Examining the Past to Shape a Brighter Future

For the second summer in a row, a diverse group of several dozen people from Charlottesville embarked on an eight-day journey by bus through the South. Together, they toured historical sites significant to the ongoing struggle for racial justice, including the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. Jalane Schmidt, director of the Memory Project and professor of religious studies at UVA, described the unique experience of the tour.

“You have the provost from UVA sitting beside someone who lives in public housing, or a public school teacher talking with a UVA professor. These conversations don’t always happen in our everyday lives, but since we’ve visited these sites together, we are learning from each other. It’s a deep kind of learning, meaningful and life changing.”

A program of the Karsh Institute of Democracy, the Memory Project grapples with questions of how we think about the past and how we use memory to shape the future—and sponsors educational programs and public events that engage memory to create a more just and democratic society. Planned in partnership with the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, the Civil Rights tour is offered to public school teachers, residents of public housing, and racial justice activists at no cost, as well as UVA students, scholars, and affiliates.

Woman reading information from museum exhibit

Civil rights tour attendees visited the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in Jackson, Mississippi.

The Memory Project’s groundbreaking work has attracted the attention of prominent philanthropic institutions such as the Ford Foundation, whose mission is “to reduce poverty and injustice, strengthen democratic values, promote international cooperation, and advance human achievement.”

“We cannot talk about the history of America without acknowledging the role that slavery has played, and how its legacy persists to this day,” said foundation president Darren Walker. “Ford Foundation is proud to support the Memory Project to help foster discussion and reflection around African American historical experiences, keeping these stories alive so we can learn from the past to create a brighter future.”

Through a generous grant made in 2021, the Ford Foundation is supporting not only the Civil Rights tour, but initiatives including research into the sales of enslaved people in Charlottesville and the writing of a children’s book called “Isabella Gibbons: Through Her Eyes.” The book tells the story of Isabella Gibbons, a remarkable woman who was an enslaved cook at UVA. She was literate, however, and after emancipation became a teacher in the Freedmen’s School in Charlottesville. The illustrated children’s book is being distributed to public schools for libraries and classroom teaching to foster students’ knowledge of local history.

With the support of Ford and other foundations and donors, the Memory Project is shedding light on Charlottesville’s rich yet complicated history. By engaging community members—many of whom are descendants of enslaved people—the project seeks to determine how this history is memorialized, as other sites of racial strife have been. Educating public school teachers and students, the project disseminates knowledge widely to future generations of leaders, empowering them to build a more equitable community.

Ford Foundation is proud to support the Memory Project to help foster discussion and reflection around African American historical experiences, keeping these stories alive so we can learn from the past to create a brighter future.

–Darren Walker

The benefits are already far-reaching, but the Equity Center’s goal is to examine the outcomes of Starr Hill Pathways to serve many more students in the region and beyond. “We’re trying to discover what the barriers are for students from first-generation families and students from low wealth so that we can then inform division-level policy,” said Allen.

This research mission is funded by the William T. Grant Foundation. Katrina J. Debnam, associate professor in the School of Education and Human Development, advises the program on research methodology. The funding supports the work of two junior faculty: Chris Chang-Bacon, who is looking at multilingual tutoring and its impacts on students who are English language learners, and Channing Mathews, who studies the self-efficacy of students of color in STEM. Faculty research efforts are supported and coordinated by the Equity Center’s Director of Equitable Analysis Michele Claibourn and Educational Equity Data Scientists Nina Schoonover and Asha Muralidharan.

The program has a data protocol with families of participants and a data-sharing agreement with Charlottesville City Schools and Albemarle County Public Schools. “That allows us to do two things,” said Allen. “One is continuous improvement as our program is developing: we can make sure that we’re targeting students with the right intervention. We can help advocate in different classes. The other piece is on the longitudinal side—a comparative study that looks at our set of kids and compares them with students with the same demographics in the area that don’t have the intervention.”

Collage of photos from the Civil Rights tour.

“How can UVA close the gap between who we are and who we want to be?” Schmidt asked. “The Ford funding helps us do what UVA’s ‘Great and Good’ strategic plan articulates—to partner with local institutions, to provide accessible education opportunities, and to be a good neighbor to the community. UVA can also offer a template for other communities that have this kind of history.”

Gillet Rosenblith, a postdoctoral student who earned her doctorate in history from UVA, is leading a group of graduate students in unearthing the names and histories of the enslaved people sold in Charlottesville by combing through courthouse records. Meeting regularly with community groups like the Descendants of Enslaved Communities at UVA, the researchers hope to not only humanize the people who were bought and sold but discover how best to educate the public. This research is a response to community engagement that began with 2016’s Blue Ribbon Commission, when the Charlottesville City Council approved plans to not only remove Confederate statues, but to research and memorialize this overlooked aspect of local history.

“Having a major foundation’s support gives researchers, many of whom are marginalized themselves, the freedom to explore thorny topics like race and enslavement,” Rosenblith said. “Through memorialization, we can not only keep enslaved people’s stories alive but change the physical landscape of Charlottesville so that walking through Court Square, you are confronted with the reality of this history and its significance. It creates conversations about things we need to deal with today in terms of racial injustice and informs how we move forward as a city.”

With a vast array of scholars, community partners, and philanthropic institutions like the Ford Foundation supporting its work, the Memory Project places Charlottesville and the University of Virginia at the forefront of a movement to examine the past and forge a more equitable, democratic, and ethical future.