I could be wrong (and hope that I am) but the guess here is that those about to read this narrative are probably unfamiliar with the name Willis McGlascow Carter. But no worry since until recently, neither did I although he spent most of his life as a teacher, newspaper editor and activist in Staunton, Virginia, which just happens to be my hometown.
Now as happenstance would have it, a week before I planned to visit Staunton, my good friend Chris, a Waynesboro, VA historian, researcher and storyteller, sent me the book, “From Slavery to Statesman, The Life, Editor and Civil Rights Activist Willis M. Carter of Virginia,” by Robert Heinrich and Deborah Harding. Oh my, what a book.
Now before I say anything more about the book, understand that the old school dude that I am, when it comes to books, I guess that I’m one in a dying breed of literary troglodytes who still prefer the touch and feel of – and occasional drips of spilled coffee on – books I read. That was the case when I read the Willis Carter in its entirety, including plowing through its pages of foot notes and bibliography, before going home. Suddenly my trip home took on a level of significance that I never could have imagined in my wildest dreams.
But first some context, a brief history.
Willis Carter was born a slave on a plantation belonging to Ann Goodloe at her home located at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains near Afton in Albemarle County, Virginia, a home built with bricks made by slaves. In the back of her house was a slave cabin where Willis was born on September 3, 1852. His father Samuel Carter was a slave at an adjacent plantation. Samuel was also one of the slaves involved in the construction of the nearby Blue Ridge Railroad tunnel. When Ann Goodloe died in 1860, three years before the Emancipation Proclamation that freed slaves – and although Carter wrote fondly about how he was treated by the Goodloe family – mysteriously she left no will nor did she free any of her slaves including Willis Carter.
After working several different jobs in Virginia, West Virginia and Newport, Rhode Island, Carter eventually achieved a formal education at the Wayland Seminary (which eventually became Virginia Union University) in Washington, D.C., before returning to Staunton and becoming a teacher, principal, newspaper editor, statesman and political activist highly respected for his work to promote African American political rights and educational opportunities. To preserve school funding and voting rights, Carter was the chairman of a select group of nine men elected to represent Black Virginians at the 1901-1902 Constitutional Convention in Richmond.
But before I say more about that recent trip, I should also mention that Staunton is the birthplace of Woodrow Wilson, the 28th president of the United States who, during his first year as president, authorized the imposition of segregation inside the federal bureaucracy. And if that wasn’t enough, he authorized showing the controversial film, “Birth of a Nation,” a 1915 fictional narrative based on the novel The Clansman by Thomas Dixon Jr. that blends fact and fiction with a highly inaccurate and racist portrayal of the Civil War and Reconstruction eras, glorifying the Ku Klux Klan and distorting the history of Black people in the South. (On a personal level, my late grandfather Mr. James Strother was a footman on the carriage during the homecoming for Wilson in 1912.)
Although Wilson was born in 1856 and Carter was born in Virginia in 1852, there’s no evidence that they ever crossed paths in Staunton though Carter’s newspaper office on 14 Frederick Street in Staunton was a 20-minute walk to Wilson’s birthplace on Coalter Street.
In response to the fatal race riot in 1883 in Danville and, a decade later, the lynching of a Black man in Roanoke, Virginia, Willis Carter was thrust into a leadership role in politics at the state and local levels when he helped organize 1500 Staunton African Americans to rally in response to the racial atrocities. He spoke to the crowd from the pulpit of Augusta Street Methodist Episcopal Church, the place where I was baptized decades later.
While the 1899 Washington Bee described Willis Carter as “one of the best-known citizens of Virginia” Carter’s work and contributions were basically forgotten in the century following his death.
Turning now to my recent trip to Staunton.
With the book on Willis Carter in my briefcase peppered with yellow highlights and handwritten notes, it dawned on me the magnitude of what I was about to experience as I traveled up North Augusta and Nelson Streets where Carter once lived hoping that I could locate the places he once lived in if in fact they remained.
I stopped and stared at the Augusta Street Methodist church; the one Willis Carter spoke eloquently from the pulpit to hundreds of Black Stauntonians protesting horrific acts of racial turmoil during those times.
I drove up Augusta Street to Mt. Zion Baptist church where many of the important personal events in Carter’s personal and political life occurred.
Before leaving Staunton, I snapped pictures of both churches, grabbed a pastrami sandwich at a deli on Beverly Street and took one last trip through town and concluded with two emotionally touching moments that left an indelible impression on me.
First was my sitting on the grass next to Carter’s gravesite in Fairview Cemetery with one arm encircling his monument with a realization that six feet below me were the remains of a slave turned statesman buried there over a century ago.
After a few minutes on the ground, my buddy Zack Lewis extended his hand to help me up from the ground, I drove slowly out of the cemetery while scanning the scores of granite headstones and with it a jarring reminder that on their shoulders I stand today.
My second touching moment was during a visit with Chris Wilmott and Walter Brown – creators of the “Standing on Their Shoulders” African American history site – was holding in my hand at my friend Jennifer Vickers’ kitchen table in her home on West Johnson Street a laminated copy of the only surviving copy of Willis Carter’s newspaper, the Staunton Tribune (below). She thrust it my way and – in a moment that I’ll never forget – I held it in my hands like I would hold a precious newborn baby.
And hour later, I was back on Interstate 64 heading east over Afton Mountain deep in thought about the story of Willis Carter and the institution of slavery that was an undeniable reality in and around the place of my birth.
At the rest stop on Afton Mountain, I thought about the large number of slaves who were hired out by their owners for the dangerously backbreaking work building the Blue Ridge Tunnel not far from where I stood overlooking miles of beautiful countryside in Nelson County.
As I drove off the rest stop and back onto Interstate 64, I thought about my experience in Staunton, what I saw but cannot unsee, feel but cannot unfeel, touch but cannot untouch.
My thoughts then turned to thoughts about efforts nowadays to push uncomfortably sordid aspects of our history down and bury it at the advice of powers to be who tell us that the past is the past and we should just “get over it.”
Seriously? “Get over it?” Uh, uh, no thanks, no way y’all!
Well, I’ll respond to those who want to diss our history with this quote from a character in Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Novel, Beloved:
“That which dies badly, never sleeps peacefully. That which dies badly will return to bedevil the living.”
In other words readers, that which is dead ……ain’t necessarily gone!
Terry Howard is an award-winning writer, a contributing writer with the Chattanooga News Chronicle, The American Diversity Report, The Douglas County Sentinel, Blackmarket.com, recipient of the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Leadership Award, and third place winner of the Georgia Press Award.