Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 19, 1995 TAG: 9503200066
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARGARET EDDS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: Long
"Baby Adams," says one.
Date of death: Dec. 4, 1931.
Age: 19 days.
The card is followed by those of three tiny soulmates: the unnamed infants of Mary Elizabeth Adams, Purley St. Phillips Adams and Shirley Adams, all stillborn or premature in an era when one out of every 12 infants died before their first birthday, if they were black.
In aged file boxes acquired recently by the Library of Virginia rest thousands of such index cards, listing the occupants of two African-American cemeteries and offering a glimpse into the lives of black Richmonders in an era when segregation was a cradle-to-grave affair.
Now being microfilmed for preservation, the records of the Woodland and Evergreen cemeteries are part of a growing body of African-American archives in a state that as late as 1860 had more black residents than any other.
A few decades ago, material on blacks in major state archives consisted largely of notations about slaves in the records of white plantation owners, said John Kneebone, a historian with the state library.
But since the 1960s, there has been an explosion of interest in records kept by blacks themselves: diaries and travel journals, church papers, business accounts, records of black educational institutions and even cemetery interment cards.
The growth in collections at the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond reflects the change. A decade or so ago, the guide to the society's holdings listed fewer than two dozen African-American sources - most of them papers of slave-owning white families. In a statewide guide published by the University of Virginia Press in 1990, Historical Society entries had grown to 166.
And in a just-published guide, the society includes 570 African-American entries. The list has expanded to include such records as the accounts' book of Prince Henry, a free black barber who worked in Woodstock in the 1840s, and the papers of William Layton, superintendent of a Hanover County trade school during the mid-20th century.
Archivists and librarians have joined in the push to "abandon the great white male approach to history," said Michael Plunkett, who included 1,035 entries in a 1990 work, "Afro-American Sources in Virginia: A Guide to Manuscripts." Now, he said, that number would be much larger.
Preserving a record of ordinary blacks has long been a goal of the Library of Virginia, noted Dennis Hallerman, assistant state archivist. The project involving Woodland and Evergreen cemeteries reflects that mission, he said.
In those two burial grounds, nestled amid industrial warehouses and within earshot of Interstate 64, rest the remains of many of the capital's pre-civil-rights-era black elite, as well as individuals of more modest rank. Across the state, cemeteries such as Calvary in Norfolk and Springwood Burial Park in Roanoke were similar resting grounds for entire communities.
Maggie L. Walker, the first American woman to head a bank, is buried at Evergreen in a small, grassy oasis in a wooded thicket of periwinkle, wild roses and poison ivy.
A few feet away in the underbrush, a statue honoring the mother of former newspaper editor John Mitchell - Walker's rival as head of black society in Richmond at the turn of the century - has toppled from its perch. It rests half-hidden by vines and weeds like an archaeological treasure in a Guatemalan rain forest.
Nearby at Woodland, spired monuments honor the Rev. John Jasper, a fiery minister who was one of 19th-century Richmond's most compelling orators, and William W. Browne, described on his tombstone at his death in 1897 as "the foremost financier of his race."
More recently, tennis great Arthur Ashe chose to be buried at Woodland in tribute both to his mother, who died in 1950, and to the history that the cemetery represents. Ashe's marble tombstone and his mother's smaller granite one are side by side in a tiny plot set off by a wrought-iron fence.
Some Richmonders have proposed moving the bodies to a grander site, but cemetery Superintendent Isaiah Entzminger doubts that will occur. "This is what he wanted," said Entzminger.
The reason, perhaps, is encapsulated in the index cards on file at the Library of Virginia. Their bits of information hint at the condition of ordinary life in a time when segregation forced African-Americans of all economic stripes to spend eternity as a cohesive lot.
Among the cards are those of numerous World Wars I and II veterans. Pvt. Leon E. Bailey, a 33-year-old widower, is listed as having died in Italy on July 4, 1945, two months after German forces in the country surrendered. Bailey's body was returned to Woodland in December 1948.
There are glimpses of love stories. James T. Bradley died in June 1955 at age 67 and was buried at Woodland. His wife, several years his junior, died eight months later, as spouses sometimes do, and was buried beside him.
The index cards, which from the 1920s to the 1940s listed causes of death, also offer a telling look at public health conditions. Folk medical terms such as "cerebral apoplexy" and "congestion of the brain" are cited as terminal. Numerous deaths are attributed to diseases - including pulmonary tuberculosis and whooping cough - now erased or subdued by antibiotics, improved sanitation and childhood inoculations.
There are sober reminders that the violence plaguing Richmond in the 1990s has historical roots. Twenty-one-year-old Mary Anderson died in January 1936 after being "shot while seated in car." Douglass Alexander, 24, died from "homicide by shooting" in March 1934; 21-year-old William Beale died of a gunshot wound in February 1943.
And there are mysteries: What happened, for instance, to Laura Bennett, a 21-year-old who died in 1942 of "natural causes," or Leona Bennett (apparently unrelated), whose cause of death in September 1930 is listed as "unascertainable?" Leona Bennett was 3 years old. "There were a few colored doctors and a few white ones who came out to the colored wards," recalled William M.T. Forrester, an 88-year-old retired physician who was one of about 15 black doctors in Richmond when he began practicing in 1930. At most hospitals and clinics, he said, "it was `whites first.'''
Since that era, much has changed - both in medicine and, more recently, in the emphasis on preserving a record of such memories.
by CNB