Justice Prevails: Descendants of enslaved people at historic
plantation win bruising battle to tell their stories
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Rhonda Sonnenberg, SPLC Senior Staff Writer | Read the full piece here
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Friend,
Set on a pastoral landscape at the foothills of the Blue Ridge
Mountains outside Orange, Virginia, Montpelier
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is among the country's premier historic plantation sites.
It was the home of James Madison
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, the so-called father of the U.S. Constitution and the nation's
fourth president.
It was also "home" to 300 enslaved people during
Madison's time, and their descendants are now boldly asserting
the right to tell their stories.
For the past 18 months, Montpelier's conservative, white leaders
had been battling the Montpelier Descendants Committee
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(MDC) - an organization dedicated to restoring the narratives
of enslaved African Americans on the plantation - over its
demand for equal voting power on Montpelier's board.
Previous Montpelier leadership and staff had established relationships
of trust with the descendant community. In 2019, the MDC was
established to push for "structural parity." The board
reluctantly made parity official in Montpelier's bylaws
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in June 2021, only to begin undermining
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that promise.
But in a stunning turn of events this week, MDC representatives not
only obtained parity on the Montpelier Foundation board but took the
majority of board seats for the first time.
Montpelier President and CEO Roy Young II resigned, and two
conservative board members quit. The move left a solid majority (13
out of 20) board members, including the MDC chairperson, as
descendants of enslaved people or endorsed by them.
"Four hundred years and counting, and we still have to convince
the primary beneficiaries of slavery that our ancestors were essential
to the founding of this nation," said Iris Ford, a retired
anthropology professor whose great-grandfather Alan was recorded as
"son of the master" at an adjacent plantation that later
became part of Montpelier and has watched events unfold.
"Harvard [University] just allocated $100 million
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to acknowledge that immense wealth was made on the backs of enslaved
people," said Ford, a member of the MDC. "That money
certainly does not serve as the standard for acknowledging injustice,
but it is a recognition of America's true history. When people
ask what this history has to do with James Madison: It's the
realization that the well-crafted story of Montpelier and the
nation's founding myths are not just a moral matter but a matter
of racial injustice."
It was late March when the former foundation board members voted to
reverse their promise to share power with descendants. On April 18,
Young and former Board Chair Gene Hickok fired three revered, longtime
staff members - Elizabeth Chew, Montpelier's vice
president and chief curator, Montpelier's chief archaeologist;
and its spokesperson - and suspended two others in what was seen
as retaliation for their highly public support of the MDC.
But after public outrage and critical media coverage, a landmark
resolution on May 16 in favor of the MDC apparently ended the bruising
battle when the Montpelier foundation board voted
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to approve 11 new
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, MDC-nominated members to equally share power in Montpelier's
governance.
READ MORE
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In solidarity,
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