They were together once again — teacher and pupil. It had been a long time. Bettie Woodson Weaver had been the fourth-grade teacher and Lauranett L. Lee was one of her very special students. In 1969 Chesterfield County’s public schools for blacks closed and the schools which previously had been for whites only were integrated. At age 10, Lauranett Lee was among those first black students to integrate the schools, and Mrs. Weaver was her teacher. Both were Baptists.
Fred Anderson
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The pupil and teacher had a two-person class reunion of sorts in one of the sessions of the recent “Faith, Freedom & Forgiveness” national conference co-hosted by Virginia Baptists’ two historical organizations along with the Baptist History & Heritage Society. Lauranett Lee, the founding curator of African-American history at the Virginia Historical Society (not to be confused with the Virginia Baptist Historical Society), was a featured speaker for the session. In the room, especially to hear her former pupil, was Bettie Weaver, herself a historian and a former president of the Virginia Baptist Historical Society.
In her remarks, Lee referenced the experience as one of those first black students. She and her brother found their first rude awakening when they climbed aboard the school bus. None of the other children would allow them a seat; and since the driver would not proceed unless all were seated, the children sat on the floor. In the classroom the little girl did find a warm and loving teacher, Bettie Weaver, who modeled the perfect teacher.
The years passed for both. Bettie Weaver continued to teach and today is honored with an elementary school in Chesterfield which bears her name. As a child herself, she would visit her grandparents’ old home, Aetna Hill, near the village of Midlothian and absorbed family stories. After her father’s death in 1928, she lived with her grandparents while her mother returned to school to renew her teacher’s certificate. To entertain the child, her grandmother often would show her family treasures removed from an old trunk. Bettie Woodson was receiving her first education as a future historian.
“On Sundays I brushed my bangs and put on my best dress and white stockings and buttoned my black patent leather Mary Janes to attend Sunday school and services at Winfree Memorial Baptist Church,” wrote Bettie Weaver in the preface to her book, Midlothian: Highlights of Its History. It was the church where her grandfather, Robert H. Winfree, was pastor. His father also had been pastor. It remains her church and Aetna Hill is her beloved home.
In the same neck of the woods, Lauranett grew up as the oldest of five children of Clarence and Gloria Lee. In elementary school she studied the required subject of Virginia history and realized that the role played by people of her color was not the moonlight and magnolias image of the Old South. She lost interest in history.
As the oldest in her family, she was the one who was instilled with a sense of responsibility and the notion that she must attain her highest potential. After high school, she felt that it was her “duty” to attend college. She first attended Shaw University, a historically African-American school in North Carolina, and transferred to Mundelein College in Chicago, a woman’s college now a part of Loyola University. She also studied the practical trade of cosmetology, a career path then open to African-American women.
It was not until she heard the late Edgar A. Toppin, dean of the graduate school at Virginia State University, that she was smitten with black history. “It changed my whole world,” she once reflected in a news article. “He talked about history from the people’s perspective. He really made you understand how ordinary people can play a part in history. I began to see that there was a way to delve into history from another perspective that would be of greater interest to people, not just focusing on dates.” It was the spur she needed to pursue history as a career.
She eventually enrolled at the University of Virginia where she studied under Ed L. Ayers, a popular history professor who inspired his students and challenged them to discover and interpret history. Interestingly, Ayers today is president of the University of Richmond and on the board of the Virginia Historical Society where Lee is on staff. He also was the keynote speaker at the opening session of the “Faith, Freedom & Forgiveness” conference.
While studying in Charlottesville, Lee handled an early manuscript of a Northern woman who came to the university town to teach freedmen after the Civil War. “I began to see really how important education was,” Lee explained in the news article. “When you really start looking at the history behind it, particularly for women, and then when you add race on top of that, you begin to see that education is a way to propel us up out of the morass of life and to really begin to make an impact in the world, make a change in some way.”
Lee already has made that impact by establishing a data base for the names of enslaved persons and slaveowners which she calls “Unknown No Longer.” By the end of 2012, she and a few helpers had recorded the names of 10,000 persons from over 500 documents in the collection of the Virginia Historical Society. The following taken from her blog indicates the nature of her project: “To be candid, this is a hard subject to study. The onerous nature of slavery offends my sensibilities in every way. Yet, when the opportunity to delve into our collections to extract the names of enslaved people was presented to me, I saw the lasting value in creating a genealogical tool to help people find their ancestors.
“My days are spent poring over old documents, deciphering scrawl and chicken-scratch. However they come to me I am humbled and honored to transcribe the names of so many people who deserve the dignity of identity.”
It is what the fourth-grader received so long ago from her caring teacher — the dignity of identity which ever human being should be accorded. The reunion offered a rare and gratifying moment when the teacher from so long past could witness what the pupil had become.
Fred Anderson ( [email protected]) is executive director of the Virginia Baptist Historical Society and the Center for Baptist Heritage & Studies.