Names give us our humanity. They distinguish us from others in our family and connect us to our ancestors. Some names carry a particular meaning. Try imagining people without names. Recently at Richmond Hill we have been exploring the lineage and heritage of the land on which we sit and we have found some names of people enslaved here from the 1740s through 1865. Judy, for example, labored for the Richard Wilkins family in what is now known as the Adams-Taylor house from 1860-1865. By that time, she had already toiled for the Wilkins family for nearly four generations. Judy is said to have died around 90 years old. Writing in 1940 about his boyhood days in the house, Benjamin Harrison Wilkins remembered his beloved “mammy.” She always had one of his mother’s 10 children in her arms, he wrote in War Boy. Benjamin’s younger sister Mary also remembered Judy. In a letter to her children and grandchildren, Mary recalled the morning when Judy carried her to a high porch of the house and pointed off in the distance to the “Bluecoats marching into Richmond.” Perhaps with wonder and praise in her heart, Judy said to the young child, “Mary, always remember that you saw history in the making when you were four years old.”
In her long life of bondage Judy came of age in the Revolutionary era and witnessed the War of 1812 and the Civil War. She was surely affected by game-changing pronouncements including the US Constitution, Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th and 14th amendments abolishing slavery and recognizing citizenship in all human beings. Judy saw African Americans elected for the first time to public office during Reconstruction. Perhaps mercifully, she did not live to witness the painful setbacks, slavery by another name and the era of sharecropping, Jim Crow, terror and more violence. From the tobacco fields of Virginia to the sugar plantations of New Orleans and back again, this time to urban enslavement in Richmond, we can safely conclude that Judy possessed a strength that surpasses understanding.
In the tradition of the College of William and Mary that named its university black history research program The Lemon Project after a man who had been enslaved by the university, Richmond Hill is proud to name its black history research project after Judy. May her ancestral spirit of resilience guide our work forward.
Richmond Hill’s intention with The Judy Project is to learn as much as we can about the people once enslaved here. We want to know who they were, where they came from, what skills they possessed, the composition of their families and separations and disruptions to family life. We want to know how enslaved people resisted and what knowledge, choices and strategies helped them survive. And we would like to discover a descendent community.
To learn these things and to understand the larger context we must necessarily learn about the slave-owners – some of whom had governing roles in public life or were well established merchants. To learn the fuller story, we will travel through the colonial and early national periods into the Civil War era and use historical documents including wills, inventories, census records, slave schedules, death and marriage certificates, deeds of trust, land records, personal letters, newspaper articles, pension files, family stories, maps and anything else we can find that will inform the search.
We invite you to join the Koinonia School of Race & Justice in this journey.