Histories of Communities in Action: A People’s Guide to Richmond and Central Virginia

This project, which centers public and community histories, is the culmination of a decade of community-based research. Oral histories and community archival work form its foundation. It features over one hundred contemporary and historic sites in Richmond and Central Virginia where significant struggles over power, protest, resistance and survival developed have occurred. Each site has been closely developed alongside key leaders from the featured communities. These local histories show a long history of communities working to combat institutionalized racism, settler colonialism, environmental injustice, labor exploitation, and anti-LGBTQ violence. The oral history project centers the experiences and voices of those often rendered invisible in the landscape and left out of traditional historical texts and guidebooks. This poster will outline the methods of the project and engage in a number of key oral histories, including those of the Pamunkey and Mattaponi, local indigenous communities, as well as Latinx, African American, and LGBTQ+ community members. Visually, the poster will showcase a few key sites represented spatially within the context of Central Virginia. Intellectually, it will center the importance of oral histories in conjunction with other research methods to fully engage in telling inclusive community histories, particularly in communities that have faced systemic historic and contemporary marginalization. In short, it centers a community-led approach for understanding historically marginalized communities whose histories often remain invisible to those outside of the community. As one example, one site featured on the poster will center a group of Pamunkey women who continue to make pottery, a centuries-old tradition but one appropriated by the state in the 1930s. At that time, Virginia established a pottery school on the Pamunkey reservation in order to teach the Pamunkey how to mass produce tourist-oriented pottery, which deliberately eschewed their traditional pottery making methods. Today, potters incorporate both methods of pottery making and see the style as unique to their community's survival despite centuries of state-imposed violence. In addition to the poster, brief selections of oral histories will be made available via a simple app easily accessible via a smartphone.