Jefferson School African American Heritage Center Celebrates 10 Years

We recently celebrated our 10th anniversary and, in preparation, I have been sifting through images of the many events the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center has held through the years. These images speak to me of community. They include people who are still with us and some who have passed on. Since 2007, when I was Curator of Collections and Exhibitions at what's now known as the Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia, I've been working with community members to build the JSAAHC. With community, and an Advisory Board comprised of Jefferson High School alumni, we planned our Pride Overcomes Prejudice exhibition to tell the school's history. Though funding for staff was limited, we were able to retrofit the auditorium and offices to once again host the community as we pushed forward in our resolve to create an African American educational institution that also served as a gathering space. Our mission is to celebrate the rich history of the African American community in Charlottesville and Albemarle County, and to promote a greater appreciation for, and understanding of, the contributions of African Americans and peoples of the Diaspora.

Over the years, we have accomplished much: a permanent exhibition that will expand in the coming year; more than 30 curated exhibitions of local and national work by renowned African American visual artists; five regional cultural festivals each year; a lecture series that pushes the edge of contemporary cultural scholarship; a teacher training program in its fourth year that equips classrooms with the fullest version of local history; a museum studies program for high schoolers; a theater program that supports African American actors and directors; a home for the area's only African American film festival; two oral history projects; the creation of the city and county's first racial covenants maps; Juneteenth and second line parades; and much more.

Ten years ago the JSAAHC was envisioned as a museum with an exhibition space to tell the history of the Jefferson School, the city's African American public school from 1866-1970. But in the 21ˢᵗ Century, museums are more than just collecting institutions. They should also be community stakeholders that drive conversation while simultaneously holding and protecting that community’s memory. This is why we define ourselves as an interdisciplinary art and heritage center, and why we support new nonprofits by serving as their fiduciary agent or by providing space and support for their events.

When the city wanted to re-examine its Jim Crow statues to Confederate leaders, it used the JSAAHC as its central convening space. When the University of Virginia wanted to engage the larger Charlottesville community about the design of the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers, they came to us. When the Ku Klux Klan came to Charlottesville we held a teach-in for the community to learn more about white nationalist groups. The day after the Unite the Right rally in 2017, after Heather Heyer's tragic death and the life-changing injuries to 29 others, the community met in our auditorium to process its grief. Since then we have taken hundreds of our community members on bus pilgrimages to Montgomery, Alabama, traveling through the south to learn about our country’s history of racial violence, while locating our community's own experiences within that narrative. Our first of these trips fulfilled a recommendation made by the Blue Ribbon Commission on Monuments, Race and Public Spaces, thereby ensuring that the document did not sit on the shelf collecting dust. Instead, 98 members of our community participated in the Equal Justice Initiative’s Community Remembrance project, and delivered soil taken from the site of John Henry James's 1898 lynching in Albemarle County. The result of that trip is the marker that sits in front of our local courthouse that reminds the community and others of the extra-legal activity that lynching is.

Through conversations with some of our nearest and dearest we've determined that our work moving forward, over the next 10 years, will be defined by two guiding principles and aggregated under two overlapping program areas: Learning and Engagement, and The Center for Local Knowledge.

Our twofold approach draws on the tradition of call-and-response; we must be learning to be engaged, and we must be engaged to learn. Further, we define public history as an ecosystem that respects the many sources of historic knowledge. As such, it's our responsibility to ensure that research go beyond the written word, and lead to social praxis. With this in mind, in the coming years our community can expect to see more ways to get directly involved in this living embodiment of public history and its interpretations. This includes broader and richer artistic engagements that center our young people in particular, as well as the creation of our region's first permanent exhibition that reflects the complete physical and social landscape of the Charlottesville area’s African American community.

I am looking forward to our next ten years—I believe they will be equally if not more impactful than our first.