Symposium Series

Red & Black: The Legacy of Native& African Peoples in Charles City County

This series, funded in part by a grant from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and Public Policy, offered a glimpse of a present-day rural Virginia community that still struggles with the legacy of the British invasion of 1607. Six speakers, three Native and three African American, explored various aspects of Red & Black relations in Charles City County. The speakers were joined by local Native & African American panelists and performers, creating a unique cultural experience.

Background

Few of us have heard about the Weyanoke, the Paspahegh, and the Chickahominy, Native peoples from what is now Charles City County, Virginia. The Chickahominy resided there when British colonists first arrived in the area looking for gold and land. Patented in 1613, strategically located between the James and the Chickahominy Rivers, and close to the colonial capitals of Jamestown and Williamsburg, Charles City County was the first westward expansion of English-speaking America.

The Chickahominy were affiliated with the Powhatan Chiefdom who lived in a region currently referred to as the Virginia Tidewater, which includes Jamestown Island. At that time Charles City was the largest of the original eight shires, or counties, and also included Prince George, Surry and Isle of Wight counties. The Chickahominy is that area’s only surviving Native people who are recognized by the Commonwealth of Virginia. The area has been home to Algonquian-speaking peoples for at least the last five hundred years.

The Chickahominy, along with other tribes in the Powhatan Chiefdom, at first extended their hospitality and civility to the Europeans. Had they not, the fledgling colony would probably have suffered the same fate as Sir Walter Raleigh’s colony on Roanoke Island in present-day North Carolina. Those colonists "disappeared," and their settlement has become known as "The Lost Colony."

The colonists did not find the gold they were seeking, so John Rolfe, Pocahontas’ husband, developed the "golden" export crop of tobacco, ironically marketed in Europe as a "cure-all." Once they had enslaved the Native peoples they found that Native labor was not as productive as they wished. The Native peoples’ familiarity with the territory made possible an easy escape; they could not endure the horrors of forced labor, nor survive the introduction of European poxes and other diseases. The colonists imported Africans into the colony, starting at least as early as 1619. These Africans, who were at first bondspeople or indentured servants, were settled on "the governor’s land," Governor Yeardley’s twenty-two hundred acre tobacco plantation. That land was home to the Weyanoke people, in what is now Charles City County, Virginia.

The kidnapped Africans’ forced labor on tobacco plantations was so cost-effective that by the 1650s the British enacted chattel slavery laws to protect their profits. These laws trapped Africans and Native peoples in what was to evolve into a definitively brutal form of slavery. The two peoples, who held many similar religious and cultural beliefs, were forced to work and live together under grim and unnatural conditions. It has been estimated that as many as 80% of those known today as African Americans have significant Native ancestry.

During Reconstruction the Europeans’ technique of "divide and conquer," using propaganda to pit one group against another, succeeded brilliantly through the creation of "educational" institutions for ex-slaves. The trend began in Hampton (formerly Elizabeth City County), at Virginia’s own Hampton Agricultural and Normal School. The school’s first president, Gen. Samuel Chapman Armstrong, invented the "Hampton Method." The African American students were told to swallow their resentment over the broken promises of the Reconstruction period and express gratitude for their station, because they were better off than the Native American students. Native American students were informed that their work habits, language skills, and general progress were inferior to those of the African American students. A concurrent strategy of Armstrong’s our mission was to teach his Native and African American students to dress, speak, work, and behave like whites, while offering no guarantee that they would ever be given the power and privileges equivalent to those whites enjoyed. Armstrong’s own writings confirm that he was both deliberate in his actions and pleased with the results, the ramifications of which persist to this day.

Around the turn of the century, African and Native Americans’ efforts toward freedom, autonomy and self-determination were further assaulted by Dr. Walter Ashby Plecker and the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America’s efforts to "purify" the caucasian race. By 1924, they had prevailed upon the Virginia General Assembly to pass the "Race Integrity Act." Under this law, people who could not prove themselves "white" were classified as "colored" for the purposes of birth records, marriage licenses, school attendance and death certificates. Native and African Americans and others were dumped into a category which culturally neutered and proscribed them.

The symposium series, RED & BLACK: THE LEGACY OF NATIVE & AFRICAN PEOPLES IN CHARLES CITY COUNTY, was conceived to explore the historical relationship between African and Native peoples in that area of Virginia. How was their relationship influenced by the colonists’ adaptation of British Common Law to the plantation society they developed? What was the effect of indentured servitude, slavery and the Virginia slave codes on how Natives and Africans interacted? Did they later come to shun one another in an attempt to exercise some control over their identities and destinies? What are the lingering results of the nationally accepted "one-drop rule?" And how has Plecker’s Race Integrity Act affected subsequent generations of the Commonwealth’s Native and African Americans?

Despite the upheaval, in 350 years little has changed: The early names of Adkins, Atkins, Binns, Bradby, Brown, Carter, Charity, Harrison, Jones, Marable, Miles, Page, Paige, Ruffin, Tyler, Whitehead and others still populate the county. Native peoples still pay tribute - albeit symbolic - to the Governor of the Commonwealth during the harvest season. And the county’s economic association of power still resides in the working plantations along the James River.