their basic points on the board under Notice and Questions. Answer questions as you can.

14. Before going on to the context, ask students to examine the chart comparing average monthly salaries of colored and white teachers between 1905 and 1917. Again have students work in pairs but first, on their own, look closely at the chart and jot down on paper what they notice and also make a note of any questions they have.

15. In this case, examples of things students might notice and question include: that white male teachers are paid about twice as much as colored male teachers over this period, that white female teachers get more but not as much more than colored female teachers, that there is also a clear and consistent gender inequality, etc. Students might ask about the worth of a dollar then, or about inflation.

16. Reconvene the class as a whole and ask students to share what they noticed and the questions they had, and write their basic points on the board under Notice and Questions. Answer questions as you can.

17. The next step is to connect students’ observations and questions on the photos and chart to the historical context at this time. Again, use the relevant section of the Historical Background and the Three-Part Time Line to do this in whatever method makes sense to you and your class.

18. Wrap up. Last, ask students to use what they have just learned – and what they have learned in prior lessons about the experience and values of William Jasper, his family and his community. Students should predict what these people will do in the face of segregation. This can be done in the form of a brainstorm or in journals with structured questions. NOTE: Students can work in pairs then share their predictions which the teacher can record and keep – and use to compare with what actually happens in the next lessons on a child’s life in segregated society, the founding of the Laurel Grove School and other colored schools in Fairfax County, and daily experience of the Laurel Grove School, 1925. Another option might be for students to students to write newspaper articles reporting the 1902 or a journal from any perspective about the 1902 Convention. The students should focus on the effects on daily lives of people at this time. A final possibility is that students curate a museum exhibit using photographs and other materials. The students should consider which items will best tell the story of Jim Crow education in Virginia, provide captions for the items which ties the discriminatory actions of state and local school boards to the 1902 Virginia Constitution.

Books & Media

Anderson, James D. The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

Foner, Eric and John Garraty, eds. The Reader’s Companion to American History. Boston: Houghton and Mifflin Company, 1991. Entry on segregation by Howard Rabinowitz.

Harlan, Louis R. Separate and Unequal: Public School Campaigns and Racism in the Southern Seaboard States, 1901-1915. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1958.

Sargent Wood, Linda. The Laurel Grove School: Educating the First Generation Born into Freedom. Unpublished essay, 2006.

Websites

The Virginia Historical Society’s exhibit The Civil Rights Movement in Virginia focus on Beginnings of Black Education
http://www.vahistorical.org/civilrights/education.htm#16

The New York Public Library, NYPL Digital Gallery, Schomburg Center for Research in BlackCulture
http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/

Primary Sources:

• Letter from Raleigh C. Minor to members of the Constitutional Convention, 1901

• Flyer - "No White Man to Lose His Vote", 1901

• The Daily Progress , October 4, 1902, “The Recent Voter Registration Drive”

• Excerpt from the Virginia Constitution of 1902

• Photos of white schools from County Board of Supervisors, Industrial and Historical Sketch of Fairfax County, Virginia

• Photos of colored schools are from the Library of Congress, and African American Landowners, Churches, Schools and Businesses, 1860-1900 in Fairfax County

• Photos of colored and white schools from South Boston, Halifax County, Virginia

• Average monthly salaries of colored and white teachers compared in chart

Other Materials:

• Directions for Orange and Blue Activity

• Chart paper

• Three-Part Time Line

History does not always tell a story of even and steady progress. Students will understand that the freedoms and rights promised to and sometimes exercised by African Americans after the Civil War were slowly taken away after Reconstruction. It took years to win them back. During Reconstruction, African Americans began to have power in Virginia’s government, and men of all races could vote. After Reconstruction, these gains were lost when Jim Crow laws were passed by southern states. These laws had a substantial negative effect on African American life, in restrictions on voting, holding public office, using separate public facilities, and by having African American and white children attend separate schools.

In this lesson students will examine how the actions of people in government during Reconstruction, 1865-77, affected the choices that individuals made. Students will consider the life of African Americans in Virginia during this period, noting how the national government’s actions and the Virginia government’s actions impacted the education of African Americans in Virginia. This lesson focuses on the opportunities that Reconstruction opened up for African Americans, providing students the opportunity to learn about William Jasper and his family. It works well after students have learned about slavery and the Civil War in Virginia, and before students study the effects of segregation and Jim Crow on life in Virginia – a time during which many of these opportunities were taken away.

Students will
1. Use secondary sources to identify some of the problems Virginians faced during the period of Reconstruction following the Civil War

2. Recognize how the national government supported African Americans during Reconstruction

3. Use primary sources including a voter registry and a marriage license to appreciate how African Americans in Virginia exercised their newly won rights

4. Identify and interpret primary source documents

5. Determine cause and effect relationships

6. Sequence events in Virginia history

7. Interpret ideas and events from different historical perspectives.

grades 4, 6, and 11

Grade 4: Virginia Studies

Skills VS.1 The student will develop skills for historical and geographical analysis including the ability to
a) identify and interpret artifacts and primary and secondary source documents to understand events in history
b) determine cause and effect relationships
f) sequence events in Virginia history
g) interpret ideas and events from different historical perspectives

Content VS.8 The student will demonstrate knowledge of the reconstruction of
Virginia following the Civil Was by
a) identifying the effects of Reconstruction on life in Virginia.

Grade 6: United States History I – to 1877

USI.1 The student will develop skills for historical and geographical analysis, including the ability to: (a) identify and interpret primary and secondary source documents to increase understanding of events and life in United States history to 1877.

USI.10 The student will demonstrate knowledge of the effects of Reconstruction on American life by: (a) identifying the provisions of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution of the United States and their impact on the expansion of freedom in America; (b) describing the impact of Reconstruction policies on the South.

Grade 11: Virginia and United States History

VUS.1 The student will demonstrate skills for historical and geographical analysis, including the ability to: (a) identify, analyze, and interpret primary and secondary source documents, records, and data, including artifacts, diaries, letters, photographs, journals, newspapers, historical accounts, and art to increase understanding of events and life in the United States.

VUS.7 The student will demonstrate knowledge of the Civil War and Reconstruction Era and its importance as a major turning point in American history by (c) examining the political, economic, and social impact of the war and Reconstruction, including the adoption of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution of the United States.

Estimated time is 2 class periods, but feel free to adapt this lesson to your needs.

According to Christopher Clark and Nancy Hewitt, “Both failures and successes were inherent in the task of rebuilding the nation following the Civil War: vigilante violence, often fatal conflict over the right of African American men to vote, courageous African American insistence on self-determination and participation in the political process, and federal intervention in the South to help assure freedpeople’s rights. The Union victory in 1865 had settled two major debates but left everything else in doubt. The United States of America was preserved; slavery was dead, and African Americans were now free. But who would hold and exercise economic and political power in the postwar South? What kind of labor system would replace slavery? Who would lead the South politically? What would freedom mean for the four million former slaves? Answers to these questions were widely contested and would emerge only after two decades of intense political and social struggle, a struggle that contemporaries hopefully called Reconstruction.
Racial conflicts in the former Confederacy continued to disrupt efforts at reunification, and a protracted financial crisis dashed hopes for a quick economic recovery. In response, northern political and business leaders focused their efforts on revitalizing the economy through reconciliation between North and South rather than protecting racial advancement in either region. Thus… the old planter aristocracy – under the protection of a revived Democratic Party – returned to power, controlling a nonslave but still exploitative system of agricultural labor.
The failure of Reconstruction to transform southern race relations shaped the nation as a whole. Still, it was freedpeople who paid the highest price. Outgunned, both figuratively and literally, they were left with few alternatives. Yet they did not give up. Those who remained in the South established a dense network of autonomous community-based institutions, including black schools, churches, and businesses, to keep their democratic hopes alive within an oppressive and racist system.”
(From Clark, Christopher and Nancy A. Hewitt. Who Built America, Volume I, pages 589-590.)

Virginia, 1865-1870
The 1869 Virginia Constitution, unlike previous state charters, mandated public education. Virginia’s position on public education – let alone its position on educating blacks – had been tenuous at best. The state had long resisted a system of free schools, despite the efforts of some of its more famous citizens. Thomas Jefferson’s unsuccessful campaign for free schools had yielded little more than a literary fund for indigent children. All of that changed when Congress passed the Reconstruction Act of March 2, 1867 demanding that southern states ratify new constitutions guaranteeing black suffrage. Once these constitutions met with congressional approval and after the state approved the Fourteenth Amendment, Congress promised re-admittance into the Union.
Responding to the Reconstruction Act, Virginians registered voters and called an election to decide if the state would call a convention to revise the state’s constitution. In 1867 226 Fairfax County blacks registered to vote – voting unanimously in favor of a constitutional convention. In 1869, they returned to the polls and voted for adoption of the Constitution.
At the 1867-1868 Constitutional Convention, education proved to be one of the most hotly debated topics, (the state’s war debt was the other top issue). Though delegates, largely consisted of northern immigrants and freedmen easily approved a public school system, they were strongly divided over the question of integration. Many northern immigrants viewed public schools as the foundation of a democratic society and a key to reconstruction of the South. The question broke along racial lines. Black members introduced resolutions ensuring equal access to education “without distinction of color.” White delegates never took these suggestions seriously. Even radicals who supported desegregation voted against such resolutions. Mindful of widespread sentiment against mixed schools, they did not want to risk ratification. In the end, while most assumed public schools would be segregated, no language could be agreed upon and the question was not resolved until the legislature revisited the issue in 1870.
While blacks lost their campaign for mixed schools, they still passed a milestone in gaining access to public education. However, as a result of poor political and financial support, Virginia’s first public schools for both blacks and whites were grossly inadequate. Many did not have heat or toilets, schools were small and scattered; also the average term was less than the five months mandated by the Constitution, and attendance, which was not required was sparse. Despite these conditions – and those for black children were considerably worse than those for whites – still there were now public schools in which both black and white children learned.”

The William Jasper family, 1808-1870 [Talking Points]

• William Jasper, an African American, was probably born in 1808 not far from George Washington’s plantation in Mount Vernon. He was born a slave on the plantation of William Hayward Foote’s Hayfield plantation. Foote was one of the richest men in Fairfax County—when he died he owned 50 slaves.

• Jasper worked on a plantation that grew wheat and corn, and raised horses, cattle, sheep and hogs. Slaves at Hayfield, including Jasper, are likely to have had skills as farmers, blacksmiths and carpenters.

• Jasper and his family were not sold south to booming cotton and sugar plantations, as were many other slaves.

• According to his will, Foote decided to free his slaves on or soon after his death in 1846. At this time Jasper, in his thirties, was valued by appraisers to be worth $350. Foote’s will also freed Jasper’s wife Sara, in her mid-twenties, and their two daughters who were six and four. They were actually freed in the early 1850’s.

• It is important to note that the Jaspers were free blacks in Virginia before the Civil War. But even as free blacks they faced numerous obstacles. They could not: own a gun, obtain an education, vote, conduct business freely, worship in religious services unless supervised by whites. Also they might be captured by slave traders and sold back into slavery.

• The Jaspers wanted to stay in Virginia near friends and family, so in 1853 and 1858 they chose to register as free blacks in Fairfax County to prove that they were free. This meant they could travel and gain employment.

• In 1860 William Jasper purchased 13 acres of land near the Hayfield Plantation. It is likely that he put together the $200 to pay a white farmer and slave owner for the land from his work as a farmer.

• The Jaspers probably did not stay on their newly bought land during the Civil War -- and it is also likely that what they had on this land, including buildings, animals and crops, was lost during the war.

Day 1
1. Hook: Begin by asking students what they remember about slavery – specifically about how slavery impacted the lives of those who were slaves. Write students’ recollections on a web on the board or a flip chart. Then ask students what they know about free blacks before the Civil War: specifically what rights did and didn’t they have? [If this lesson follows directly after the lesson on Slavery and Free Negroes, 1800-1865, best to begin by asking students for a short recap of what they learned.]
* For HS students, teachers might start by asking students recall what they remember about Reconstruction.

2. Tell students that they will learn the story of William Jasper and his family, people who were first slaves then free blacks in Virginia, and will then get a chance to examine some documents for clues about life in Virginia after the Civil War.

3. Use the talking points above about William Jasper and his family to tell students this story. As you do, ask students how the Jasper’s experience is similar to or different from what they remember about slaves and free blacks.

4. Explain that they will be examining two primary sources to find out what rights freed people gained during Reconstruction and how these rights affected the lives of individuals.

5. Give each student a copy (and possibly have a copy on a smart board or overhead projector) of A List of Colored Voters Voting in the 3rd Magisterial District, Fairfax County, Virginia, October 22, 1867.

6. Direct students to work in pairs and follow along as you introduce the List, then have them look at the list of names. Ask students to jot down on paper what they notice and also make a note of any questions they have. These are purposely open-ended, with the goal being for students to focus and think first on their own, and then to have pairs of students discuss what they found.

7. Examples of things students might notice and question include: the date is 1867, that William Jasper’s name is listed, that colored voters are listed separately from white voters, that only men are listed, that each many has a first and last name – different from the list of slaves on the Foote will and inventory where most were identified by first names only, only names are listed – not addresses. Questions might address why some of these things occurred.

8. Reconvene the class as a whole and ask students to share what they noticed and the questions they had, and write their basic points on the board under Notice and Questions. Answer questions as you can.
* Points to clarify and emphasize include:
 That Thornton Gray, another of the founders of the Laurel Grove School (and included in the previous lesson) is also on the List.
 On the list of voters, note the total number of colored voters voting, and that they were not just registered but voted in 1867.

9. Next give each student a copy (and possibly have a copy on a smart board or overhead projector) of the 1869 Marriage License for William Jasper and Georgiana Jackson.

10. Again, direct students to work in pairs and follow along as you read the Marriage License. Ask students to jot down on paper what they notice and also make a note of any questions they have. These are purposely open-ended, with the goal being for students to focus and think first on their own, and then to have pairs of students discuss what they found.

11. Examples of things students might notice and question include: that Georgiana (Jackson) not Sarah is listed as William Jasper’s wife – explain that Sarah died and that William Jasper married again, note “Condition of Husband” and “Condition of Wife” with two options: widowed or single, and that for husband widowed is listed, while for wife single is listed, notes ages (58 and 34), no names listed for wife’s parents, there is no designation that this license for race (white or colored), husband/Jasper’s occupation is listed as farmer, and there is no place to list wife’s occupation. Why was getting married legally so important to freed people?

12. Reconvene the class as a whole and ask students to share what they noticed and the questions they had, and write their basic points on the board under Notice and Questions. Answer questions as you can.

13. Ask students:
• What rights do these two documents show that Jasper (and others) had in 1867 and 1869 that they did not have as slaves or as free blacks?
• How did free blacks get the right to marry legally and to vote (among other rights)? [Questions asked in Historical Background that you might want to use/revisit:
• Who would hold and exercise economic and political power in the postwar South? What kind of labor system would replace slavery?
• Who would lead the South politically?
• What would freedom mean for the four million former slaves?

14. The next step is to connect students’ observations and questions on the list and the marriage license to the historical context at this time. Again, use the relevant section of the Historical Background and the Three-Part Time Line to do this in whatever method makes sense to you and your class. Be sure to make two key points at this point:
• Use the three-part timeline with National, Virginia, Jasper/Walker Family events to show the inter-relatedness of what happens. – Could begin to create this three-part timeline or have the teacher put it together section by section.
• People make choices within their historical contexts.

15. Wrap up: The last question will provide an important problem-posing link to students’ study of Reconstruction: encourage students to hypothesize how these rights became legal for freed black people in Virginia, and write their hypotheses on the board or a flip chart.

Day 2
1. Before class, write the information listed in # 3 below on the board or a flip chart.

2. Hook: Begin with the word “Reconstruction”: ask students what it means and what they think needed to be reconstructed at the end of the Civil War in Virginia. What groups of people would need help and why? Problems faced by Virginians during Reconstruction include:
• Four million freed slaves needed housing, clothing, food, jobs, and an education/literacy
• Virginia’s economy was in ruins
• Confederate money had no value
• Banks were closed
• Railroads, bridges, farms and crops had been destroyed A different option for the hook might be to have the students do a “Think-Pair-Share.” Students should discuss problems and issues Virginians may have encountered during the Reconstruction era.

3. Give students a brief explanation of the Congressional actions during Reconstruction by reading and showing them the information below. Be sure to remind students that in 1863 Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation had already freed slaves in areas under Confederate control. Also explain that the amendments listed below were additions to the U.S. Constitution. * This will be a brief review with high school students.
• 13th amendment – December 6, 1865 -abolished slavery in the entire United States.
• 14th amendment – July 9, 1868 - made former slaves citizens of the United States and the state in which they live, forbade the denial of equal rights
• 15th amendment – February 3, 1870- said that voting rights cannot be denied to a person because of his race, did not specifically say that African Americans have the right to vote [Older students might want to explore why this distinction is important.]
• In 1865 Congress set up the Freedmen’s Bureau (the Bureau of Freedmen, Refugees, and Abandoned Lands), a national government agency that provided food, schools, and medical care for free slaves and others in Virginia and the rest of the South.

4. Set the stage for the role play on the 1867 Virginia Constitutional Convention by explaining that
• According to Congress, the requirements for Virginia – and all former Confederate states – to be readmitted into the union was that they had to accept Amendments 13, 14 and 15, and write a new constitution. Also Congress passed the Reconstruction Act of 1867 demanding that southern states ratify new constitutions guaranteeing black suffrage (right to vote).
• All Virginia voters could vote on whether to have a convention to create a new state constitution – and that among these voters was William Jasper. Be sure to explain why black voters would want a new state constitution.
• The major topic at this convention was education: whether or not to have public education for all children, and whether to have black and white children attend the same schools.

5. For the role play, you can divide students into three large groups and assign them to play these groups of delegates to the 1867 Virginia Constitutional Convention OR you can divide students into smaller groups of three:
 White Radicals (including white northern emigrants and a few southerners)
 White southern/Conservatives

6. Give each student in the same group the same role description. These explain each group’s views on the topic of education, and it will be useful to go over the wording to be sure they understand: White Radicals – We believe that public school for all children is essential as the foundation of a democratic society, and it has worked this way in our northern states for years. Also, public schools are important to the reconstruction of the South. People need an education to be good citizens and productive people. But, while it might be fair to have black children attend any school, we worry that if we write this into this constitution, Virginia voters will vote against, or not ratify, the constitution. Black freedmen/Radicals – We believe that public school for all children is essential as the foundation of a democratic society. To be good citizens, all children need to learn to read and write. We also believe that black children should have equal access to all schools – that is only fair. Black children deserve the same schools as white children. Education is the gateway to all the other rights and black children should be prepared to become full American citizens. White southern/Conservatives – We are not convinced that there should be public schools for white children, whether rich or poor. We are even less sure about public education for black children and absolutely certain that black and white children should not attend the same schools. We are afraid that, since Virginians already have to pay off large war debts, adding taxes to pay for public education would be a bad idea at this time.
* HS teachers could have students research additional roles before the role play takes place. Possible additions include carpetbaggers, scalawags, and Redeemers.

7. Direct students once in their groups to have each member of the group read his or her role, then put what they read in their own words. Next ask students to discuss how they will vote on the education questions. Remind students they’ll have to vote on these questions as if they were delegates to the Convention:
• Should there be public education for all children?
• Should black and white children attend the same schools? Emphasize that they must vote based on their role.

8. Acting as facilitator, reconvene the whole class with students still in their roles and ask each group’s representative to explain their group’s position. Finally, record the votes of each person on the two education questions – and announce the winning positions.

9. Debrief: Ask students to step out of their roles – and to be themselves again and give them an opportunity to tell how their role felt to them. Tell students that the actual convention voted to have public education for both black and white children – the first time there was public education at all in Virginia. Note that, although most people at that time assumed public schools would be segregated, the 1869 Constitution did not include these words. The first Virginia superintendent of education, William H. Ruffner, developed a plan for establishing public schools in 1870 and in that plan, he instituted separate schools for blacks and whites. And, finally, point out that, since Virginians owed so much money in war debts, there was not much money left over for public schools for white students and definitely not for black students.

10. Inform students that all African American men (remind students that women did not have the vote) who voted in Fairfax County voted in favor of this Constitution. Note that African American men in Virginia had several opportunities to vote: First, they elected delegates to the Convention, then African American delegates at the Convention helped decide what would go in the Constitution. And after the Convention, African American men had another chance to vote. They, along with white male voters, voted whether of not the Constitution would be ratified. African American men voted unanimously for ratification of the Constitution of 1869.
* Information from steps 9, 10, and the chart from the convention could be given to the students.

11. Finally, ask students to compare what actually happened during Reconstruction with their hypotheses on Day 1 (when you asked them to hypothesize how these rights became legal for freed people in Virginia).
* You can use the information below as a reference with students. A chart of the information can be found with the attachments for this lesson. Constitution of 1869
1. National events: 13, 14 & 15 Amendments, Reconstruction Act 1867
2. Who could vote: Vote expanded to African American males
3. Who was at convention: Northern immigrants, freedmen, conservative white southerners and a few radical white southerners
4. Major issue(s): Education: public? Mixed?
5. Decisions made: Public education to be provided for both black and white children, but it was unlikely to be mixed or equally funded

12. Wrap up: Grade 4: Ask students to write a story that William Jasper might tell his children and grandchildren explaining what life was like for Virginians, particularly African American Virginians, during Reconstruction. Explain that students will need to include specifics from this history as an integral part of their story. It might be useful to take some time during English/Language Arts to complete this writing, since it provides students with practice in “writing effective narratives and explanations,” (Grade Four English Standard of Learning 4.7). A rubric might specify that an exemplary piece of writing would:
• Accurately and clearly discuss two or three historical specifics from Reconstruction
• Connect the lives of individuals to the actions of Congress and Virginia state government
* Demonstrate evidence that the student planned, wrote, revised and edited their narrative.

Grade 11: Assign students roles to write an editorial from a Fairfax newspaper in 1867. The students must present the views of the particular person in the article: White Southern Conservatives, White Radicals, Black Freedmen Radicals. The students should focus on the interests, needs, and fears of the person from whose view they write. Next, the teacher will select one editorial and “publish” the letter. Students will complete a second writing, a “letter to the editor,” in response to the published position. They must choose a person whose views are different from the views of the published editorial.

Books and Media

Anderson, James. The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

Berlin, Ira. Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South. New York: Free Press, 1974.
Buck, J.L. Blair. The Development of Public Schools in Virginia, 1607-1952. Richmond: State Board of Education, 1952.

Clark, Christopher and Nancy A. Hewitt. Who Built America, Volume I, third edition. Boston: St. Martin’s, 2008.

Foner, Eric. A Short History of Reconstruction. New York: Harper & Row, 1990.

Heatwole, Cornelius J. A History of Education in Virginia. New York: Macmillan, 1916.

Wood, Linda Sargent. “The Laurel Grove School: Educating the First Generation Born into Freedom,” Unpublished essay: Nov. 27, 2006.

Websites.

America's Reconstruction: People and Politics After the Civil War
http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/reconstruction/section1/section1_intro.html
This exhibition is part of the Digital History site that contains an up-to-date U.S. history textbook; annotated primary sources on United States, Mexican American, and Native American history, and slavery; and succinct essays on the history of ethnicity and immigration, film, private life, and science and technology. The text is by Eric Foner, the DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University and renowned expert on Reconstruction, and Olivia Mahoney, Director of Historical Documentation at the Chicago Historical Society.

Civil War and Reconstruction, 1861-1877
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/ndlpedu/features/timeline/civilwar/civilwar.html
This Library of Congress exhibition contains succinct overviews of several aspects of the Civil War and Reconstruction and features primary sources, maps, and images

Primary sources

• 1869 Marriage License for William Jasper and Georgiana Jackson

• A List of Colored Voters Voting in the 3rd Magisterial District, Fairfax County, Virginia, October 22, 1867

* Photos of Williamand Georgianna Jasper

Handout: Role play parts for Virginia Constitutional Convention, 1867-68

Three Part Time Line

Optional: Create a transparency adapting the Talking Points on the William Jasper family and have an overhead projector.

Students will expand their knowledge of slavery, an institution of labor that varied considerably depending on time and place. They will recognize what slavery was like in Virginia and particularly in Fairfax County in the antebellum period, and gain an understanding of the skills of and choices made by African Americans both as slaves and as free people.

Students will:

1. Use several secondary sources on slavery to understand the complexity of slavery and life for free Negroes in Virginia.

2. Use primary source documents – a will and inventory, a registration of free Negroes, a deed, and a map – to examine life for free blacks before the Civil War.

grades 4, 6, and 11

Virginia Standards of Learning:

Grade 4: Virginia Studies

VS.1 The student will develop skills for historical and geographical analysis including the ability to: (a) identify and interpret artifacts and primary and secondary source documents to understand events in history; (b) determine cause and effect relationships; (d) draw conclusions and make generalizations; (i) analyze and interpret maps.

VS.7 The student will demonstrate knowledge of the issues that divided our nation and led to the Civil War by: (a) identifying the events and differences between northern and southern states that divided Virginians and led to secession, war.

Grade 6: United States History I – to 1877

USI.1 The student will develop skills for historical and geographical analysis, including the ability to: (a) identify and interpret primary and secondary source documents to increase understanding of events and life in United States history to 1877; (b) make connections between past, present; (c) sequence events; (d) interpret ideas and events from different perspectives; (e) evaluate/discuss orally and in writing; (f) analyze and interpret maps.

USI.9 The student will demonstrate knowledge of the causes, major events, and effects of the Civil War by: (b) explaining how the issues of states' rights and slavery increased sectional tensions.

Grade 11: Virginia and United States History

VUS.1 The student will demonstrate skills for historical and geographical analysis, including the ability to: (a) identify, analyze, and interpret primary and secondary source documents, records, and data, including artifacts, diaries, letters, photographs, journals, newspapers, historical accounts, and art to increase understanding of events and life in the United States; (b) evaluate the authenticity, authority, and credibility of sources; (c) formulate historical questions; (d) develop perspectives of time and place.


VUS.6 The student will demonstrate knowledge of the major events during the first half of the nineteenth century by: (c) describing the cultural, economic, and political issues that divided the nation, including slavery, the abolitionist and women's suffrage movements, and the role of the states in the Union.

Estimated time is: Elementary and Middle – three lessons, each one period; High school – two single lessons, each about 45 minutes, but feel free to adapt this lesson to your needs.

Slavery was primarily a labor system based on oppression and violence. Slaves were forced to work. At the same time, despite the cruelty, slaves created families and culture (song, dance, religion and education). This diverse and complex institution was not static. Instead the dynamic system evolved and changed over time and place. For example, life for a southern Virginia slave working tobacco in 1710 was not the same as life for a northern Virginia slave laboring on a wheat farm in 1850. Contrary to popular conceptions of slavery, many slaves did not pick cotton or live on Gone with the Wind-like plantations. Societies that allowed slavery also varied. In Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America, Ira Berlin distinguishes between slave societies where slave labor dominated the economic, political, and social world and societies with slaves – those in which there was not a total dominance of slavery.

In the 1650s and 1660s Virginia and Maryland had been societies with slaves, in which slaves had provided some labor. By the end of seventeenth century, they were being transformed into slave societies, in which slaves formed the bulk of the subordinate labor force. Laws passed in the 1660s had formally recognized slavery and begun to define it in racial terms – clearly distinguishing between black Africans and white workers. In the two decades before slave importation ended in 1808, planters purchased some quarter of a million Africans, doubling the number they imported in the previous two centuries. In the following years, natural reproduction and the internal slave trade replaced importation and met the demand for workers.

In 1830 a significant portion of Virginia slaves worked on small farms, where a laborer might cook one day and hoe cotton the next. On these farms patterns of labor varied from season to season as owners tried to insure profits and, at the same time, cultivate enough food and raw materials to sustain their own families. In such situations, slaves had more direct interaction with owners and could hope that a successful owner might purchase nearby family members. But slaves on small farms faced great danger. One bad season could cause owners to sell slaves to pay off debts, thus breaking up slave families and contributing to the great internal migration of slaves to sugar or cotton plantations in southern states such as Mississippi and Alabama. Alexandria had one of the largest slave markets in the U.S.

By the 1820s and 1830s throughout the Upper South, including Virginia, residents questioned the profitability of slavery. Many farmers turned from tobacco, which did not grow as well in northern Virginia as it did further south, to other crops, such as wheat, that did not require year-round labor. By the 1840s northern Virginia farmers had diversified and were growing wheat, corn, flax, raising hogs, cattle, and sheep. There was a change to smaller farms and to skilled slaves on plantations. Work was differentiated and skilled. With these skills, slaves had greater power and increased opportunities. They had more leverage to negotiate for better living conditions, less work, and some contracted their labor out.

In 1831-32, the Virginia state legislature considered resolutions that supported the gradual emancipation of slaves or their shipment to Africa. The resolutions received a substantial number of votes but failed to pass. This debate and the defeat of the resolutions was the result, in part, of timing, for in 1831 a major slave rebellion led by Nat Turner, erupted in Virginia. Instead of granting freedom, southern masters tightened their grip on blacks, free and enslaved, and on anyone else who challenged their right to own slaves. In Virginia, fearing the influence of antislavery literature, it became illegal to teach slaves to read. Nonetheless, the existence of such a debate suggests the problems Upper South slaveowners faced in sustaining the institutions of slavery.

What was life like for free Negroes in the South? Often free blacks were highly skilled in occupation, lighter in color than in North. While some lived and worked on small farms, most free blacks lived in urban areas and supported themselves as manual laborers, domestics, petty traders, artisans, or small shopkeepers. Often they formed support networks among themselves, founding their own churches and clubs. But after Nat Turner’s rebellion, whites assumed that the freedom of any blacks could stimulate dangerous notions among slaves. The Virginia legislature passed new restrictions on the activities of free blacks, denying them the right to own firearms, be ordained as ministers or meet for worship without the permission of the local white officials. By the 1830s, free blacks in every southern state found their very presence assailed and sometimes banned. Often the laws that limited them became the same as those after the Civil War.

Although free Negroes have been described as more slave than free, they were not a monolithic group, with different circumstances and choices depending on the region they lived in. In the North even without fear of slave revolts free Negroes had limited political rights, but they were allowed to travel freely, organize their own institutions, publish newspapers, and petition and protest. By 1810 the Upper South contained nearly 100,000 free Negroes, who composed about 8 percent of the black population in the region and almost 60 percent of the free blacks in the U.S. Thereafter repression slowed the number and the proportion declined. Some were freed by their masters who began to see slavery as inconsistent with the principles of the new Republic or who lost economic incentive to keep slaves. In the South there was less immigrant labor competition than in the North, so free blacks had higher economic standing than in the free states. But free Negroes in the Upper South were severely limited in their political and communal activities because whites feared they would instigate slave rebellions. Consequently, they were prevented from voting, sitting on juries, testifying in court, and also barred from travel without permission and meeting without supervision of whites. Free Negroes in the Upper South enjoyed economic advancement at the expense of political activism, and this was even more pronounced in the Lower South.

The William Jasper family, 1808-1870 [Talking Points]

• William Jasper, an African American, was probably born in 1808 not far from George Washington’s plantation in Mount Vernon. He was born a slave on the plantation of William Hayward Foote’s Hayfield plantation. Foote was one of the richest men in Fairfax County—when he died he owned 50 slaves.

• Jasper worked on a plantation that grew wheat and corn, and raised horses, cattle, sheep and hogs. Slaves at Hayfield, including Jasper, are likely to have had skills as farmers, blacksmiths and carpenters.

• Jasper and his family were not sold south to booming cotton and sugar plantations, as were many other slaves.

• According to his will, Foote decided to free his slaves on or soon after his death in 1846. At this time Jasper, in his thirties, was valued by appraisers to be worth $350. Foote’s will also freed Jasper’s wife Sara, in her mid-twenties, and their two daughters who were six and four. They were actually freed in the early 1850’s.

• It is important to note that the Jaspers were free blacks in Virginia before the Civil War. But even as free blacks they faced numerous obstacles. They could not: own a gun, obtain an education, vote, conduct business freely, worship in religious services unless supervised by whites. Also they might be captured by slave traders and sold back into slavery.


• The Jaspers wanted to stay in Virginia near friends and family, so in 1853 and 1858 they chose to register as free blacks in Fairfax County to prove that they were free. This meant they could travel and gain employment.

• In 1860 William Jasper purchased 13 acres of land near the Hayfield Plantation. It is likely that he put together the $200 to pay a white farmer and slave owner for the land from his work as a farmer.

• The Jaspers probably did not stay on their newly bought land during the Civil War -- and it is also likely that what they had on this land, including buildings, animals and crops, was lost during the war.

1. For all levels (ES, MS, and HS) begin with students’ associations with/ assumptions about slavery.

2. For HS students this could be done as a think/pair/share activity for about 10 minutes. For MS and ES this could be done with webbing or KWHL. Either way, be sure to return to students’ assumptions after some historical context on slavery is provided. Another possibility is creating some myths and facts or true/false statements about slavery.

3. An advantage of the KWHL or webbing is that students can generate their own questions that they want to answer.

4. It might be useful to prime the pump and ask about national, regional, state, and local conditions.

5. Use the Historical Background section on slavery (based on secondary sources listed below) and the Three-part Time Line to provide a more nuanced and accurate historical context about slavery. This can be accomplished in a variety of ways such as: Teacher Talking Points, SHORT PowerPoint, having small groups of students work together to read and share different sections then have them report out, could be jigsaw. The goal is to provide at an appropriate developmental level a more complex historical context for this topic and to convey to students the connections between national, regional, state, and local events.

6. Once students have a clearer picture of slavery, it is time to take a look at the lives of some people living during this period. They will use the primary sources to find out: Who were “Free Blacks”? How did they get “free”?

7. For HS students give them copies of Wm. Hayward Foote’s will and inventory of his death in 1846 in the original handwriting, and direct them to try transcribing it.

8. For a warm up with MS and ES students, teacher directs a think aloud with this document, and brainstorms with students about meaning of vocabulary words. Give each student a copy of the transcribed version (and possibly have a copy on a smart board or overhead projector).

9. With HS students ask them what they notice/see. Students are likely to point out a great deal of information prior to debriefing. Get them to ask questions. Then give them a copy of a full transcribed will.

10. Direct students to work in pairs or small groups and follow along as you read the will aloud. Ask students to jot down on paper what they notice and also make a note of any questions they have. These are purposely open-ended tasks, with the purpose being for students to focus and think first on their own, and then to have pairs of students discuss what they found.

11. Examples of things students might notice include: The date of the will is 1846 – well before the Civil War, the court is in Alexandria County, Foote discusses his slaves right away, and uses words like “care and kindness” of his wife, slaves will be paid, most slaves have only first names, some also have last names, most of Foote’s wealth was in slaves and not material possessions. Examples of questions include: meanings of unfamiliar words such as executor, executrix, emancipate, comport, codicil; when were these slaves actually freed?

12. Ask students to use the same process (notice and question) as they look at/read the handwritten inventory. Useful for students to notice that, while things are listed, slaves are valued as worth most, also that William Jasper is listed.

13. Reconvene the class as a whole and ask students to share what they noticed and the questions they had, and write their basic points on the board under Notice and Questions. Answer questions as you can. Points to clarify and emphasize include: o Foote leaves the decision as to when “from time to time” to free or emancipate the named slaves up to the discretion of his wife, and for the “probable welfare of“ his slaves.
o The freed slaves are to receive one payment of $20 for males and $10 for females
o William Jasper is one of the slaves listed, but he is not actually freed until later.
o The average number of slaves held at this time was two – and Foote had fifty.

14. For HS students use these guiding questions:
 What were the signs of daily work on the farm?
 List and discuss the relative values of Foote’s property.
 In what way do you understand the people who owned these possessions?

15. For ES and MS students have students infer that eighty percent of Foote’s wealth came from slaves. Begin 2nd lesson for HS students.

16. Before examining the next primary source have HS students pre-read Oates, Stephen B. “The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner’s Fierce Rebellion.” Then have them examine/answer :
 The impact of Nat Turner’s Rebellion on the laws governing the lives of free Negroes in Virginia.
 What were the advantages to whites of having free Negroes register? To free Negroes of registering?

Begin 2nd lesson for ES and MS students.

17. For ES and MS warm up have students think aloud with teacher and brainstorm why there might be a register of free blacks.

18. Have students use the next primary source, Registration of Free Negroes/Blacks in 1822, 1835, to learn more about free Negroes and to practice the analysis process. Who were “Free Blacks”? How did they get “free”? Were they really free? Have students look for William Jasper, Sarah Jasper, and Thornton Gray.

19. Distribute a copy of Registration of Free Negroes/Blacks to each student and use the same approach – notice and question – this time reading on their own and jotting down what they notice, and questions they have, discussing in pairs, sharing out as a class, and recording students’ main points on the board.

20. Examples of notice and questions: these people are identified first by their scars – why is that – significance of scars to former owners? To ex-slaves? How might we identify ourselves? Color of skin, size, and age are mentioned. For Thornton Gray a key fact is that his mother was a free woman emancipated by George Washington. What is race of the people signing the affidavit? Some are granted permission to remain in the state, but others are not – why? William and Sarah Jasper (not noted that they are married – why? legal only after war? Also earliest date for their registering as free is 1853 though Foote’s will was in 1846 – so did it take 7 years until Foote’s wife freed them?

21. Questions teachers might use include: How are Sarah and William Jasper and Thornton Gray described? Why do you think these features were noted here? Why do you think they had to ask permission to remain in Virginia as free Negroes? What year did each register?

22. Questions to guide the discussion include:
 What was the impact of Nat Turner’s Rebellion on the laws governing the lives of free Negroes in Virginia?
 What were the advantages to whites of having free Negroes register? To free Negroes of registering?

23. For ES and MS students, create a T chart and ask students to consider the opportunities (pros) and opportunity costs (cons) of being a free black.

24. From there have students predict what William Jasper’s life will be like as a free Negro. Use the predictions (some help would be useful here as to ways to make a living/eco opportunity, civil and political rights) to compare with what does and does not happen, what is and what is not allowed for free Negroes in Virginia from 1830 to 1860.

25. For ES and MS students have them think aloud and brainstorm about what connection property ownership might have to freedom. Begin 3rd lesson for ES and MS students.

26. Students will examine two more primary sources, together, to solve the problem: who were free Negroes and how did they live. These are:
 Thompson Javins deed of land to Wm. Jasper in 1860
 1860 Property map superimposed on a mid-twentieth century county map 2

27. Direct students to use the same process (Notice/Question/Context) and work on their own, then in pairs, then share their findings.

28. Examples of what students might notice and question: the precise legal language in the deed and why it was used. That Javins was white (and they might remember that Javins earlier signed the affidavit for the registration of free Negroes), using the map with the deed one can see that Javins kept/lived on? land next to Wm. Jasper, that Jasper bought 13 acres of land for $200 in November of 1860? How did Jasper earn the money to but this land? Using the map – who were the other landholders next to or near Jasper? Were they white or “colored”? This land purchase takes place about five months before the Civil War begins – where did Jasper and other free Negroes go during the war?

29. Let students know that, once war breaks out in April 1861, it is not clear where Jasper, family and free black community go during war – maybe to a Freedman’s Village in Alexandria or Falls Church. One of Thornton Gray’s family joins the Union Army.
For ES and MS students find an early 1860s map of Northern Virginia that shows the Civil War battlegrounds. Ask students to see which battles were fought near the Jaspers’ newly purchased land and discuss what students might think or how they might feel if this had been their land. 30.
The next step is to connect students’ observations and questions on the will and registration, the deed and the map to the historical context of free Negroes at this time. Again, use the relevant section of the Historical Background and the Three-Part Time Line to do this in whatever method makes sense to you and your class.

31. Discuss how students’ predictions compared to what happened.

32. Be sure to make two key points:
o Use the three-part timeline with National, Virginia, Jasper/Walker Family events to show the inter-relatedness of what happens. – Students could begin to create their own three-part timeline or have the teacher put it together section by section.
o People make choices within their historical contexts, whether it be Virginia legislators after the Nat Turner Rebellion or William Jasper and his family about registering, buying land etc. 3

3. Wrap-up: Have ES and MS students fill out a 3-2-1 chart and share with the class. 3 = tell three things you learned in the lesson, 2 = tell two things that surprised you, and 1 = tell one thing you would still like to know. One option is to return to the KWHL chart or web from the beginning of this lesson and have students write on their own and then contribute as a class to the “L” (learned) column about slavery and free Negroes. Another option is to have students write diary entries from the perspective of a slave owner, wife, and/or free Negro.

Books & Media

Clark, Christopher and Nancy A. Hewitt. Who Built America? Working People and the Nation’s History. Volume I, third edition. Boston: St. Martin’s, 2008. A survey of the nation’s history from the perspective of the transformations wrought by the changing nature and forms of work and the role that working people played in the making of modern America. Used to write the historical background.

Foner, Eric and John Garraty, eds. The Reader’s Companion to American History. Boston: Houghton and Mifflin Company, 1991. Article on Free Negroes, 1619-1860, by Ira Berlin. In one readable and accessible volume this book covers political, economic, cultural, and social history; it combines short descriptive entries with longer in-depth essays. Used to write the historical background.

Lester, Julius. To Be a Slave. New York: Scholastic Inc., 1968. Particularly useful for MS and ES school students (if entries selected and read by teachers), this book is based on the extensive collection of slave narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project at the Library of Congress as well as 19th century interviews with abolitionists.

Oates, Stephen B. “The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner’s Fierce Rebellion,” in Portrait of America, Vol.1, 8th ed. Stephen B. Oates and Charles J. Errico. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2003. Appropriate for HS students, this is a dramatic and thorough telling and explanation of Nat Turner’s Rebellion.

Unchained Memories: Readings from the Slave Narratives. An HBO Documentary Film in association with the Library of Congress, introduced by Ira Berlin, 2003. Based on oral histories from the Federal Writers Project and visual sources from the Library of Congress, entries are read by a range of well-know actors.

Websites
http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/slavery.htm
The Avalon Project at Yale contains: history and literature, federal and state statutes, and other documents on Slavery

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/aaohtml/exhibit/aopart1.html
An essay and primary sources at the Library of Congress website on Slavery – The Peculiar Institution, contains a variety of useful images and contexts.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/home.html
The PBS four-part program from 1450 to 1865, each with a historical narrative, a resource bank of images, documents, stories, biographies, and commentaries, and a teacher's guide.

Primary Sources:

• Wm. Hayward Foote’s will and inventory of his death in 1846

• Registration of Free Negroes/Blacks in 1822, 1835, 1853

• Thompson Javins deeds land to Wm. Jasper in 1860

• 1860 Property map superimposed on a mid-twentieth century county map

Three-part time line

Slave life was never the same. Students will understand that Virginia and particularly Fairfax County between 1800 and 1860 went from being a slave society to being a society with slaves, and that between 1800 and 1840 the slave population of Fairfax County dropped because poor economic conditions on farms and changing attitudes toward slavery led slave owners to sell land and to sell or free slaves. Students will also understand that in Virginia between 1800 and 1861 not all African Americans lived in slavery, many were free, and that Virginia law in the 1820s and 1830s required free blacks to register so that they could be controlled. This law was more strictly enforced after Nat Turner’s Rebellion in 1831.