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The Legacy Museum of African American History, at the intersection of Fourth and Monroe Streets, on opening day, June 25, 2000.
Public accommodations made clear who was welcome.
car, likewise pre-dates the Civil War.
The first part of “Deep in My Heart” explores the legal basis
for the racially discriminatory practices that prevailed between 1865 and 1954. The exhibit shows how the local political climate in the decades following the Civil War shaped the civic and cultural lives of black and white Central Virginians; how local custom
subject of the upcoming exhibit at the Legacy Museum of African American History. Located at 403 Monroe Street in Lynchburg, the Museum also includes in its mis- sion the counties of Amherst, Appomattox, Bedford, and Campbell.
The Jim Crow exhibit is
being supported by grants from the Virginia Foundation for
the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the City of Lynchburg, and
by the efforts of dozens of vol- unteers. The exhibit, which will open to the public on Sunday, June 26, 2005, is Part One of a pair of exhibits called “Deep in My Heart: The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow in Central Virginia, 1865-1975.” Part Two, on Central Virginia’s Civil Rights Movement, will begin in June of 2006.
The exhibit’s title quotes the song many consider the anthem
of the Civil Rights Movement. “We Shall Overcome” was based on Charles Tindley’s 1900 gospel song “I’ll Overcome Some Day.” The term “Jim Crow,” firmly established by 1900 as a reference to racial segregation, seems to have origi- nated with the performances of a
white minstrel known as Thomas “Daddy” Rice, who, in the decades before the Civil War, called one of his routines “Jump Jim Crow.” Rice performed in blackface to ridicule African Americans, drawing laugh- ter from his audiences, and by the middle of the nineteenth century “Jim Crow” had become current
in popular culture as a derogatory term used by whites to refer to blacks. The term “Jim Crow car,” for a racially segregated railroad
Ivy Hill School, Amherst County, c. 1920.
Spring/Summer 2005 13
COURTESY OF TED TREVEY AND THE LEGACY MUSEUM
COURTESY OF NANCY MARION
COURTESY OF JOHN ALBERTSON AND THE LEGACY MUSEUM