ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, May 22, 1996 TAG: 9605220012
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: ROBERT FREIS STAFF WRITER
Richard B. Dickenson wants to illuminate the shadows that have concealed the folk histories of many black Montgomery County residents.
The roots of their family trees run deep, and Dickenson spent the past week performing historical excavation work by meeting with families, combing through libraries and visiting cemeteries.
His goal is to recapture lost generations in a genealogical book titled, "Appalachian Black Families During Reconstruction."
"A goodly heritage," he calls this story of perseverance and fortitude.
The idea of writing such a book germinated 20 years ago when Dickenson served on Virginia Tech's faculty. He's already published a genealogical book about free blacks that lived in Montgomery County before the Civil War.
Dickenson now lives in New York City and works as the official historian for the Borough of Staten Island. He's writing and financing the new book as both a gift for fellow African-Americans and an invitation to discover their heritage.
Blacks have a strong oral tradition of passing along ancestral stories, he said. "The story lives on with the people that talk about it. But it didn't go out into the wider community."
African-American history wasn't recognized as important during the era of Jim Crow discrimination, he said. Reconstruction, the time when Dickenson's current book begins, was a tumultuous period of American history that marked the Civil War's end and the beginning of modern black history.
It was a painful time for many Southerners, Dickenson said, and one they've preferred to forget.
Even though promises of freedom for emancipated ex-slaves were unfulfilled, the period from 1865-1877 was the first time many of these new citizens gained the status of being listed in legal records.
For example, a census of black Montgomery County residents were recorded for the first time in 1865. Also, in 1867 a marriage register listed the names of black couples. Many blacks also became landowners during Reconstruction and got the right to sue in court.
These documentary records - dry as dust to most people - are the genealogist's "gold mine," Dickenson said. "I'm surprised it hasn't been done before."
In Montgomery County, he said, most of the records dating from Reconstruction that affected blacks have been preserved. That's not always the rule in other places, where such lists have been lost or destroyed.
The accessibility of this information has much to do with the local impact of the Freedmen's Bureau, a government agency created in 1865 to incorporate blacks into the fabric of the reunited nation.
As a social experiment, The Freedmen's Bureau had a spotty record. However, in Montgomery County, it was unusually effective, mostly due to the work of Charles Schaeffer.
Schaeffer was a former Union army officer and local Freedmen's Bureau head who founded black schools and churches, including the one that still bears his name, Schaeffer Memorial Baptist Church in Christiansburg.
Most of the approximately 1,200 blacks who lived in Montgomery County after the war worked as laborers or tenant farmers. Access to land ownership was a key to economic viability, and a number of blacks were able to obtain property.
Sometimes this property came by donation from white ex-slave holders. This was the case for the black families who occupied Wake Forest, a tract separated from the extensive Kentland plantation in northwest Montgomery County.
At one time the county had a number of African-American communities. Several have disappeared, but Wake Forest and others remain, along with the descendants of its original occupants.
Dickenson plans to dedicate his book to the memory of Samuel H. Clark, a native of Vicker who headed a national railroad union that successfully advocated equal rights for black workers. One of Clark's daughters married the country's first black admiral.
Clark's family story is both extraordinary and typical, Dickenson said. As a reward for "faithful service," the Taylor family gave Clark's ancestors a tract of land on Crab Creek. There they build a small school, worked diligently over time and prospered.
Christiansburg Institute, the longtime black school that closed in the 1960s, is another example of how local African-Americans pulled themselves up by the bootstraps, Dickenson said.
Dickenson helped to get both the Schaeffer Memorial Baptist Church and the adjacent Hill School, founded in the 1880s to educate blacks, designated as National Historical Landmarks in 1979.
During his time at Tech in the 1970s, Dickenson found what he called "a lack of awareness of the local black heritage." That made newly arrived blacks feel isolated and worked against diversity at Virginia Tech, he said.
His work on behalf of the historic landmarks and his books are meant to correct that imbalance. Perhaps, too, when his book comes out (by the end of 1996, he hopes) both blacks and whites will use the information to learn about their community.
"We have something," he said, forming a cup with his hands.
LENGTH: Medium: 96 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ALAN KIM/Staff. 1. Richard Dickenson uses resources atby CNBVirginia Tech's Special Collections department. 2. Index cards hold
information Dickenson has collected. color.