Scholars from the Center for Mason Legacies (CML) closed out Black History Month 2025 with a lively showing of standout research projects conducted in the past year. CML affiliate faculty member LaNitra Berger, who directs African and African American Studies, opened the program by noting that this third annual CML symposium coincides with the tenth anniversary of CML’s original project, investigating the Enslaved Children of George Mason. As in that undertaking, symposium presenters included both graduate students and an undergraduate student, reflecting the center’s commitment to shaping research and pedagogy at all levels of teaching. Their varied projects addressed narratives and documents spanning parts of four centuries of our region's history.
The symposium served as a fitting close to Black History Month, Berger noted. "By creating a 'mentoring web' of faculty, graduate and undergraduate students who work together to engage in rigorous academic study of the Black experience in Northern Virginia—and why that matters today," she explained. "BLND is creating a new generation of scholars who will carry forward Dr. Carter G. Woodson's call for us 'to begin with life as we find it and make it better.'"
Shemika Curvey, an integrative studies major, whose work featured in two of the morning’s presentations, came to the dais first with an exploration of Black naming and identity at the margins of an all-pervasive slave system, titled “What’s in a Name? Bethia Fairfax and Sarah Ambrose: Free Women of Color in 19th Century Fairfax County, Virginia.” Curvey, a degree candidate in the School of Integrative Studies’ Bachelor's/Accelerated Masters program and a CML graduate research assistant, described how her research quickly diverged from her original questions, about how a Black family came to be called Fairfax, and drew her to new inquiries about the use of names as a form of power and resistance. Examining Bethia’s relationship to another free woman of color, Sarah Ambrose, led Curvey to questions about the function of “fictive kinship” in relations among Black people in a slave society. In keeping with traditions of Black feminist scholarship, she closed her presentation with a work of art. Her original poem about Bethia, also known as Betsey, ended with the lines, “Being found is not her objective./Freedom is.”
Andrew Snowman, a history major, delivered the second paper, which he has also been selected to present this month at the 2025 Virginia Forum. “Foundations of Black Mistrust: An Exploration of White Policing of Black Bodies in Fairfax County,” relates several incidents of anti-Black aggression following chronologically from vigilante neighborhood attacks and more formalized slave-patrol actions in the antebellum era to incidents of mid-twentieth brutality by uniformed police officers. He tracks the institutionalization of county policing from onetime slave patrols into, after the Civil War, officially appointed constables, and the eventual creation, in 1940, of a county-supported police department. The study required reviewing decades of policing records, both man-hours and maps, at the county circuit court’s Historic Records Archive, where Snowman also served as an intern. These data he cross-referenced with local race demographics, yielding the insight that slave-patrol activities intensified from 1810 to 1830, paralleling a surge in the county’s Black numbers, which drew nearly even with the local White population.
Thomas Seabrook, a graduate research assistant in the Department of History and Art History, brought the discussion back to the eighteenth century in his paper on the ways that personal details of sparsely documented Black lives could be pulled from seemingly dry family business records. Seabrook is a leading member of the team assembling a rich database from the Mason Family account books kept by nephews of George Mason IV, held in University Libraries' special collections. Read properly, even this “document made by White people for White people" can yield clues about the stories and experiences of free and enslaved Black people who labored for or did business with the family. His long-running work on the project as a CML graduate research assistant informed his symposium paper, “Underpinning the Community: African American History Revealed in the Mason Family Manuscript Account Book.” Seabrook explained how, over several years, he and fellow editors have teased out elusive biographies by cross-referencing log book entries with information from county archives and other historical records. The work also offers illustrations of slavery's primacy in Northern Virginia society and its economy: By tracking records of several Mason “runaways"—self-emancipated Black men—and mapping the web-like network of the many locals invested in their recapture and captivity, for example, Seabrook showed how deeply embedded community members, slave-owning or not, were in the system, creating, as he put it, “legacies that resonate to this day.”
The morning’s final presentation brought Curvey back to the podium, “alongside” (via a projected Zoom screen) research partner Annabelle Spencer, a graduate research assistant in the Department of History and Art History. Their study “Spatializing Black Stories: Geographies of Community in Loudoun County Virginia” examined what they characterize as “placemaking" in Black communities of Northern Virginia—the turning of land and homes and farms become “geographies” and, when not erased, mechanisms of generational wealth. Exhibited online as a storymap of the same title, their study examines Willard and St. Louis as just two among many Black communities that dotted the region, many of which, like St. Louis, persist in some form today. Curvey and Spencer community history protocols that draw on stories and leads coming from locals, through “histories husbanded by people who lived them and their descendants.” Rather than “extracting” these experiences and stories, CML scholars enrich and augment them—using additional sources such as court and government records, newspaper archives, and secondary accounts— “stitching them into new material.”
By these methods, the researchers identified the people and placemaking that brought the largely African American settlement Willard into being and built it up enough, by 1910, to merit a U.S. post office. Land acquisition and generational transfers, homebuilding, and the formation of a local church and school all contributed to this new geography, a legacy torn apart when the federal government abruptly condemned Willard’s land, in 1958, with (as the researchers showed) scant compensation, to make way for Dulles Airport. In St. Louis, they documented the deep vein of kinship networks, family striving, and agricultural and equestrian expertise that built up the local Black community, little noted or recognized for their essential contributions to the region’s rich “horse country” farm culture.
March 07, 2025