I haven’t posted recently for a few reasons, including foot surgeries that reduce me to crawling upstairs for access to the Stilson photos but Martin Luther King Day requires an effort. Reading past MLK posts, one quote struck me. In relating our experience on the streets of D.C. streets at the first Obama inauguration, I described my mom, sister, and I crowding with others to listen on a radio to the president’s speech. He said it was time to “choose our history.” So many are trying to edit history and restrict what is taught these days but that was not what President Obama was talking about. He was imploring our country to become the more perfect nation our forefathers dreamed of, even as their own lives were imperfect in many ways. They couldn’t envision a world where other races and genders were equal, where ALL, not just all men, are created equal. The direction we’re headed in scares me. Limitations on voting, women’s rights, and other issues threatens to hurl us backwards into times of segregation and barriers, when I was a kid and beyond. Back to the days of my great-grandfather, Harry Stilson: Richmond streetcar motorman, amateur photographer and radical.

Some photos and stories I post are ‘reruns’ because I inherited photographs and papers from Harry but he didn’t realize that a century later I would share his life with the world. He didn’t document events as fully or with as many photos as I would have wanted. He didn’t explain or identify or even choose his subjects as I would have liked. I wish I had a picture of Maggie Walker, who he must have known, because his streetcar stopped near her bank and he was in her neighborhood daily but if he did, it didn’t survive. What survived is a tiny bit of his letters and writings and nearly 5,000 photographs but with them, we can piece together a man who marched to a different drummer in the early 1900s, one comfortable on the streets of Jackson Ward, Richmond’s African-American and Jewish neighborhood and even in the houses of the black folks he knew. In a way, Harry was choosing his own history.
Jackson Ward was also choosing its history. That’s where Richmond’s first black schools were created, where black businesses, such as Maggie Walker’s St. Luke Pennysaving Bank, were making history. Hartshorn College was the first African-American women’s school in the United States to award baccalaureate degrees and it stood where Maggie Walker Governor’s School is located today, at Lombardy and Leigh. Although students weren’t allowed to ride streetcars, Harry knew students and teachers and interacted with them in ways other middle-aged white men didn’t. In the Hartshorn group below, students posed with their tatting (like crocheting) and the other picture includes their teacher, Miss Julia Elwin. Hartshorn had white teachers but Virginia Union University, across the “trestle” from Hartshorn, made history by employing black professors. Harry didn’t identify any of his images as being at “Union” as its older alumni call it, but Percy Jones of New York, posed on the trestle with Virginia Union buildings in the background. Irma Dillard’s father was best friends with Percy and she identified him as well as her mother’s friends from Armstrong High School that Harry photographed often.




One Armstrong student, Maggie Lena Walker was an anomaly in her time. The daughter of a laundry woman and former slave, she taught school and was an officer in the Independent Order of St. Luke. That fraternal society offered insurance and provided social services not available to African Americans. She went on to be a successful business woman and the first African-American female bank president in America. Her St. Luke Pennysaving Bank, corner of First & Marshall Streets, is visible behind the streetcar in this Stilson image. That bank later became Consolidated Bank & Trust. Maggie Walker influenced other aspects of life, including creating the Richmond Council of Colored Women in 1912. Her home in Jackson Ward is part of the National Park Service and is open to the public. I always learn something new when I’m there and it’s well worth a visit.

The folks who attended Jackson Ward’s schools were choosing their history by reaching for a better life. They went on to be architects, business owners, preachers, and teachers. Often, their parents were illiterate and working as laborers and laundry women but those parents were determined that their children achieve more. They collected money to start schools when there were no public schools in Richmond (especially for black kids!) and they sacrificed for their children to be educated and able to vote. All of their children, including females. I remember one of my oral history sources calling Clay Street “Strivers’ Street” because the families living there were striving for a better life. Choosing their history.

As we celebrate Martin Luther King Day, perhaps we can choose our history. Not editing the past and cleaning up the nation’s shames and sins but determining a path forward for all. Harry Stilson wrote a speech in 1909 about such a path. He submitted it to a magazine but it was rejected because its content wasn’t “acceptable.” He suggested “common schools and churches” (integration) and offered the idea that if students became “more familiar” with “those of a different tint,” that they would become “better citizens of this great nation, having more respect for each other and less strife.” I am thankful that Harry’s hand-written talk survived and that I can share it. It’s an example of how we can choose our history even when our ideas aren’t popular. Even when ridiculed or criticized. We can still choose our history but we have to choose it well.


One of my favorite photos: Harry’s son, Don Stilson & friend in the back yard on Gilbert Street. Pigeon coop in background.