On a chilly Friday night in early March, a group of mostly gray-haired preservationists marches slowly down Franklin Street. It’s a protest that feels more like a funeral procession: There’s an accordionist and the steady chime of a cowbell along with dozens of signs defending the honor of the iconic Second Baptist Church, that 1906 Classical Revival masterpiece next to The Jefferson Hotel with the columned portico and monumental front steps, the one that’s been under the threat of demolition for the past 30 years.
Longtime preservation advocate Jennie Dotts is directing traffic, advising the march line, speaking to the crowd on the sidewalk and the TV cameras assembled on the curb. Dotts, 71, jumped into the fight in early February, helping to organize another rally on Feb. 12 and launching a petition to boycott the hotel, which now has nearly 800 signatures.
Last fall, Richmond billionaire Bill Goodwin’s Historic Hotels, which owns The Jefferson and Second Baptist Church next door, applied for a demolition permit to raze the church, citing the need to “backfill and landscape” the property. Then in February, Kevin Vonck, director of the city’s Department of Planning and Development Review, determined that a previously approved permit to raze the structure in 1992 was still valid. In other words, there’s nothing standing in the way of the old church and the proverbial wrecking ball.
“Look at it. We are never going to see the likes of that building again, ever,” bemoans Dotts in a recent interview. “Walk around Jackson Ward. Walk around Church Hill. Go downtown. By and large, the new architecture, the new designs, they cannot compare to the design, the skill, the artistry embodied in Second Baptist. It’s just not there.”
Preservationists rally to save Second Baptist Church, built in 1906, in February. (Photo by Jay Paul)
If the rally elicited a sense of déjà vu, there’s a good reason for it. When the demolition permit for the church was first granted 30 years ago, the preservation community fought back aggressively. Led by the Historic Richmond Foundation, they rallied around the church, put pressure on City Council members and penned essays in the local newspaper. By December of 1992, the hotel’s owners relented, calling off the bulldozers.
“I think everybody in the preservation community was shocked. Everyone thought that the owner would have to come back and make a whole case to demolish the sanctuary,” says Joe Yates, 70, an architect who attended the rallies three decades ago — and the two earlier this year. “I would chalk it up to complacency and thinking we’ve done our job, and we can go home and rest on our laurels. And, obviously, that’s not the case.”
The push to save Second Baptist has been loud — and effective. In late February, Goodwin agreed to pause demolition plans for 90 days and discuss renovation options with Historic Richmond. This kind of effort has also become increasingly rare: Preservation battles were routine 30 years ago, says Dotts, a seasoned activist who got her start as director of public relations and development for Historic Richmond in 1993, later becoming executive director of the Alliance to Conserve Old Richmond Neighborhoods, a now defunct nonprofit that worked to save hundreds of historic buildings across the city.
But it’s been nearly 20 years since she last organized protests similar to the recent push to save Second Baptist. In a city that’s booming with residential growth and so much new development, Dotts, who now spends her days selling vintage real estate, worries that historic properties across Richmond are becoming dispensable.
“I don’t think history is revered or cherished in any wide way today,” she says, comparing the “urban pioneers” of the 1960s and ’70s to the younger people driving Richmond’s current growth. “I think they like the density. I think they like the location. They like the convenience. They like the urban vibe. But I wouldn’t say it is because they’re drawn to the history or the historic ambiance.”
A Shift in Focus
If it took a group of middle-aged protesters to shine the spotlight on Second Baptist, what does the future hold for historic preservation in Richmond? The old guns are aging out as younger generations move in. At the same time, the social justice movement that led to widespread protests in 2020, and the removal of Confederate statues on Monument Avenue, has shifted the focus to reconciling the city’s history of disenfranchising African Americans.
Preservation activism is changing, says Cyane Crump, executive director of Historic Richmond, but she argues that the young professionals driving the city’s recent growth are equally passionate about living in a sustainable urban environment. The adaptive reuse of old warehouses and buildings in places like Manchester and Scott’s Addition, fueled in large part by historic tax credits, wouldn’t be possible without an appreciation for historic architecture.
“I don’t think history is revered or cherished in any wide way today.” —Jennie Dotts, preservation advocate
“The reason people want to come to Richmond is because of our really unique and high-quality historic districts,” says Crump, 52. “The older buildings, the workmanship that went into them, the details, they’re really inspiring, and they’re attractive to our creative class, young and old.”
Historic preservation, she says, aligns naturally with the younger generation’s appetite for environmental sustainability. “Preservation is focused on sustainability and adaptive reuse of historic structures,” she says. “The greenest building is the one that already exists.”
Historic Richmond, Crump adds, has seen an influx of younger people interested in the nonprofit’s programs and advocacy over the last few years. The organization’s junior board, for example, is currently at capacity. “I think there are a lot of enthusiastic people, a lot of young folks who are very involved in this and interested in preservation,” she says.
The same is true at Preservation Virginia, says Chief Executive Elizabeth Kostelny: “I see a lot of young people engaging in our work, whether they’re showing up for a review board meeting in favor of preserving a historic site or they get involved in sort of grassroots advocacy for an historic African American school … or they show up at programs that are exploring history.”
Millennials really do care, says Kostelny, 63, or at least they say they do. In a 2017 study commissioned by the National Trust for Historic Preservation to help reorient its fundraising efforts in the face of an aging donor base, 97% of the millennials surveyed agreed that it was important to “preserve and conserve buildings, architecture, neighborhoods and communities.”
However, nearly two-thirds of those surveyed, 62%, responded that they weren’t actively involved in preservation advocacy.
And the past few years have seen another shift, Crump and Kostelny say. In particular, younger activists are gravitating toward social justice — preserving and elevating the city’s African American sites. Following the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, there’s been a heightened interest in honoring and recognizing Richmond’s long-neglected Black history.
“Preservation at its core is about people and places,” Crump says. “The older the place is, the more layers of stories and the more people whose hands shaped that place, and whose lives were shaped by that place. … Sometimes those stories are hard and complicated. But we shouldn’t shy away from those stories. We should learn from them.”
Founders of The JXN Project, (from left) sisters Enjoli and Sesha Joi Moon aim to elevate the origin story of Jackson Ward, the economic heartbeat of Richmond’s Black community after the Civil War. (Photo by Jenae Harrington)
Elevating Black History
The JXN Project, founded by sisters Enjoli and Sesha Joi Moon, is a case in point. While planning the fifth anniversary of the Afrikana Independent Film Festival in 2020, Enjoli Moon recalls reaching out to her sibling for help gathering information about Richmond’s Black neighborhoods for an exhibition. One of the neighborhoods was Jackson Ward, which raised a question they struggled to find an answer for: Who was the Jackson in Jackson Ward?
“Compelling evidence suggests that it is Stonewall Jackson, but, you know, what I think was interesting is that it all depends on who you ask,” Sesha Joi Moon says. Longtime residents of Jackson Ward, a Black community established in 1871 to gerrymander its residents into political irrelevance, long held that the namesake was Giles B. Jackson, who was born enslaved but after the Civil War learned to read and write, eventually becoming an attorney, entrepreneur, real estate developer and civil rights activist. Some historians, however, contend that Jackson Ward is named after President Andrew Jackson or Confederate Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson.
“It opened up a bit of a Pandora’s box around the naming convention of [Jackson Ward] and introduced us to more of the origin story,” Enjoli Moon says. The simple question led to more research and digging, as well as the formation of The JXN Project, a reparative preservation nonprofit that’s gained considerable traction in the past two years.
The Moon sisters, for instance, are currently raising funds to construct a replica of the house built by Abraham Peyton Skipwith, the first known Black resident of what would become Jackson Ward. The small cottage, built in 1793, still stands, albeit in Goochland County, where it was relocated in the 1950s prior to the construction of Interstate 95. The Moon sisters initially wanted to bring the house back to Jackson Ward, but after extensive renovations, they say, the Skipwith cottage had been stripped of its original historical significance.
Fundraising has gone exceedingly well. In April, the Mellon Foundation awarded The JXN Project $1.5 million for the project, which includes reconstructing Skipwith’s cottage as a historical site with offices, parking and an outdoor green space. With the grant and a land donation from the Maggie Walker Community Land Trust, the sisters are nearly halfway to their fundraising goal of $5.68 million.
The JXN Project is building a replica of Abraham Peyton Skipwith’s cottage on Duval Street in Jackson Ward, originally built in 1793. (Photo courtesy The Valentine)
While some worry that the younger generation is losing interest in history, the Moon sisters say the social justice movement and the ensuing protests of 2020 helped open the door for The JXN Project, “helping to just pivot a national lens, with Richmond kind of at the heart of that, and it’s made space for projects like JXN, but not us alone,” Enjoli Moon says. “We talk a lot about the presidents … and the Confederacy. But in those stories being elevated, what’s been submerged is the Black contribution.”
The JXN Project aims to elevate the story of Black Americans. “As we think about the ideas of monuments and preservation,” she says, “how can we laser focus ourselves to the preservation of our stories that have just been paved over for decades upon decades?”
‘Exalting Versus Acknowledging’
If the social justice movement demanded the removal of Confederate monuments, how do you generate enthusiasm for preserving historic structures built by and for enslavers, often literally on the backs of enslaved people?
Tearing them down isn’t the answer, says Dotts, the preservation activist, who points to the demolition of the McGuire Cottage on the city’s North Side in 2021. The Union Presbyterian Seminary decided to bulldoze the structure, located on its Brook Road campus and built in the early 1800s, as “repentance for the resourcing provided to the seminary through the labor of enslaved persons,” a spokesman for the seminary told Richmond BizSense in January of 2021. Hunter Holmes McGuire was a Confederate surgeon who published racist tropes after the Civil War, arguing that Blacks were naturally inferior to whites.
The building came down quickly.
“I’m very concerned about the politicization of everything,” Dotts says. “In the same way that you see this movement to extricate texts and limit how teachers can teach history, aren’t we doing the same thing when we erase those features that allow us to really explore and talk about the past?” The Confederate statues, she adds, “really needed to go,” but that shouldn’t extend to a house or a building that wasn’t erected for the sole purpose of memorializing the Confederacy and the Lost Cause.
“It’s the point I’ve always made about preservation and the materiality of it,” she says, referring to the Emily Winfree Cottage, which she helped save in the early 2000s and which now sits behind Main Street Station in Shockoe Bottom, awaiting revitalization. Winfree, an enslaved woman, was given the cottage by her former owner, along with 100 acres, in 1866. “If the Winfree Cottage isn’t there to talk about Emily Winfree and slavery and the end of the war,” she says, “that’s a really hard thing for people to imagine in the abstract.”
Engaging today’s young people with history may require a new approach, but there is a path forward, Sesha Joi Moon says.
“It’s the difference between preservation of a place versus putting something on a pedestal. What’s the difference between exalting versus acknowledging?” she asks, referencing a documentary she watched recently where a discussion ensued about a Black-owned nonprofit that purchased a former plantation in Georgia. “Some people in the community didn’t understand. ‘Why would you want to buy a former plantation?’ And the other part was like, well, ‘Why not? This represents just as much of our story as it does the enslavers.’
“I’m having to reconsider space and place, and which one should I shy away from, or which one should I say, ‘No, actually, I deserve ownership, too, because my ancestors helped build this thing.’ … I can’t say I’ve necessarily arrived at an answer, but I think it’s a worthy one of asking.”
