2021 Special History Award
The Alexandria Historical Society presented a Special Award to the Alexandria African American Heritage Trail Committee at the city’s 2021 virtual event commemorating Juneteenth. The award recognized the committee for research on and contributions to the public’s awareness of the history of Alexandria’s African American community covering more than 250 years. Combining new research findings with the insights from many oral history interviews of the city’s long-time African American residents and previous work by historians and archaeologists, the committee envisions a network of trails that highlights the complexity of the African American experience in Alexandria as it changed through time.
Stops on the North Waterfront Route, published on the city’s website as the first section of the trail and available on our hand-held devices, shed light on diverse aspects of the city’s African American history, including:
Participation in the horrific transatlantic and domestic trafficking of enslaved people in the 18th and early 19th centuries;
Forced labor of enslaved people who contributed to the wealth of their enslavers and the town by rolling hogsheads of tobacco to the river and loading them onto ships and by providing the workforce for the town’s infrastructure, such as the 18th-century landfilling activities that made early Alexandria an international port and the early 19th-century construction of the Alexandria Canal;
Seasonal employment of up to 600 free and enslaved people in the 19th-century fishing industry, cleaning and salting hundreds of thousands of fish from March to May, a time of hard work and financial reward;
Hardship that ensued as a result of the 1847 retrocession of Alexandria from the District of Columbia to the Commonwealth of Virginia where more restrictive and oppressive laws stripped free African Americans of many of the rights that they had previously held in the federal city, such as access to education and freedom of assembly;
Development and expansion of African American neighborhoods during the Civil War as self-emancipated Blacks in search of freedom made their way to Alexandria, a city controlled by the Union Army, where opportunities existed for some to contribute to the war effort;
Employment in some of the more dangerous positions in early 20th -century industries, such as fertilizer companies, where African Americans eventually joined labor unions that helped them earn salary increases, and glass manufacturers, and where journalists highlighted the abuses of child labor;
Desegregation of the defense industry by a 1941 executive order manifested in the hiring of African Americans as machinists at the Torpedo Factory followed by continued employment of Blacks when the federal government began to use the facility for the storage, processing, and return of records captured during World War II.
Many of the stories featured at the trail stops have their roots in decades of research and archaeological study found in the files and site reports on shelves at the Alexandria Archaeology Museum. The publication of the trail on the city website makes the information about Alexandria’s African American heritage extremely accessible to the public, not only as a virtual tour from our homes and offices, and lately from the confinement of our pandemic locations, but also as our individual walking tour guide on our hand-held devices.
As expressed by Carlton A. Funn, a native Alexandrian, Parker Gray alumnus, and Alexandria public school teacher, “In order to understand today and tomorrow, you have to understand yesterday.” Funn’s words highlight the essence and importance of the African American Heritage Trail to the City of Alexandria and to all who seek to understand the history of the African American experience, its role in shaping the present, and the path forward to a richer, more robust cultural understanding. Although the committee began to meet in 2017, the trail takes on added significance as a bridge to a more inclusive public understanding of African American history as our nation has struggled to confront the on-going realities of police brutality over the past year.
The work of the committee now allows us to hold this history in our hands as we walk along Alexandria’s waterfront. Recognition and thanks go out to the Office of Historic Alexandria for its support, to Audrey Davis, Eleanor Breen and Ben Skolnik, staff members of Alexandria Black History Museum and Alexandria Archaeology, who worked with the committee, and especially to past and present members of the committee (Councilman John Chapman, Susan Cohen, Gwen Day-Fuller, Indy McCall, Maddy McCoy, Chair Krystyn Moon, McArthur Myers and Ted Pulliam) whose dedication and hard work have begun to make the full trail a reality.
NOTES:
The South Waterfront Route of the Alexandria African American Heritage Trail was officially launched in February 2023.
Alexandria Archaeology offers a number of printed and online Self-Guided Tours including:
Walking Tours of Historic Old Town
Walking Tours of African American Historic Sites
Walking Tours of Civil War & War of 1812 Sites
Walking Tours of Del Ray
Walking Tours of Women's History
Bike Tours
American Heritage Trail
