Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 18, 1993 TAG: 9304180175
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
A LONG HISTORY . . . AND A LONG MEMORY
Franklin County boasts more black national heroes than Booker T. Washington.Adam Clayton Powell Sr. - father of the late Harlem congressman and longtime minister of Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church, the one his son later pastored, too - was born in a stone-chimneyed slave cabin still standing near Hales Ford. It's just down the road from Washington's birthplace.
Retired Roanoke surgeon Dr. Warren Moorman, who owns the cabin, invited Adam Clayton Powell Jr. down to see it when Powell first went to Congress. Powell replied that he wasn't interested.
The log tobacco barns still scattered around the county - sometimes sitting incongruously next to new commercial developments - tell much of the story of how black people came to Franklin. Many were brought here to work on tobacco farms.
Franklin County's 6,400 slaves and 100 free blacks comprised about a third of the population in 1860.
The tobacco farms they worked on, however, were not the mighty plantations of Tidewater Virginia. They were smaller. Three-quarters of county slaveholders in 1860 owned 10 or fewer slaves. Hundreds had only one or two.
In a controversial 1978 essay, former Ferrum College history professor Andrew Baskin suggested that the low ratio of slave to master softened race relations in Franklin County.
"By being around whites to such an extent," he wrote, "the blacks surrendered much of their heritage, especially when compared to slaves on larger plantations. The majority of blacks in Bedford and Franklin [counties] worked with whites, ate near whites, and slept near whites. This perverted integration produced docile and submissive individuals who had to accept the situation to survive."
Slaves on big plantations, in their own quarters away from whites, could retain their African heritage more easily, Baskin, now a history professor at Kentucky's Berea College, said in a recent interview. "It's easier to maintain your identity and your culture if you are by yourself."
Fifteen percent of the county's slaves were listed as "mulattoes" in 1860, and Baskin argued that sexual intimacy between blacks and whites could also have led to a lack of black militancy in the late 19th century.
Such arguments still gall black county residents.
Charles Edwards Sr., the father of Linda White, the new Franklin County NAACP president, knows a lot about black history in the county, too.
Edwards, 80, a county School Board member until a few years ago, comes from a long line of black Franklin County farmers - many of them free blacks in the days of slavery. One of them was Pitchgrove Fry, a tobacco roller who owned land in 1860.
Edwards and his family say many black Franklin County families were strong and independent.
Robin Neamo-Parker, a black Roanoke teacher who grew up in Franklin County, said that in some places black farmers owned more land than neighboring whites. "I remember my mother telling me that whites came to my grandfather and asked him to go to court for them, because he had a power base."
Charles Edwards did custodial work for 35 years, but he had a power base, too.
He refused to sharecrop for whites, and he forbade his children to as well. Black children who picked tobacco for whites were kept out of school until late fall, when the crop was in, White said. Edwards wouldn't have it. Eight of his 10 children went on to college.
Edwards had a long memory. Years after stores took down their "whites-only" signs, he refused to patronize them. About 20 years ago, he saw a sign in a filling station about Klan meetings. Edwards never bought his gas there again.
"Most of the people around here treated me pretty fair," he said, "but they know I won't take no stuff."
Years ago, he and his white neighbors would go to each other's farms to thresh wheat, then share a meal. Whites were served first, even at black homes.
At his house, Edwards insisted that blacks and whites eat together. "I would never sit nobody down at my table before myself."
The year after he served the races simultaneously, he said, whites recalled what they saw as his haughty disregard for them and refused to help him with his wheat. Edwards bought a combine and threshed it himself.