Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 9, 1992 TAG: 9202070183
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: MELANIE S. HATTER NEW RIVER VALLEY BUREAU
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Long
THREADS OF HISTORY
Michael Cooke, 40, always asks older folks about the old days. It comes with the territory of being a historian.While talking to Hunter Bell, who lived in Blacksburg during the 1950s until a recent move to Lynchburg, Cooke just had to ask him what the town was like back then.
Listening to Bell, "it dawned on me there was much more here than meets the eye."
Cooke, an associate professor of history at Virginia Tech, has written an article about the history of race relations in Montgomery County. It will be published in the March issue of the Journal of the Appalachian Studies Association.
He moved to Blacksburg seven years ago as a visiting professor. He had been a teacher in South Carolina for about a year. After two years at Tech, he was given a permanent position.
Cooke's interest in history started as a youngster around age 10 when his grandfather would tell him stories of slavery and reconstruction, he said. His grandparents were the first generation of non-slaves.
"I was always fascinated. . . . I can't remember many things from then," he said. But he'll never forget the story of how his family came up with the name Cooke. His great-grandparents, freed from slavery, adopted the name from a funeral home in Raleigh, N.C., Cooke said. "That's etched in my memory."
He has always written local histories, he said, and has published or soon-to-be published works on issues in his native Washington, D.C., and in South Carolina.
It wasn't until some years after talking to Bell that he decided to write an article about blacks in rural Montgomery County from 1870 to today.
He had been asked to join the Concerned Citizens for the Preservation of Nellies Cave Community and to write a history of the community for a panel presentation to the Appalachian Studies Association last year in Kentucky.
Cooke decided to go one step further and encompass the whole county.
A community fighting to maintain its heritage is not unique, he said. There are other communities that are losing or have lost their identities, such as Wake Forest and New Town, now a "defunct black community," he said.
But "Nellies Cave was a catalyst for me. I wanted to do something with more significance to the county," he said.
His inspiration to start was his barber, Charles Sonny Johnson of New Image in Blacksburg. Again, Cooke often talked with Johnson about the old days. Johnson was able to give him names of local folks to talk to and "it just kind of snowballed," Cooke said.
He was amazed at the response.
With every interview, he asked for more names and about 80 percent of all the people he contacted were willing to talk. It was like letting a genie out of the bottle, he said.
"Black people tend to be more oral," and they had the opportunity to let go of stories they had kept bottled up inside for years, he said.
"These people's minds were incredible," he said. They gave him times and dates that matched information he checked in the courthouse.
"A treasure lode has already been lost in understanding the nature of race relations in the region, but a great deal can be salvaged from interviewing the elders of black Appalachia," Cooke wrote.
One elderly person Cooke found fascinating was Leola Burford. She is nearly 100 and is the oldest living graduate of the Christiansburg Industrial Institute, the first black high school in Southwest Virginia. She met Booker T. Washington in the early 1900s and told Cooke that he toured the area and sent fellow educators to administer the school and teach.
Cooke recounts the period after slavery when freed blacks started as laborers and tenant farmers. Few social and economic gains were made by most blacks, but some obtained land throughout Montgomery County, including the Wake Forest area near the New River, Cooke said.
The black population at its peak was 25 percent in 1880. Over the years, that number has dwindled to about 4 percent. At the turn of the century, many blacks moved away in search of work.
However, Cooke believes that number will remain stable because of people like himself moving into the area.
"The universities have been instrumental in keeping the black population steady."
Those who stayed in Southwest Virginia found work on the railroad or in the coal mines. Many continued to move away in search of racial equality in economic and professional opportunities.
Homer Sherman, 73, of Wake Forest told Cooke he left when the mines closed in the mid-50s. His white counterparts easily found jobs in the area but he headed to Detroit in search of work, returning to his home community to retire, Cooke said.
Cooke said he was surprised to learn to what extent the wave of civil rights that was sweeping across the country touched Southwest Virginia in the 1950s. "After the Brown [vs. Board of Education] decision of 1954, native-born blacks and newcomers to the area asserted themselves and did much to help dismantle the last vestiges of Jim Crow," Cooke wrote. "Perhaps, no incident publicly signaled a change in the status quo as the Archie Richmond incident."
The Rev. Archie Richmond, pastor of the St. Paul AME Church of Blacksburg, took church members to picnic in the white section of Carter Wayside Park in Wythe County, instead of to the "untidy black section."
On Aug. 21, 1955, Richmond, principal of a black elementary school in Christiansburg, was arrested.
The Montgomery County School Board suspended him and began proceedings to fire him. However, Richmond's case was dismissed in the Wythe County court. "In all likelihood, the judge wanted to avoid adverse publicity," Cooke said.
Richmond was reinstated as principal at Friends Elementary School after pressure from black ministers and the black PTA.
The incident "acted as a catalyst to accelerate the desegregation efforts in the county," Cooke said.
In spite of past efforts for racial equality, the battle must be a continuous effort, he said.
"Nellies Cave will not be the last battle between the forces of reaction and democracy," Cooke said referring to the pending lawsuit by Nellies Cave community against the county charging racial discrimination.