This text is taken from chapter 6, of the book “From South Boston To Cambridge, The Making Of One Philadelphia,” published in 2013.

When the time came to move to Charlottesville, it was the summer of 1960. For all we knew Charlottesville might as well have been in Charlotte, North Carolina which was named for Queen Charlotte of England. I was thirteen years old, having finished the sixth grade at Baker Upper Elementary School. My father was hired by Paul H. Cale, the superintendent of Albemarle County Schools, to be the new principal of a new Black elementary School, Virginia L. Murray, being completed in Ivy, Virginia, in 1960 about 15 to 20 miles west of Charlottesville off of route 250 west.

At the time of his hiring, Dad was commuting from Richmond to Louisa County daily as the principal of Z.C. Morton Elementary School. In 1960 I knew nothing of Charlottesville I was 13 years old, neither did Mom or Dad. Mom’s work in Richmond had not gotten any better. The opportunity to end the commute, close out the fight to get into the Richmond schools and to get Mother into the classroom and out of the cafeteria were strong incentives to take the offer extended by Paul Cale. Back then segregation was the rule and Paul Cale was an enforcer and implementer of that rule and the system in which it operated. But to our family Paul Cale was a mixed blessing. He offered Dad and Mom teaching jobs that ended the rickshaw ride that Dad and Mom had been negotiating between commuting and getting hired into the Richmond Public School system which had been ongoing for several years. Economics was the issue for us not Brown vs The Board Of Education of Topeka.

Though Dad had the Napoleonic drive to succeed, Charlottesville was not his Waterloo, not even close. But Albemarle County-Charlottesville—where he fought many battles professionally and in business—was his own “Elba,” where he is interred, and where he suffered a kind of elected exile away from friends, family and professional aspirations unrealized.

One Saturday morning in June of 1960, Dad and I drove to Charlottesville to look for a new home. We were taken aback by the provincial uninspiring nature of the city; the paucity of upscale modern housing for Blacks that met our standards. Compared to North Avenue in Richmond, Charlottesville was drab, antediluvian, rustic. At its core Charlottesville was and to some extent still is, a small racist southern college town living on the history and living out the legacy of its “patron saint,” Thomas Jefferson. The contrast between the Black community of Richmond and the Black community in Charlottesville was the difference between the sophisticated and the provincial. Richmond’s Black community was vibrant and alive: that community had a wealth of Black lawyers, doctors, teachers and principals, preachers and funeral directors because it was a larger city with a progressive Black culture.

Charlottesville in early 1960 was a stagnant languorous place, with only the University of Virginia and Skyline Drive as its calling cards. There were no Black lawyers in Charlottesville at that time. There was only one Black doctor who made house calls without hospital privileges at the University of Virginia Hospital. One dentist, three funeral directors, enough Black teachers to teach in the Black schools and enough Black principals to manage them. Black businesses in Charlottesville were more than rare: besides two nondescript neighborhood variety stores and three funeral parlors there were no other Black businesses except for two local realtors. The standard of living for the average Black in Charlottesville was not high. The small Black middle class—consisting of the few professionals listed above—lived better than the lower classes, but Richmond had a critical mass of such Black professionals.

The real estate agent showed us small frame and stucco houses in the northwest Black section of town near West Street and Page Street, but we declined any interest and moved on. Those houses were small, antiquated in design and accouterments, and lacked inspiration. The streets were narrow and the houses close to one another. There were no grand boulevards, with wide streets traversed by city transit buses and statuesque houses to entertain our fantasies.

Later in the day we were shown a stately red brick four bedroom house on a wide street in the southeast section of town on Ridge Street, near the corner of Elliott Avenue and Ridge, not more than three miles from the center of downtown. This was a White area just beginning to change over. Several, but not many, middle class Black families lived in this section of the city. Dad liked the house. It satisfied his ego and when he asked me if I liked it, I said “yes I like it.” Amidst the uninspiring, this house touched the imagination. Mother had not seen the house, but she trusted Dad’s judgment. We knew that if we liked it Mother probably would, at least we thought so. But mother’s heart was still in the house on North Avenue. It was her first house and she dreaded the day she had to leave it. Several weeks later we were moving our furniture and our futures to Charlottesville.

Dad knew what he wanted out of life when we moved to Charlottesville. He learned the game of success in Richmond, having been tutored by some of the best. By the time we moved to Charlottesville, Dad already owned four houses including our home on North Avenue. So, Dad got ahead of Charlottesville before Charlottesville got ahead of him. When Charlottesville looked up, Dad had made his mark and was cruising. Charlottesville was not accustomed to the presence of an aggressive Black man of Dad’s ilk. Dad charged through Charlottesville like Sherman swept through Atlanta, only he didn’t burn everything in his path; he tried to acquire it. The powers that be in Charlottesville were more used to a “hang dog,” “yes man” type of Black man. An “accommodating” Black man with no vision, a captive, dependent on the system. Not one out to “beat the system.” Dad was anything but an “accommodationist”. He tolerated the beast of discrimination, but he did not accept it. Dad was not a flag waver or a protest marcher. He couldn’t be, he was a part of the system he fought to overcome. Rather, he was a social conventionalist, single minded in his determination: a Black man with a plan to achieve economic security for his family and professional satisfaction for himself. He played the game the way he saw it, as a Black man “trying to play an inside straight.” They didn’t know it, but the power brokers in Charlottesville and Albemarle County had a guerrilla fighter in their midst, a secret agent.

As the moving van left the wide boulevard of North Avenue, my mother cried. She did not know what to expect in Charlottesville but knew what she was leaving in Richmond: her friends, her church, her family relations, the familiarity of a place she had grown to know over many years and the resultant “community of neighbors,” and of course the house she had made our home.

Mother cried all the way from Richmond to Charlottesville. The tears kept coming, her heart had been touched by memories. Each flashback evoked more memories and more tears. What was the problem? People are often stirred by the memories of their beginnings, the genesis of it all. For mother, Richmond was the substantial beginning of her family life, a place where we were all together under one roof. The place where the ideal, albeit imperfect, was transformed into reality, if just for a while. A place where imperfection was present, but that which was perfect was good, fulfilling and treasured. It had been a special time in all our lives.

This was the Charlottesville of my youth at age thirteen as seen from Vinegar Hill, a Black enclave of small white masonry buildings containing small retail stores of one kind or another lined one beside the other abutting the side walk as it descended into downtown. Vinegar Hill was located at the vertex, of Main Street, east and west, Ridge Street to the south and McIntire Street to the north, one entranceway into the city of Charlottesville in 1960.

Charlottesville was a “country” town in 1960, yet it was the largest thriving city between Richmond on the east, Harrisonburg on the west, Washington D.C. on the north and Danville on the south. The country folks from the surrounding counties of Greene, Madison, Fluvanna, Orange, Buckingham, Culpeper and Louisa came to Charlottesville on Saturdays to shop. The red clay on the treads of their tires, the roughness of their attire and coarseness of their demeanor testified to the rural nature of their being.

As the crowd formed to observe the dance, the smell of salt pork and freshly slaughtered pork bellies drifted through the air. Followed closely by whiffs of alcohol, from wine, beer or liquor and moonshine held in bottles and cans of different shapes concealed by brown paper bags folded down to reveal the mouth of each container. The hands that held the bags were dark brown, black and white with traces of ash noticeable between each fold of rough skin. The nail beds of the fingers that held the paper bags were pink rimmed by a dark grey band of dirt underneath each nail. The hands of farmers, cooks, dairymen and janitors.

The dancer’s stature was small, diminutive, short and thin. He wore rumpled blue jeans, with the cuffs rolled up, a plaid shirt that was torn in spots and threadbare. Black shiny shoes on his small feet. The complexion of the man was dark, leathery, shiny to a gloss, and smooth as freshly tanned rawhide. He danced a jig, and sang his song, “ace, king, queen, jack, good looking nigger, but you sho’ is Black.” They threw coins at the man’s feet as he danced, pennies, nickels and dimes. The more they threw, the harder he danced. With a small top hat on his head, his movements were swift and exact. He knew his steps; he had performed his routine so many times. Those of us who witnessed his show admired his artistry but disdained what he represented. The Whites liked to hear him sing his song and threw him nickels and dimes the more he danced and sang. The Blacks were entertained, yet shamed and embarrassed but they laughed at themselves knowingly. Tippy Rhodes was his name, Charlottesville’s version of the Vaudeville minstrel Steppin Flechit, the Blackman, the buffoon. Defeated by an alien system, a fool, reduced to a caricature of his noble self, whipped down by the legacy of Jefferson’s Monticello and its residue.

As the evening approached and his daily routine wore out its welcome, he would disappear into an alley not to be seen again until he reappeared the next day to do it all over again. Tippy danced up and down Main Street until he got enough money to make it worth his time.

The Black neighborhood of Vinegar Hill would be removed a few years later by what political leaders called urban renewal, but what John Lassiter the author of The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (2006)[8] calls “Negro Removal.”

I had never seen anything like this in my short life until I came to Charlottesville. Tippy danced across my face, and he danced on my evolving self-image. Still harboring the images of Amos and Andy from television, now I saw the caricatures in person. This was the race culture of Charlottesville during those days. Tippy’s act was a metaphor for the subjugation of the Black self-image by a system that enabled and perpetuated the indignity. Less than three miles to the east at Court Square slaves were bought and sold. And to the south east was Monticello, an historical edifice that slaves built, the home of Thomas Jefferson, the personage whose legacy of intellect, impiety, ethnocentricity, racial and moral duplicity pervades the culture. This was part of the way of life in Charlottesville during those days.

“You better have your money or know where you’re going to get it if you go to Charlottesville,” so my mother and father were told before moving to this town. “There are only two kinds of folks in Charlottesville, the rich and the poor” the commentator opined.

Charlottesville was a locked down segregated city when we moved here. The races were polarized and severely segregated well before the explosion of the civil rights momentum that invaded this hamlet in 1962-66.

We worked hard during the summer of 1960 to get our new home ready for our long-term stay in Charlottesville. Dad and Mom were set to begin their careers living in Charlottesville but working in the Albermarle County Schools in the fall. The Ridge Street home is an all brick statuesque house, but at that time it was in need of some major overhaul. We did all of the painting and cleaning and restorative work ourselves. Our neighbor Mr. Sturman provided us with advice. He knew something about construction, way more than we knew, which was next to nothing, so his advice was welcomed. Mr. Sturman owned two properties, his home and a rental property, two doors north of our house. Mr. Sturman, was bald and had a heavy foreign accent. He was muscular in his build but short and he wore small wire-rimmed glasses. He came over each day advising us on what to do. His advice about how to remove the wallpaper and prep the walls for painting and repapering were invaluable. He did this kind of work for himself and some others. I got to know him a little bit over the months and years that ensued. His wife was seldom seen but we knew she was there. She kept close to their home.

The Ridge Street house has a long and wide front porch made of cinder block and cement painted dark red with a red brick wall railing system that surrounds and encloses the porch, similar in style, but not in construction, to the porch on North Avenue. Four, four-foot high brick columns rest on the porch wall, each stationed at opposite ends and at the center where the entrance way to the house creates an alcove affect that supports the porch roof. On the first floor, the front door opens into the living room area, which includes a small working fire place; there is no “center hall plan” as Dad would say. In addition to the kitchen, there is a dining room, living room and a second sitting room. The kitchen is a large eat-in kitchen with a pantry in the right rear corner. There was also a small half-bath on the right near the front entrance to the kitchen, and a small back porch on the opposite side of the pantry separated by a wall.

On the second floor, four large bedrooms await and a full bath all centered around a small but somewhat wide hallway; one for mother, one for Dad, one for me and a spare bedroom. Their bedrooms faced Ridge Street, mine faced the “Monticello mountain”–the distant view from the back of the house. High masonry ceilings and walls with crown molding in some of the rooms and hard wood floors throughout attest to the quality of construction. A new heating system was installed. All the walls in the bedrooms and living rooms were scraped of their existing wallpaper and repainted. The floors were cleaned, waxed and polished.

A new roof was added. A four-foot high brick retaining wall in front of the house abuts the side walk, in back of which was a shallow front yard, but the backyard is deep and wide. The extended wall sets the front boundary line for the property except for a narrow two-foot strip of sidewalk that runs parallel to the north alley side of the house and extends to the rear property line. An unpaved alley separated our home from our next door neighbor’s house on the north side. The ground level of the house resembles a Greco-Roman facade. Large mature evergreens, “boxwoods,” planted perpendicular and parallel to the porch front and along the walkway, obscured the front porch from public view. The backyard had a small gold fish pond with no gold fish in it at that time.

Mom, Dad, Andy and I worked tirelessly each day during this period. So much so that Dad broke out in hives two weeks before school was to start. His sensitive skin rebelled against the dust and glue that suffused the air, so that his face became red and puffy. It looked like a beehive pocked, swelled with red bruises and contusions. We all wondered what kind of impression he would make on the first day of school with his face so irritated and inflamed. He had gotten this skin disease from all the plaster and dirt unleashed by peeling the wallpaper from the masonry walls, sanding the floors, applying polyurethane and waxing them afterwards, cutting grass and hauling trash. We worked from sun up to dark for two straight months.

We brought along with us Andy, one of the foster kids being raised by Kate and Joe Allen. Andy was about my age, with a tanned skin-tone with short closely cut hair. He and I had gotten to know each other having lived next door to each other on North Avenue. We played together sometime but not like I played with Marcellus and Rockie. Andy had a sense of humor and we enjoyed each other’s company. Andy was there to work and to be company for me. Dad must have worked out some sort of deal with Kate and Joe to loan us this kid to help with the work or to be company for me. He was used to hard work. Either way Andy stayed with us the remainder of the summer and worked with me in the yard, cutting grass, peeling wallpaper and waxing floors. It was good to have Andy along since I had no friends and school had not yet started. Andy was my co-worker and my playmate.

My father did not believe in spoiling the child. If you hung around him, he would put you to work. In Richmond when my friends would come around to see if I could come out to play, he often tried to put them to work with me if I was working when they came around. He used to always say “you better work while you got somebody working with you because if you don’t, when they leave, you’ll have it all to do by yourself.”

After the bulk of the work was completed, we settled down into our new home and schools. In September I enrolled in Jefferson Elementary School in the city, Mother went to Benjamin Franklin Yancey Elementary in Esmont and Dad went to Virginia L. Murray Elementary School in Ivy. All of these schools were Black populated schools, one hundred percent. Life was good in Charlottesville. No more commuting for Dad, Mom was back in the classroom, and I began a decade-long search to find self-definition and determination, and in the process answer the question, who was I? Moving to Charlottesville was good for me and for my family in many ways. Mom and Dad had professionally appropriate jobs. The city was quiet. The crime rate was low and the economy of the city, at that time, facilitated Dad’s investment strategy. We all did well here. I thrived within the confines of this world and so did the family.

The Charlottesville of the 1960s, 65 miles west of Richmond, on route 250 west, was a one horse town according to mother, and that horse was a white horse. Black folks did not ride that horse; instead it trampled them under its hooves as it galloped from historical period to historical period. Black folks worked as cooks, maids and butlers, where slaves were once sold at auction in Court Square north of downtown. This city was, and is not today, a friend to Americans of African descent. Back then, and now, the University of Virginia located west of the city was the beacon of attraction and the raison d’etre. During the 60’s the bitter, caustic culture of racism was blatantly advocated by governors and state political leaders of that day and vehemently enforced by many local leaders who ran for city council. The heavy hand of racism upheld segregation unfailingly in the schools, businesses, hospitals, and neighborhoods of this city. The Whites, as you would expect, had the best of everything in Charlottesville at this time: schools, playgrounds, movie houses, restaurants, clothing stores, and medical care.

Back then, as now, the “gold coast” was along the 250 West corridor which begins at the corner of 10th street and west Main St. The business, property and institutional owners along this wide swath controlled politics in Charlottesville. Sections such as Bellaire, Ednam, Boar’s Head, Farmington and Flordon are the highbrow neighborhoods. In recent years, many celebrities have moved to the area giving it a cachet that the elite of the community nourish and work hard to maintain. But at its core, stripped of it flourishes and highbrows, I find Charlottesville to be a “provincial” town as that term is defined by Webster’s Dictionary: “illiberal, unsophisticated, rustic, narrow and parochial, yet inspiring to the nouveau riche.” A bastion for the “old boy” network where wealth is preserved for those who traditionally have had it.