Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, January 18, 1993 TAG: 9301160331
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ROBERT FREIS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
WINDOW ON THE PAST
TODAY we observe Virginia's hybrid holiday, Lee-Jackson-King Day, an unwieldy integration of black, white and shades of Confederate gray.The federal calendar this day honors Martin Luther King Jr. exclusively. In the Old Dominion, the civil rights leader gets back-of-the-bus billing, behind Southern war heroes Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson.
All three men share birthdays within a January week of one another. Any other connection among them is difficult for many Virginians to find.
It seems ironic that Lee and Jackson, who fought for the Confederacy, should be joined with King, who fought to end massive social resistance to racial equality.
Yet if a tie of brotherhood exists that binds these disparate men, you'll find it here, in Roanoke's Gainsboro neighborhood, where an unlikely memorial commemorates a gesture of spiritual humanity.
Behind the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church's chancel is a stained-glass window dedicated to the memory of Jackson, enscribed with his famous last words, "Let us cross over the river and rest in the shade of the trees."
The originator and designer of the window was Dr. Lylburn Liggins Downing, minister of the church for 42 years - virtually from its founding a century ago until his death in 1937.
Downing never met Jackson. The minister was born in Lexington in 1863, on the day after Jackson received his mortal wound during the battle of Chancellorsville.
He knew of Jackson through his parents, who faithfully attended the Sunday School Jackson conducted in antebellum Lexington for slaves and free blacks.
Through modern eyes, Jackson's gesture of allowing blacks the simple privilege of gathering to study the Bible and worship may not seem exceptional. Downing knew, however, that Jackson risked a fine, imprisonment and scorn to teach the Scriptures to a gathering of blacks. At that time, it was illegal for whites to teach reading and writing to blacks.
The window, depicting a pastoral Shenandoah Valley scene with a cabin, tents, soldiers, a river, a grove of trees and the Blue Ridge Mountains beyond, was installed at the church in 1906 during a ceremony attended by the local Confederate veterans group.
Since, it's been an integral part of the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church's history - even surviving a 1959 fire that destroyed the congregation's original building.
Like many other black churches across Virginia, Fifth Avenue Presbyterian is among the community's oldest institutions.
The church - whose family has included a number of prominent Roanokers including local educator Lucy Addison and internationally known tenor William DuPre - celebrated its centennial in November.
Church members held a banquet in which the story of Downing, Jackson and the memorial window was told anew.
"It represents an ideal of what could be and what should be, instead of the reality of what is," said Fifth Avenue Presbyterian's minister, the Rev. Vernie Bolden, of the window.
The story began in 1855, when Jackson, then a member of the faculty of Virginia Military Institute, was asked by the minister of the Lexington Presbyterian Church to conduct a new Sunday School for blacks.
That school was not the first such effort in Lexington, but it grew to be the largest, with as many as 100 attendees on any given Sunday afternoon.
Most of its success was due to Jackson, who recruited students and teachers, raised money, coordinated instruction and led the assembly at the beginning of each session in the singing of "Amazing Grace."
Jackson has come been depicted by history as an oddball, and he had his share of eccentricities. He was gangly, physically awkward, a hypochondriac, a strict disciplinarian but not much of a teacher. His VMI students taunted him and called him "Tom Fool" and "Old Blue Light" for his icy, intense eyes.
Yet Jackson also was a respected member of the community, a church deacon and a bank director who married well, said historian James I. Robertson Jr.
He also was a slave owner. Five of them had domestic responsibilities in Jackson's East Washington Street house and helped him with chores in his small farm and garden. A sixth was a man Jackson allowed to purchase his freedom by working as a hotel waiter. Jackson neither apologized for nor defended the institution of slavery but accepted it, said Robertson. "He believed that slavery was ordained by God for reasons beyond man, that man should not question."
Robertson, who is working on a biography of Jackson, said that kind of intense religious faith was the most dominant factor in his life. Spirituality compensated for the deaths of Jackson's father, mother, sister and stepfather early in life and the deaths of his first wife and two infant children later on.
It also gave him a sense of benevolence and respect for blacks, and made him devoted to the Sunday School even after he went away to war.
It's known that on at least one occasion Jackson rebuffed a threat of prosecution from a Lexington citizen who objected to the school. It's also known that on the day after the Battle of First Manassas - when Jackson rallied the Southern army and received the enduring nickname "Stonewall" - he sent the following unassuming note to his minister:
"In my tent last night, after a fatiguing day's service, I remembered that I had failed to send you my contribution for our colored Sunday School. Enclosed you will find my check . . .
For his military exploits Jackson soon became the most notorious man in America, a latter-day Joshua who lived by the New Testament and fought by the Old Testament. Two years into the war, he got an oft-expressed wish and died on the Sabbath, uttering the phase that became his epitaph.
On that day, Lylburn Downing was a week-old infant. Several years later at war's end he and his family were officially emancipated. He was among the first black students to attend public school in Lexington.
Downing also continued to attend the Sunday School class begun by Jackson, and credited that experience with leading him to the ministry.
In 1895, fresh from theological studies, Downing came to Roanoke and assumed the pastorate of a mission of seven members, which he soon built into the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church.
Downing spent his adult life here as an active participant in religious and civic affairs. Yet he wasn't forgotten in Lexington. In 1927, a school was named in his honor there and the name has endured to the present day, as white and black students pass by his portrait daily at Lylburn L. Downing Middle School.
The church's memorial window to Jackson has, over the years, caused a variety of reactions from Fifth Avenue Presbyterian's congregation, said Bolden. Some older members think more of Downing than Jackson when they view the window. Some have a sense of "wonderment" about why a black church would have such a memorial.
"And there are some who would not think that was a particularly significant achievement, out of a time when African-Americans were in the bowels of slavery," he said.
Bolden, who has spent much of his career serving churches in the North, is himself the grandson of a slave. He says the Jackson memorial window struck him as curious when he first arrived at Fifth Avenue Presbyterian in 1991.
Bolden has also taught collegiate history and also recalls the church he served in Springfield, Mass., that had a Bible donated before the Civil War by Jackson's spiritual alter-ego, John Brown. It's no small coincidence that Jackson commanded a unit of VMI cadets at Brown's 1859 hanging in Charles Town, W.Va.
Bolden said symbols of the Southern cause and the institution of slavery remain "a point of considerable sensitivity" in the black community.
"African-Americans are very sensitive to some of the overflow from the Civil War, such as the Confederate flag and other symbols. Due to the brutality and the extensiveness of slavery, sensitivity is to be expected."
The practice of celebrating Lee, Jackson and King on the same day is also an issue in the black community, said Bolden.
"In terms of political reality, it's understandable. One wonders if that tends to dilute the recognition of all three."
Robertson agrees. "A holiday honoring three men is crowded, regardless of who they are," he said.
Ted DeLaney, a native Lexingtonian and, as a visiting history professor, one of the few black faculty members at Washington & Lee University, calls the holiday's triad a "contradiction" and "deplorable."
"I don't think it's a good compromise at all. Martin Luther King transcends a regional focus. He is the most important black hero this country has produced. Only in Virginia would something like this happen."
Still, to Robertson, the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church's memorial to Jackson is "the most fitting thing I know of" to recognize this day. "It seems like such a natural, moving rallying point."
If nothing else, the memorial illustrates that, as Bolden said, "We still have a ways to go in terms of a real union."