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When I finally had the chance to visit The Heritage Center at its new location, I did not know what to expect. I was invited to tour the facility and make an informed recommendation on presenting African American history thoughtfully. It worked out for me that I was working on a project, Reclaiming Our Time, and I could add more details to the lives I had already researched hither and yonder.
The collections represented far more than the five contiguous counties. The overflow of historical texts, personal papers, maps, vital records, transcriptions of documents, and so on was both exciting and overwhelming for a local archive. Smartly organized in a climate-controlled environment, archivists Diane Ballman and John Reifenberg knew every square inch of the facility and its holdings. After explaining my research interests, Diane and John began pulling archival binders. While they did that, I perused book titles by location and topic: King George County, West Virginia, Rockingham, Louisa…the catalog is vast.
After about 15 minutes or so, I returned to my chair to do the white glove examination of the records they pulled. Folder after folder, I took notes on what was helpful and what could be followed up on if I had any free time. The hours passed by so quickly that I hardly noticed that the sun had moved west and that I completely forgot about lunch! It was getting late, and I had to begin culling through Ruth Coder Fitzgerald's papers. I knew Ruth personally, so this moment offered an extraordinary opportunity to see the evidence she relied upon for her 1979 book A Different Story: A Black History of Fredericksburg, Stafford, and Spotsylvania, Virginia.
True to life, Ruth was a solid journalist who had receipts for most of the research used in her book. Some evidence included obituaries, newspaper clippings, official records (i.e., vitals, census, military), and correspondence—lots of correspondence!
Dr. Richard L. Sterling, Jr., the grandson of Dr. Urbane F. Bass, Sr., had written her a letter dated October 30, 1986. Apparently, Ruth left a letter, a copy of her book and a slide show at the funeral of Maude Bass, and the letter he wrote was a simple acknowledgment of receipt of the items. Dr. Sterling was, at that time, a French lecturer at Howard University, where he was also working on his dissertation in French Literature. He corresponded with Ruth several times concerning her research on the Bass family discussed in her book. He wanted to meet face-to-face with her, but there was little opportunity between his studies, teaching, and caring for his mother, Anne Bass Sterling, to leave the city, even if only for a day. So, instead of visiting Fredericksburg, he invited Ruth and her husband Barry to Washington D.C. to meet his siblings and, over a meal, discuss his family history. In lieu of an immediate rendezvous, he enclosed a check to cover the cost of the book as well as photocopies of biographical information he collected on his grandparents Urbane and Maude Bass. It was unclear why the additional references were necessary seven years after her book was published. There may have been some gaps in the information, and Dr. Sterling wanted to clarify for the record.
Recalling that my visit to The Heritage Center was focused on the research I was conducting on Fredericksburg's ten oldest African American families, the Bass family was well beyond the scope of my work, and I did not want to dig deeper into the rabbit hole of the past only to lose focus and time on extraneous information. That is where I began, and as hard as I tried, my curiosity won out: I could not ignore Dr. Sterling's letters because they were historically significant on multiple fronts. For example, in a letter dated November 16, 1986, he described his parents' role in hosting a 1961 planning committee for the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal. Participants included Sidney Poitier and Diahann Carroll, among other cultural ambassadors. The event did take place April 1-24, 1966 and attracted artisans from all over the world. That. Was. Huge.
In that same letter, there were several references to Who's Who in America, and he provided a short list of the doctors, lawyers, and educators in his family to demonstrate the strong gene pool from which he hailed. It was a remarkable find to have so many successful professionals in one family, but what actually captured my attention was the mention of his great-grand Aunt, Dr. Anna Julia Cooper (1863-1964). I could hardly contain myself as I had walked past her historic home at 201 T Street NW in Washington, D.C., many times while in the city. Her book A Voice from the South: By a Black Woman of the South (1892) is inarguably the first text written by an African American feminist. Among the many other notable African American women such as Sojourner Truth, Ella Baker, Ida B. Wells, and Angelina Grimke, Cooper's name and legacy are staples in African American and Women's history studies.
Dr. Anna Julia Cooper used her voice to advocate for the rights of all African Americans and all women. She believed that all citizens had a right to quality educational experiences, just as she did. And as an educator and principal at what is now Paul Laurence Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C., she approved a rigorous intellectual curriculum for her students who showed potential and interest in topics other than agriculture and sewing, which was the customary curriculum for segregated African American and sex-based schools. Perhaps the most inspiring aspect of Anna Julia's life is that the former North Carolinian will forever be the fourth African American woman to earn her Ph.D. in the United States. She achieved this feat at the age of 62.
Born on August 10, 1863, to Hannah Haywood (Stanley) and her consort, Jacob Stanley, Anna was given the surname not of her father but that of the person who imprisoned both she and her mother: George Washington Haywood, a state attorney for Wake County, N.C. In 1877, Anna married Rev. George Anthony Cooper, a Bahamian man 30 years her senior. Rev. Cooper's premature death two years into the marriage was difficult, but Anna began her life anew as a world traveler and highly sought-after public speaker at home and abroad. I knew this about her before reading Dr. Sterling's letters to Ruth. Fortunately, I recognized Dr. Cooper's importance in Dr. Sterling's letter. Had I not been intimately familiar with her as an African American scholar, I could only imagine the gaze that would have surely come over me as I continued reading. Identifying materials vital to the cultural identity of African Americans requires a baseline of content knowledge relevant to the history of African Americans.
Dr. Sterling's letter did not explain how he was related to Dr. Cooper. There could be several reasons for this: 1. he presumed that Ruth already knew of Dr. Cooper's standing, or 2. he presumed she would not know and would not be interested in knowing. To define the relationships for my edification, I turned to the obituaries in Ruth's files, but I knew that I would have to consult external sources to get the genealogical data. I learned that Anna Julia's brother, Rufus, had a daughter named Mary. Mary was the mother of Maude Lillian Bass (widow of Dr. Urbane Bass, Sr.). Maude had Ann Bass, who married Richard Sterling, Sr., the father of the aforementioned Dr. Sterling. So Dr. Cooper was his maternal great-grand Aunt.
What I learned from this experience is that The Heritage Center archives are, hands down, an invaluable asset to this community. My accidental foray into the Bass legacy of servant-leadership was far more than I expected to learn.
One creative way to continue evaluating the holdings concerning the African American community might be to engage the University of Mary Washington’s Multicultural Center students in a meaningful scholarship competition to uncover/discover new information from the archives. As with any research paper, the students would have to abide by uniform style guides for writing an academic essay and those references, in turn, could be the basis for prioritizing digitization projects. The winning project might appear in a local historical journal. The competition could repeat itself quarterly or annually or until the students have analyzed a healthy representation of the collection.
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