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For Our Own Good
BY DIANNE SWANN-WRIGHT EDITED BY CAROLYN WILKERSON BELL
“Without African American
civic and social groups,
Central Virginia would have
been a very different place,”
writes Dianne Swann-Wright, guest curator at Lynchburg’s Legacy Museum. In a community- wide effort to illustrate this point, dozens of citizens scoured attics, interviewed elders, and lent their own possessions for a year-long exhibit at the nine- year-old museum of local African American history, located at Fourth and Monroe streets in historic Tinbridge Hill.
In addition to the collectors’ work, research
in burial records, in “Negro” directories, and in other documentary sources yielded the names of scores of African American organizations active in Central Virginia from the mid-nineteenth century until the 1980s. Many of these organizations have disappeared, but some continue to exist, enriching the lives of local African Americans and at the same time strengthening the larger community.
The following pages preserve the text and a selection of images and artifacts from For Our Own Good: African American Civic and Social Groups in Central Virginia. The exhibit opened at the Legacy Museum of African American History in June of 2008 and will close on May 29, 2009.
Dianne Swann-Wright is director and founding curator of the Frederick Douglass-Isaac Myers Maritime Park in Baltimore and guest curator at the Legacy Museum of African American History in Lynchburg.
Carolyn Wilkerson Bell retired three years ago as Susan Duval Adams Professor of English at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College. She is a member of the Legacy Museum board of directors.
ABOVE IMAGE
Hill City Teachers Association,
Lynchburg, 1963
Photo gift of Alma Irvine
SPRING/SUMMER 2009 