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Inexperienced and white awnings and a small signal are all that distinguish the Richmond house of Maggie L. Walker from neighboring duplexes which were fastidiously restored to their look circa 1925. What distinguished Walker in her day was her ability at overcoming all of the obstacles society may place earlier than a black lady dwelling underneath Jim Crow segregation legal guidelines.
However wait. Maggie who?
Maggie Lena Walker, the daughter of a former slave, was a black entrepreneur and civil rights activist who achieved enterprise success at about the identical time because the extra well-known Vanderbilts, Carnegies and different Northern captains of business had been making their names. She was a revered resident of Richmond’s Jackson Ward neighborhood throughout the early Twentieth century, when the realm was experiencing its heyday.
Sure, Virginia, there’s a aspect of Richmond referred to as the cradle of black capitalism, even supposing only a few many years earlier, throughout the Civil Battle, town had served because the capital of the Confederacy.
Throughout Black Historical past Month, Richmond celebrates its black heritage in various venues, from the Black Historical past Museum to the elegant Gilded Age Maymont Mansion. However there’s nothing fairly like visiting Jackson Ward. Enter this not-yet-gentrified district about 14 blocks northwest of the state Capitol and also you step again right into a time when the thriving black group was abuzz with power and residents frequented greater than 100 black-owned theaters, insurance coverage corporations, church buildings, hospitals, retailers and different institutions.
What introduced my go to to life, together with a tour of Walker’s two-story “city mansion,” was the strolling tour of 12 historic websites that described the medical doctors, journalists, enterprise folks, ministers and others who as soon as resided right here, few of whom I used to be conversant in.
I began at Walker’s Victorian home on East Leigh Road, which retains greater than 90 p.c of the household’s authentic furnishings and belongings, an astonishingly excessive share for historic houses, mentioned Ben Anderson, a park ranger who led me by the positioning. As a result of members of the Walker household lived in the home till they turned it over to the Nationwide Park Service in 1979, little has been misplaced or destroyed.
Midway into the tour, I used to be joined by a household of 4. Upon coming to a room behind the home, the mom expressed dismay on the buckets, washboard and clothes-wringer displayed there and turned to her younger women. “Are you able to think about having to do this?” she requested. Certainly. Doing a household’s laundry was so arduous that it may take every week. Folks with cash paid somebody to do it for them. Walker had one among a number of kinfolk dwelling together with her do the job.
Upstairs, one of many women lagged behind at a roped-off bed room, intrigued by dolls in fancy attire arrayed on a twin mattress, some with white faces, others with black. Walker’s granddaughter had owned a “Tu-In-One” doll, a Siamese-twin-like doll with a head on both finish, as a substitute of ft. It turns into a white doll with a bonnet or a black doll together with her hair tied up in a crimson material relying upon which head the gown covers.
Walker clearly was an astute businesswoman. As a brief movie on the customer heart explains, she was the primary black lady in the USA to personal a financial institution: the St. Luke Penny Financial savings Financial institution, chartered in 1903. She additionally began a newspaper and opened an emporium promoting clothes and different items to the black group, all greater than a decade earlier than girls may vote. A photograph of 16 of the financial institution’s staff that first yr exhibits eight black girls in lengthy skirts and high-necked blouses.
These girls wouldn’t in any other case have had respectable job prospects. “The concept of working at a financial institution, having these job expertise, merely didn’t exist earlier than Mrs. Walker got here alongside,” Anderson mentioned. “She went out of her technique to rent African American girls.” It meant that these girls may escape the drudgery of working at one of many three essential occupations out there to black girls on the time: laundress, home servant or tobacco manufacturing facility employee.
Walker was a up to date of such political and civil rights leaders as Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois and Mary McLeod Bethune. Some had been pals; others served together with her on the boards of varied organizations.
The early Twentieth-century instances got here alive much more throughout my strolling tour of the ward, now a Nationwide Historic Landmark district. The Park Service lends guests an iPod with narration interspersed with authentic music from the period, scratchy vinyl sounds and all. I felt as if I’d landed in a 3-D model of a Ken Burns documentary.
My first cease was the Hippodrome Theater, opened in 1914 as a vaudeville and movie show. It stands subsequent door to a 26-room mansion, inbuilt 1905 by the Rev. W.L. Taylor, a pacesetter of the United Order of True Reformers, a temperance group that was one of many largest black fraternal and enterprise enterprises in the USA.
On a bitingly chilly day, I visited banks and insurance coverage buildings, a church, a funeral institution and the houses of different residents, whose names I hadn’t identified however whose tales I discovered, shedding extra gentle on Walker’s contemporaries.
After which, a shock. Say “Mr. Bojangles” and I consider a tune a few man who danced, and whose canine up and died. That’s all I knew till I stumbled on a statue of Invoice “Bojangles” Robinson (born Luther Robinson) and heard the narration in regards to the Richmond-born vaudevillian and faucet dancer who starred in additional than a dozen movies, together with a number of with baby star Shirley Temple. Reside and be taught.
I began the tour disillusioned that the unique financial institution constructing and the division retailer that Walker had based now not exist. However the narrated tour of different landmarks gave me a superb taste of the period and a deeper understanding of it.
On earlier visits to Richmond, I’d been to the grand Monument Avenue space and to modern Shockoe Backside’s retailers and eating places. However till this go to, I hadn’t walked a mile north to Jackson Ward, nor a mile within the footwear of some outstanding achievers who proved how a lot the human spirit can overcome.
Picture: Ellen Perlman. Maggie Walkers home in Richmond, Va.
[This story original ran in The Washington Post in 2012. I wrote a post about the trip on my blog.]
Okay, there are solely two days left in black historical past month, however I think about this underneath the wire. Do not you? (thanks bissextile year for giving me an additional day)
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