Curating Victory: Ecologies of Life and Resistance at Hickory Hill

• In Event: Ecology of Black Life and Resistance

Description for Program

Curating Victory - Ecologies of Life and Resistance at Hickory Hill, is an ethnographic case study about the contemporary and historic phenomenon of the Hickory Hill School and community relations; past and present in Richmond, Virginia, the former capital of the Confederacy. It anthologizes a refined scope of Virginia's social, educational, industrial history, and spatial-cultural dimensions within the former Gateway to the South, located on the James River.

Though closed in 1970, Hickory Hill School is presently a community center, and its over 100-year legacy continues to anchor civic and social affairs. Hickory Hill School was a self-propelled educational initiative of cultural specificity sustained over time by African American residents for their children in the rural South before and after the Civil War. It is believed to be the only nationally recognized African-American historic site in the Southside of Richmond. Also, the district is identified as the most cumulatively impacted by pollution in the state.

Hickory Hill School’s significant interrelationships between residents and churches, Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and agriculture, civic empowerment, economic development and global industries is largely untold. Hickory Hill School’s robust experiences included stakeholder resistance to government indifference, land purchase and donation for the cause of education, affiliation with the Tuskegee-Rosenwald curriculum and network, rebuilding a school that was burned a week after construction was finished, teacher demands including a legal case about teacher salaries that received national attention, and civic sustainability.

“No Victory without Struggle” was Hickory Hill School’s motto. Curating Victory: Ecologies of Life & Resistance was adapted as a project theme to sync qualitative research about the school and community relations, contributing to its sustainability success and continuing desire for better health and economy.

Author

• Monica Esparza