Places of Memory, Landscapes of Empowerment in Hampton Roads, Virginia

Session Submission Type: Panel Session

Abstract

Group identity is at the core of how communities used ceremonies as an important component of public and sacred memory. We remember important moments from our past as we associate time with place. For millions of people of African Americans whose lives and memories were marked by violence, fear, triumph, success, separation, and unity, the memory of those experiences was embedded in their bodies and inscribed onto the landscape. According to Katharina Schramm’s 2011 article, “Landscapes of Violence: Memory and Sacred Space,” new homesteads, cemeteries, and sacred spaces became important sites because of their “complex entanglement of procedures of remembering, forgetting and the production of counter-memories.” [5] Often places of memory were associated with the sacred. As African Americans pushed the nation towards modernity and social equality in the mid-century, these traditional bonds of memory loosened with the destruction of black neighborhoods through urban renewal programs and the movement of people from the restrictive boundaries of segregated neighborhoods. Yet, while the loss of these spaces became porous boundaries that shifted as the community changed and diffused into broader society, recent efforts have been made to recover the significance of these sacred spaces to younger generations to have a touchstone that will remind them of their heritage. This reawakening in the Hampton Roads region in Virginia is one example of how African Americans are erecting monuments, markers, and the reclaiming of abandoned buildings as sites for communal gatherings as places of memory.

Sub Unit

• 101st Annual Meeting and Conference of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History

Chair

• William Alexander, Norfolk State University

Individual Presentations

• Never Just a Theater: Places of Memory and Joy for Generations of African Americans - Cathy Jackson, Norfolk State University

• Remembrances, Commemorations, and Sacred Spaces within Virginia’s African American Communities - Cassandra Newby-Alexander, Norfolk State University

• Memory and Meaning in the Nat Turner and John Brown Insurrections - Kay Wright Lewis, Norfolk State University

Commentator

• ASALH Audience, .