The Montgomery Museum of Art & History in Christiansburg, Virginia and the Christiansburg Institute has approval to place three interpretive panels in the town square describing the history of the area’s Black population during slavery and Reconstruction. Councilman Brad Stipes wrote in a statement supporting the project that “Learning about and understanding history is one of the most important things we can do as an individual, a family, a community and as a nation if we ever want our tomorrow to be better than our today. If the town square of the county seat is not the best place to tell the story of our community, then where is?” This African-American Memory and History Project has met some opposition in the town.
The panels will be placed in a square dominated by a fifteen foot high Confederate monument which is inscribed as being dedicated “to the memory of Montgomery’s sons who fell in the Lost Cause and to all the Confederate dead who lie beneath her soil.” The square also contains the Constitution Oak planted to celebrate the 1902 Virginia Constitution that stripped Blacks of rights they had been given in the 1870 Reconstruction Era Constitution.
According to the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies, the Confederate monument’s “position on the town square reflects the historic importance of the old Montgomery County courthouses, which stood at the center of town. Confederate monuments were often placed near courthouses at the symbolic and often geographical center of the county.”
Some residents have raised arguments against the panels claiming that the placement of the panels will make white people feel guilty about what their ancestors had done to enslave Black people in the county. Another asked that the panels be placed in the Black section of Town. Some suggested that no names of slaveowners be included on the panels.
Katie Mills of Pulaski wrote in defense of protecting the memory of the Confederacy saying that “It makes me feel as if CI wants to obliterate the current monument, so that everyone forgets that there were soldiers of ALL races involved in the War Between The States to push their own agenda.” While there were soldiers of all races that fought in the Civil War, the Black soldiers fought to destroy the Confederacy. Mills is merely parroting the “Myth of the Black Confederates.” For the last 160 years, monumentation in Christiansburg ignored those of her sons who served the United States in the United States Colored Troops.
The attempt to ignore Black history in Montgomery County is nothing new. A 1992 scholarly article said that “many people of Montgomery County, Virginia, are oblivious of the heritage and presence of blacks.” *
According to news reports, a majority of people attending the town meeting on the new history panels supported the installations.
Christiansburg occupies an important place in Virginia’s Reconstruction Era history. The Christiansburg Normal Institute was the first high school established for the education of newly freed Black children in Southwestern Virginia. Started by Quakers and Union Captain Charles S. Schaeffer of the Freedmen’s Bureau in 1867, the school was a focus of Black political action for the next century. By the 1950s, unrelenting discrimination, segregation in all levels of life, and severely limited economic opportunities led many Montgomery County Blacks to leave the area. *
During the Civil War, the local enslaved population took an active interest in the political changes the war brought. A visitor to a Montgomery County plantation in 1861, just as the war was starting, wrote that one influential black man named “Uncle Davy” had made a speech to the local Black community in which he said that “Lincoln was a second Christ and that all that the white people said about Lincoln was a lie from beginning to end.”#
At the time of the Civil War, one-in-five people in Montgomery County was an enslaved African American. Today fewer than 4% of county residents are Black.
Note on Feature Illustration, text from the Roanoke News: This Lewis Miller sketch of a Christiansburg slave auction is one of several images proposed to be used in an African-American history exhibit planned for town square. Some have criticized putting a focus on slavery in Montgomery County. The text reads: “Miss Fillis & Child, and Bill, Sold at publick Sale”; from Sketchbook of Landscapes in the State of Virginia by Lewis Miller; Virginia; 1853; watercolor; ink; and pencil on woven paper; accession #1978.301.1. Gift of Dr. and Mrs. Richard M. Kain in memory of George Hay Kain.
Footnotes:
* Race Relations in Montgomery County, Virginia 1870-1990 by Michael A. Cooke Journal of the Appalachian Studies Association Vol. 4
# Soldiers, Servants, and Very Interested Bystanders: Montgomery County’s African American Community during the Civil War by DANIEL B. THORP The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography Vol. 126, No. 4 (2018), pp. 378-421 (44 pages)
Christiansburg, by the way, is right next to Blacksburg, home of Virginia Tech.
I was thinking of you when I wrote the article.