African American History Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Harpers Ferry’s Ties To Civil Rights Movement Showcased In New Documentary

Harpers Ferry was home to the second-ever meeting of a civil rights group that gave way to the NAACP. A new documentary in part highlights the town’s connection to the movement.

The historical importance of Harpers Ferry becomes clear on any drive across the town’s cobblestone roads. Museums, Victorian homes and storefronts shelved with old-time goods line each of the town’s winding streets.

Many West Virginians know Harpers Ferry as a hub of Civil War history, serving as the site of an 1859 abolitionist uprising led by John Brown and Shields Green.

But fewer people know that the town also played a seminal role in the 20th century civil rights movement. Now, a new documentary, which can be viewed for free on PBS Passport, aims to raise awareness of an often overlooked piece of American history with direct ties to West Virginia.

Origins Of A Black-led Civil Rights Group

In 1905, a group of Black civil rights leaders came together to form the Niagara Movement. Historians describe the group as a precursor to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

The group was founded by Black Americans in Canada, just outside of Niagara Falls. It aimed to address racial injustice in the aftermath of the Civil War, advocating against things like sharecropping, racial segregation and pervasive anti-Black violence across the United States.

For its time, the Niagara Movement was viewed as radical. It was run exclusively by Black civil rights leaders like W.E.B. DuBois and William Monroe Trotter.

Curtis Freewill Baptist Church, one of the meeting places of members of the Niagara Movement, is located on Storer College Place in Harpers Ferry.

*Credit: Jack Walker/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

Plus, it offered a countercurrent to accommodationist perspectives on racial justice, which encouraged Black Americans to temporarily accept segregation, better their communities and one day push for increased civil rights.

This revolutionary mindset is what drew the group to Harpers Ferry in just its second year. Beyond its ties to abolitionist uprising, the West Virginia town was home to Storer College, a historic Black college open to discussions on racial liberation.

“They felt safe to come to a Black college,” said Scot Faulkner, who co-founded a local organization called the Friends of Harpers Ferry National Park. Faulkner’s group serves as a liaison between current town residents and the national historic park.

“They saw a link between themselves as a force, basically an aggressive force on behalf of African American rights,” he said. “They felt common ground and common philosophy with John Brown and the more radical abolitionists going back into the 1850s.”

While visiting parts of the town, Faulkner said the group’s leaders even took off their shoes because they felt that they were walking on “sacred ground.”

Faulkner said that Harpers Ferry provided a stepping stone for early civil rights leaders addressing racial injustice at the turn of the twentieth century. But not everyone who visits the town is aware of this history, which can be overshadowed by the town’s Civil War ties.

Located in downtown Harpers Ferry, the Storer College Museum contains several displays on the history of Black education, as well as the Niagara Movement’s meeting in West Virginia.

*Credit: Jack Walker/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

Shining A Light On The Niagara Movement

A new documentary titled “The Niagara Movement: the Early Battle for Civil Rights” released through Buffalo Toronto Public Media earlier this month tells the story of the Niagara Movement, from how it was founded to how it gave way to the NAACP.

Raymond Smock is a historian who serves as director emeritus of Shepherd University’s Robert C. Byrd Center for Congressional History and Education. He also previously served as historian of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Smock contributed to the documentary, and hosted a screening of it on Shepherd’s campus earlier this month.

While the film doesn’t center on Harpers Ferry alone, Smock said it shows that the West Virginia town facilitated early civil rights discussions.

“This was an amazing meeting at a very historic spot where John Brown’s raid, some say, started the Civil War,” he said. “There was a great interest in holding this meeting.”

Still, Smock said that the Niagara Movement does not always get sufficient attention in contemporary historical discussions.

An exhibit on the Niagara Movement, an early civil rights organization, is located inside the Storer College Museum in Harpers Ferry.

*Credit: Jack Walker/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

“In the immediate vicinity, if you’re in Jefferson County, West Virginia, the Harpers Ferry meeting of the Niagara Movement is pretty well-known history,” Smock said. “But it’s not well known in most other parts of the state or the nation.”

Both Faulkner and Smock said that they hope the documentary helps people learn more about the Niagara Movement and civil rights history.

Much of this history can be discovered right in West Virginia, at historic Harpers Ferry sites like the Storer College campus and the Storer College Museum. The multi-level museum has exhibits dedicated to Black history, from the Niagara Movement and beyond.

For Faulkner, the ability to discover these pieces of American history on a simple walk through town is what makes Harpers Ferry great.

Harpers Ferry “was the philosophical and emotional link between the Niagara Movement in the 20th century and the abolitionist movement, especially the more forceful aspects of the abolitionist movement, of the 19th century,” he said.

“It was a really important melding of these two threads in American history, and certainly of the African American rights movement,” Faulkner said.

The African Art Of Face Jugs, Inside Appalachia

This week on Inside Appalachia, a North Carolina potter is reviving an art form brought to America by enslaved Africans. We return to the town of Hindman, Kentucky, which endured catastrophic flooding last July, and get an update on the town’s recovery. We also talk with West Virginia poet Doug Van Gundy about disasters, and their relationship to art.

This week, a North Carolina potter is reviving an art form brought to America by enslaved Africans.

We return to the town of Hindman, Kentucky, which endured catastrophic flooding last July, and get an update on the town’s recovery.

We also talk with West Virginia poet Doug Van Gundy about disasters, and their relationship to art.

You’ll hear these stories and more this week, Inside Appalachia.

In This Episode:

The Twisted Path That Brought African Face Jugs To Appalachia
Flying On The Wings Of The Cicada
Hindman, Kentucky Making Progress On Recovery
Writing And Talking About Disaster With Poet Doug Van Gundy

The Twisted Path That Brought African Face Jugs To Appalachia

You’ve probably seen pottery with a face on it – maybe a decorative teapot or an odd-looking milk bottle with a toothy grin.

Examples of this type of art turn up everywhere, but some of them are connected to African Face Jugs, an art enslaved people brought with them to America.

Folkways Reporter Zack Harold traced the story of Face Jugs, which began in a basement pottery studio in West Virginia.

Flying On The Wings Of The Cicada

Many of us who live in the eastern half of the U.S. can instantly identify the distinctive droning of the cicada. We don’t get them every year. Cicadas have a very long life cycle with different broods emerge from underground every 13 to 17 years.

In the spring of 2016, a massive brood of cicadas emerged in northern West Virginia. Their appearance inspired a West Virginia University professor to take a closer look at their wings.

This led to a discovery that may be helpful to humans.

WVPB’s Assistant News Director Caroline MacGregor has the story.

African Face Jugs came to America through slavery. Artist Jim McDowell uses the art form to speak about the African American experience. *Courtesy*

Hindman, Kentucky Making Progress On Recovery

Last July, thousands of residents in southeastern Kentucky endured historic flash flooding that took lives and devastated communities. One of the hardest hit towns was Hindman in Knott County.

Stu Johnson from WEKU has this update about the town’s recovery.

Writing And Talking About Disaster With Poet Doug Van Gundy

One of the places struck by those Kentucky floods was the Hindman Settlement School, home to the Appalachian Writers Workshop. Poet Doug Van Gundy was at the workshop during the flood.

Bill Lynch spoke with Van Gundy about poetry, disasters and tattoos.

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Our theme music is by Matt Jackfert. Other music this week was provided by Frank George, Amythyst Kiah, Gerry Milnes, Chris Knight and Born Old.

Bill Lynch is our producer. Zander Aloi is our associate producer. Our executive producer is Eric Douglas. Kelley Libby is our editor. Our audio mixer is Patrick Stephens.

You can send us an email: InsideAppalachia@wvpublic.org.

You can find us on Instagram and Twitter @InAppalachia. Or here on Facebook.

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Inside Appalachia is a production of West Virginia Public Broadcasting.

Southern W.Va. Tourism Highlights The Haves And Have-Nots

Tourism success in the coalfields seems to begin and end with a network of ATV trails, but it’s what’s in the middle that creates the challenges.

Tourism is a major component in southern West Virginia’s transition away from a coal based economy.

Tourism success in the coalfields seems to begin and end with a network of ATV trails, but it’s what’s in the middle that creates the challenges.

For $60 a head, Keith Gibson offers tourists visiting Matewan, West Virginia an airboat ride on the Tug River, a designated West Virginia flatwater trail.

“I worked at the coal mines,” Gibson said. “So I’ve had to relearn myself. Everything that I’m doing now is so different. Nothing like a coal mine.”

With headsets and microphones on to drown out the noise, Gibson tells his passengers tales of coal mine wars and the forbidden, feud-sparking love of Johnse Hatfield and Rosanna McCoy that began just over the Kentucky riverbank.

Hatfield Hideaway is among a growing number of new coalfield resorts.

Gibson said many come to his airboat tour for a respite from the choking dust of the region’s popular ATV trails. But he said getting to the remote border town may call for a feud with the state legislature.

“We have to work extra hard to attract people to drive that extra 100 miles on curvy roads to get here,” Gibson said. “Then, we have to work hard to accommodate them when they are here.”

Gibson said the legislature needs to consider the challenges border counties face, with prices often lower just a bridge ride away in neighboring Kentucky. He said he was getting close to economically recovering from the pandemic, when inflation hit.

“They have to have somewhere to stay, they have to have something to eat, but they don’t have to have an airboat ride,” Gibson said. “They don’t have to have a t-shirt.”

Jamie Cantrell knows about border battles. Her Matewan Trailhead Bar and Grill is just a half mile from the Hatfield Hideout Cabin and RV Camp in McCarr, Kentucky that she also has an interest in. She said the growing tourism industry here needs much more help from the state.

“Do some stuff with the roads to help people get here,” Cantrell said. “Finish the King Coal Highway. We always need more lodging. There’s people buying up homes and putting them on AirBnB left and right. We could use more food places. Politicians need to come into Matewan and see what we have to offer and try to get us some grant money to help restore a lot of these old buildings.”

With ATV’s whizzing through the middle of downtown Matewan, an old coal mining bank building has been converted into the Mine Wars Museum. Co-founder and museum board member Wilma Steele said the organization remains dedicated to correcting revisionist history.

“When I found out the United Mine Workers, in 1920, offered equal pay for blacks and whites and their members were not discriminating against their brothers because of culture or speech or any of that, that blew me away,” Steele said. “We don’t have that history. It’s not in the textbooks.”

About 1,500 African American men from McDowell County enlisted in World War I.

Steele said Matewan’s growing tourism industry stems from freshly voted in city leadership and a united community effort.

“The more that you work as a team and a town to do something, the stronger you get,” Steele said. ”The Mine Wars Museum, from the very first, has been that group that has been right here working and caring about development.”

A museum not too far from Matewan, the Kimball World War I Memorial in McDowell County, sits isolated and somewhat neglected. Curator Clara Thompson said this was the first and now the only remaining memorial to African American veterans of the Great War.

“Believe it or not, we had over 1,500 soldiers to go to World War I from McDowell County,” Thompson said. “When the soldiers came back from the war, they approached the county about constructing a memorial, because the white soldiers had also asked for a memorial and so they got it. They looked to place it in the county seat at Welch but there was none to be found. So that’s how we ended up here in Kimball.”

Replete with outstanding displays, open part time and struggling to maintain board members and infrastructure, the privately-funded museum works to make ends meet with a community center downstairs offering hall and kitchen rentals. Thompson said she gets national, even global visitors, yet the local population seems unaware of its own history.

Mine Wars Museum; the term “redneck” came from the red bandanas striking coal miners wore in solidarity.

“Why don’t the schools have the kids come here and visit this museum? That’s a part of their history,” Thompson said. “We could use funding so that we could advertise more, put out more brochures and things like that. But we don’t have funding and most grants, they ask for matching funds. Where are we going to get it from? It would be so nice if the legislature had that money already allotted to building these historic sites, so that they can do their job.”

The local representative in the legislature, Del. Ed Evans, D-McDowell, agreed the state needs to do more.

“You’re right, it is not open all the time. I don’t think there’s a full time employee,” Evans said. “We still have a large African American population here in Kimball on the hill behind us. Up the road here toward the North Fork and Keystone, you’ll find large African American populations.”

Evans said help with matching grant funds to enhance history-related tourism was an impetus for the legislature creating the Coalfield Communities Grant Facilitation Commission. Evans said the commission should be helping bolster declining coal communities like Kimball’s infrastructure and helping their memorial become a desired destination. But it hasn’t received the funding it needs to get started.

“It should have been underway immediately. The governor said he has to fund that off the back side of the budget,” Evans said. “We have plenty of backside but we haven’t funded it. I was always told it could be as much as $250 million put in there. That would be money that anybody that wants to write a grant could pull down from us for matching funds.”

The Kimball World War I Memorial is the last of its kind in America.

Secretary of Economic Development Mitch Carmichael is the chair of the Coalfield Grant Commission. He said with much of his efforts lately going to bring major corporations to West Virginia, he hasn’t formed a commission, hasn’t found out about funding and doesn’t have a timetable. But he said he’s committed to the process.

“We will be very active and make sure that we’re getting input from the local groups and facilitating growth in those areas,” Carmichael said.

In developing southern West Virginia tourism, the ‘haves and have nots’ seem separated right now by varying degrees of private business investment, community teamwork, infrastructure development, government assistance – and the continuing transition from a coal based economy.

African American Heritage Tour Funded For Oak Hill

A Fayette County community will soon join in a digital tour that honors Black history. The African American Heritage Tour is part of the New River Gorge National Park and Preserve.

The National Coal Heritage Area Authority will develop a new section that will be a part of the digital Southern West Virginia African American Heritage Tour.

The tours can be accessed through the National Park Service’s apps for their respective parks. The project already visits historic communities such as Hinton, Winona and Nuttallburg to share stories of Black coal miners, railroad workers, and other community members that helped shape this region.

The Oak Hill project is part of several across the country funded by the National Trust’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund.

The funding will cover research and interpretation of Black coal mining and labor history in southern West Virginia.

Book Details Groundbreaking African American Horse Trainer in W.Va.

The first African American woman licensed as a racehorse trainer in the United States learned her trade in West Virginia at the Charles Town Racetrack.

Author Vicky Moon explores the story in her new book, “Sylvia Rideoutt Bishop Had A Way With Horses: A Pioneering African American Woman’s Career Training Race Horses.” She is honored at an annual race at the Charles Town Racetrack called the “Sylvia Bishop Memorial Stakes Race.”

Moon spoke with Eric Douglas over Zoom about Bishop’s life and career.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Douglas: Tell me a little bit about Silvia. You got to know her fairly well in the last few months of her life. Tell me about the kind of person she was.

Moon: I met her in 2004, it was about August. By Christmas of that year, she died. We had every week together. I would go over and sit with her, and she would show me photographs of the horses that she had trained. We got along because I talk horse and she talks horse and I just don’t think very many writers would be able to do that. Not only that, maybe it was woman to woman, I can’t answer that. But we got along and we spoke the same language. She was, first of all, unassuming, but she didn’t mind telling me. “Oh, I was the first black woman in the United States to train racehorses.” Her greatest asset was that she wasn’t cocky about it at all. She remained a woman that you would meet on the street.

Douglas: Sylvia was really interesting because she’s African American and a woman and she started training thoroughbred racing horses in the 1930s.

Moon: The track opened in Charlestown in 1933 and she was born in 1920. So in 1934, at the age of 14, she went over there and started, as most people do, male or female, as a groom, a hot walker, cleaning the stalls, doing whatever, but taking it all in every minute.

Douglas: So she was breaking ground on two different levels in the horse business.

Moon: Absolutely, she was breaking ground. The greater challenge was as a woman. And that still exists today. I’ve calculated how many women trainers there have been recently at the track. In Charles Town there was about 10 percent on a Saturday night not too long ago. At Gulfstream, in Florida, on the same day, the percentage was six percent. I travel not just to Charles Town, but I spend winters in Florida. I go to Saratoga. Very rarely do you see a woman as a trainer. You see a woman as a groom, a hot walker, a pony rider, but not as a trainer.

Douglas: You made a great point in the early part of the book about her first connection with a pony, through a pony ride. The cover art of the book is a picture of her on a pony ride in the neighborhood. And that started her on this lifelong journey.

Moon: You know, I was so fascinated with that pony ride because evidently there’s others in the horse business, who can remember such a ride. A man would come around with his pony in the neighborhood, and it really wasn’t much of a ride, it was more of a “sit on the pony and get your picture taken for 25 cents.” And the fact that this photo survived was phenomenal.

Douglas: She went on to eventually become a trainer but she was also an owner. I was struck as much by the fact that she was owning these horses and buying and selling.

Moon: Yeah, I don’t think it was unusual for other people to do the same thing, because they have these claiming races where you put up money or whatever. One particular time, the horse was about done out, according to the owner, who was with Silvia. So she took the horse as her own. And then the horse started to win again.

The book “Sylvia Rideoutt Bishop Had a Way With Horses: A Pioneering African American Woman’s Career Training Race Horses” is available through Amazon.

This story is part of a series of interviews with authors from, or writing about, Appalachia.

Civil Rights Legend J.R. Clifford Dies: October 6, 1933

Civil rights trailblazer J. R. Clifford died on October 6, 1933, at age 85. A native of present-day Grant County, he served in an African American unit during the Civil War. Afterward, he taught at a black school and founded Martinsburg’s Pioneer Press, the first black-owned newspaper in West Virginia. He used its editorial pages to fight for better economic and social conditions for African Americans.

Five years later, Clifford became West Virginia’s first African American attorney. In this role, he fought landmark trials against racial discrimination. In the case of a Tucker County teacher, he was one of the first lawyers in the nation to successfully challenge segregated schools. He also helped organize a national civil rights meeting in Harpers Ferry that was a springboard for the N.A.A.C.P.

In 1917, he wrote a series of forceful editorials opposing U.S. involvement in World War I. In response to the criticism, the government shut down the Pioneer Press—after 35 years in print—for violating postal laws. Today, Clifford is remembered as one of the great civil rights leaders in West Virginia and the nation.