Charlottesville Daily Progress, January 1912
Alderman Library, University of Virginia
Location: University of Virginia, Charlottesville
Hours: Varies by time of year. Special Collections generally open 9-5, M-F, 9-1 Sat. The rest of the library, including Microforms and Government Documents, both located on the third floor, is open during all library hours, which generally is from 8-12, M-F, 9-6 Sat., Noon-midnight Sun. during the school year.
Photocopy Prices: for Special Collections, usually $0.15/page; for unrestricted materials, $0.07/page with copycard, $0.10/page with cash.
Microforms (located on the third floor, east wing):
The Charlottesville Daily Progress
The Daily Progress was Charlottesville's largest daily newspaper
in the early twentieth century. It recorded, in addition to state,
national, and international news, many items of local interest,
including church announcements, club and other
public meetings, marriages, births, deaths, and school reports.
Staunchly Democratic, Progress editorials largely reflected
the opinions of important local Democrats. Conspicuously absent
from the Progress, however, is any sense of the
African-American community or the lives of black citizens. The
coverage of black life in the Progress is largely confined
to criticisms of black participation in politics and to frequent
lurid reports of blacks as perpetrators or victims of criminal
activity. Information about black churches, schools, and social
happenings is almost entirely nonexistent, and reportage about
black political activity is very rare. When discussion of black
political action appears, it is likely to do so during the first
two years of the century, when Virginia debated and then ratified
a new state constitution intended to disfranchise most African Americans.
The Progress has no index.
The Richmond Planet
The Planet was the nearest black daily newspaper to Albemarle
County of which there are still extant copies. (Charlottesville
had a black daily newspaper of its own in the 1910s and early 1920s,
the Charlottesville Messenger, but there are
no known copies in existence. The Reflector, discussed below, was
a weekly, and only published in the 1930s). The Planet occasionally
reported dispatches from Charlottesville and Albemarle County,
and is worth investigating to get some additional
sense of African-American social, cultural, and political life in this period.
Black Biography, 1790-1950
In the reference room on the library's fourth floor, you can find a
three-volume index, edited by Randall K. Burkett, Nancy Hall Burkett,
and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., to a listing of over 10,000 names of
prominent African Americans. The entries range
from the well known, such as W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T.
Washington, to less famous but often important figures in African
American history. Included are local figures such as businessman
and educator G.P. Inge and politician J.T.S. Taylor. The index lists
individuals by name (they are also indexed by state), and indicates
their birthdate, birthplace, occupation, and religion. Each
entry has a reference number to a microfiche card and page
number on that card where a biography of the individual can be
found. The microfiche correlating to the collection is housed
in microforms on the third floor, in file cabinets across from
the information desk. This source is invaluable as a means of
procuring information on individuals well known in their time and
locale but relatively lost to historians today.
Government Documents (located on the third floor, between the east and west wings, and in the third floor, old stacks)
Phelps-Stokes Fellowship Series
In 1911, the Phelps-Stokes Fund, a philanthropic organization based
in New York, gave a gift of $12,500 to the University of Virginia
to fund a permanent fellowship in Sociology. One Phelps-Stokes
Fellow--often a University of Virginia graduate student--was chosen
each year, given $500 to undertake a research project on some aspect
of African-American life in Virginia, and expected to produce a
written report of his or her findings for publication by the university,
in the hope that such research would "assist in improving the condition
of the negro." While the reports are rife with methodological
problems symptomatic of liberal, paternalistic racism in the early
twentieth century, the reports contain information about black life
in Charlottesville unavailable from any other source, discussing
black education, professional and employment opportunities,
residential patterns, class divisions, land ownership, health,
interaction with the criminal justice system, and other subjects.
Between 1915 and 1950, seven of the reports focused specifically on
Albemarle County and four of those specifically on Charlottesville.
All of the Phelps-Stokes Papers are listed below, and those with
particular emphasis on Charlottesville or Albemarle are denoted with
asterisks. They can be found in the old stacks on the third
floor, and a copy of each report is also available in Special Collections.
No. 1--"Lectures and Addresses on the Negro in the South," 1915.
*No. 2--"Rural Land Ownership among the Negroes of Virginia with Special Reference to Albemarle County," Samuel T. Bitting, 1915.
No. 5--"The Negroes of Lynchburg, Virginia," Benjamin Guy Childs, 1923.
No. 6--"The Education and Economic Development of the Negro in Virginia," William H. Brown, 1923.
No. 7--"The Virginia Negro Artisan and Tradesman," Raymond B. Pinchbeck, 1926.
*No. 8--"Negro Housing in Certain Virginia Cities," Charles Louis Knight, 1927.
*No. 9--"The Negro in Charlottesville and Albemarle County, an explanatory study," Marjorie Felice Irwin, 1929.
*No. 10--"Red Hill Neighborhood: life and race relations in a rural section," William Lester Leap, 1933.
*No. 11--"Charlottesville: a study of Negro Life and Personality," Helen Camp de Corse, 1933.
*No. 12--"Negro Crime in a Small Urban Community," Robert Mitchell Lightfoot, 1934.
No. 13--"Zion Town--a Study in Human Sociology," Howard H. Harlan, 1935.
No. 14--"John Jasper--a case history of leadership," Howard H. Harlan, 1936.
No. 15--"The Negro and Crime in Virginia," Bernard P. Chamberlain, 1936.
No. 16--"Bethune Center Nursery School, a study of a Negro Institution in Lynchburg, Virginia," Hilda N. Schroetter, 1948.
No. 17--"The study of an attempt made in 1943 to abolish segregation of the races on common carriers in the state of Virginia," Nancy Armstrong, 1950.
No. 18--"The Negro in the Medical Profession," Helen E. Walker, 1949.
No. 19--"The Woman movement and the Negro Movement, parallel struggles for rights," Helen M. Lewis, 1949.
*No. 20--"A Comparative Study of Contemporary White and Negro standards in Health, Education and Welfare, Charlottesville, Virginia," James W. Barksdale, 1949.
United States Census--Virginia
The census is a basic research tool for anyone doing social history
of a region. Taken every ten years, the census groups individuals
by household, and records (depending on the year) items such as names,
ages, races, occupations, birthplaces, relations
of people within a household, literacy, and whether individuals
owned or rented their homes. Currently, the entire black
population for Charlottesville in 1910 is being entered into a
database to allow for statistical analyses and searches by category.
Special Collections (located on the second floor, east wing, through the McGregor Room)
Cox-McPherson Papers (MSS 38-11)
This collection contains the papers of Leroy Wilson Cox (1845-1938), a
local carriage and wagon maker and the chairman of the Charlottesville
Republican Committee from 1901-1922. The collection essentially
consists of two boxes. Box one contains a
small amount of political correspondence, some political
broadsides, lists of black and white voters, lists of voters
having paid their poll taxes, lists of party committees, and some n
ewspaper clippings, mostly from the Daily Progress. Box two holds
four ledgers, most of which contain voter lists, and one of
which holds some minutes from city Republican meetings. In most
cases, the records contained in this collection are somewhat
unorganized. It is not always clear whether the voter lists are
complete or even which years they represent. They are also
inconsistent in terms of who is listed from one to the next.
But at the same time, the Cox-McPherson Papers are invaluable
source materials suggesting the extent of black participation in the
electoral political process into the 1920s despite disfranchisement,
and the opposition they faced from local Democrats and sometimes
from white Republicans. Marginal notes suggest the continued
presence of local organization and voting registration drives,
and newspaper clippings and brief notations suggest the participation
of black women in politics before they received the franchise.
Any student of black politics in Virginia in this period should
read this collection closely.
Papers of the Charlottesville Republican Party (MSS 9077)
This collection is just a few pages, but it appears to be one of the
only complete lists of black voters for any given election.
Here, black voters are broken down by ward (there were four
voting districts in Charlottesville) and listed individually for
the 1900 presidential election. When cross-referenced with sources
such as the census or the city directories for 1900 and other years, this
list could provide valuable information about black men and their
participation in politics on the eve of
disfranchisement such as where black voters lived and what
they did for a living.
From porch swings to patios: an oral history project of Charlottesville neighborhoods, 1914-1984, Wilma T. Mangione, ed. Charlottesville: City of Charlottesville, 1990. (Special Collections
call number F234.C47 F76 1990)
Given the difficulty of finding personal papers from African Americans
in the early twentieth century, oral histories from individuals
who lived at the time can be extremely valuable. The anecdotal
evidence people recollect provide a sense for a
community and its inhabitants like few other materials can.
This work is a collection of oral histories taken from both blacks and
whites living in neighborhoods in and around Charlottesville.
Another important source of collected oral histories is that published by
the Ridge Street Oral History Project, a copy of which is
housed at the Woodson Institute.
The (Charlottesville) Reflector (E185.5. R4)
Recently discovered in Special Collections are 36 issues of the
Reflector, which billed itself accurately as
"Charlottesville's only negro weekly." Published at least from
1933 to 1935, this newspaper consciously
sought to report to African Americans in Charlottesville all the
news relevant to them that the Daily Progress chose to
ignore. Included are church and school reports, gossip columns,
a society report, letters to the editor, and notices for club meetings,
in addition to editorials which commonly protest the inequality
of conditions for blacks in
Charlottesville and in the South more broadly. The Reflector
is an extraordinarily valuable find, one of the only contemporaneous sources
directly reflecting African-American voices from Albemarle County.
Researchers are encouraged to glean information from the content
of the editorials to the names reported in gossip columns to the
kinds of advertising published.