The Washington Post - 22.08.2019

A8 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.THURSDAY, AUGUST 22 , 2019

road work, and management was

performed by blacks, many of

whom would stay on to live at the

settlement, sets Aberdeen Gar-

den apart from all other [New

Deal] projects,” historians from

the Virginia Department of His-

toric Resources wrote in the ap-

plication. “A government funded

project ‘by blacks — for blacks,’ a

motto that the Hampton sponsor-

ing group adopted, was unprec-

edented in the South as well as

the United States.”

A

bout eight of the original

families remain in the

neighborhood. Some of the

houses are in disrepair, but the

double-brick construction has

proved enduring, with each home

as square and traditional as a

Monopoly game piece.

It’s more diverse now — a few

white and Hispanic residents live

there. Other neighborhoods filled

in around it in the 1950s and ’60s,

still largely African American.

Those, too, consider themselves

part of Aberdeen Gardens.

With help from the city, the

neighborhood association

bought a pair of original houses

that are joined at the garage. One

house was renovated as offices,

and the other is being restored as

a museum. Neighbors have fur-

nished it with original furniture

and appliances from the 1930s.

Aberdeen Gardens hosts pro-

grams for schoolchildren and ses-

sions for each new graduating

class of the city police academy,

teaching about the neighbor-

hood’s origins. At the fish fry

Saturday, the mayor, the former

mayor, the commonwealth’s at-

torney, two council members and

a host of brass from the Hampton

city manager’s office all showed

up for food and good-natured

ribbing.

Wilson worries that the sense

of community that keeps the his-

tory alive will die out with her

generation. “I’m looking for some

young people to come behind

me,” she said. “It’s hard to find

people who will continue the

legacy. It’s so rich, and people

don’t know.”

They’re still discovering how

rich it is.

Last year, with the 400th anni-

versary approaching, researchers

identified more than 100 un-

marked burial places in the old

cemetery near the neighborhood.

Some are thought to date to the

1700s. Local lore holds that Wil-

liam Tucker, the first recorded

baby of African descent born in

the English colony around 1624,

could be among them.

Word is getting out. This year,

some new faces made it to the fish

fry. Among them were Cynthia

Young-Lee of Williamsburg and

Vicki Morris of Virginia Beach.

Both 64, they grew up together in

Richmond hearing Young-Lee’s

mother tell stories of her child-

hood in Aberdeen Gardens.

A few months ago, the friends

made a pilgrimage to see it for

themselves. They wound up tak-

ing the tour with “Miss Margaret”

— as most people refer to Wilson

— and went on to learn about the

first Africans who landed nearby.

Now they had shown up for the

fish fry in matching “Project

1619” shirts, excited to be part of a

legacy they had not known.

“We just wanted to follow the

history,” Young-Lee said. They

saw all sorts of connections — not

just to past events but to genera-

tions who dreamed and accom-

plished and built a society. Law-

yers, educators, soldiers, athletes,

doctors, politicians — figures who

came from Aberdeen Gardens, a

neighborhood in a place that

once put such people in bondage.

“This,” Morris said, as Ab-

erdeeners talked and laughed

around her, “was a starting

point.”

[email protected]

ing stories about the early days —

“and some of them were true,” he

said. There were the triumphs of

the neighborhood sports teams,

the Rattlers, named for the

snakes in the surrounding woods.

The families that crammed 13

people into three-room houses.

The time someone helped a guy

with a broken-down car and it

turned out to be Jackie Robinson.

The mailman who picked up

laundry. The woman who fetched

her husband from the tavern in a

wheelbarrow. The quiet old

neighbor who turned out to be a

Tuskegee airman.

“When somebody died, the

whole community would come

together,” Wilson said.

Everyone helped raise the chil-

dren, she said. “If you got in

trouble at school, by the time you

got home you would’ve been

spanked four times” by other

parents, she said.

In 1994, as commercial devel-

opment closed in, the neighbor-

hood won state and national his-

toric landmark status.

“The fact that the community

plan, architectural design, site

clearing, building construction,

When Claude Vann Jr. died in

2013, his family had the hearse

carry him through the neighbor-

hood one last time.

“My dad was a true Aberdeen-

er,” the son said. Retired from the

Air Force, Claude Vann III, 64,

owns several of the old houses

and rents them to younger fami-

lies.

Vann spent his whole life hear-

ticker-tape parade down Ab-

erdeen Road if she were alive

today,” said Claude Vann III.

Vann’s grandfather was an

original resident, who like the

others rented at first and then

purchased when given the

chance. Vann’s father returned

after a career in the military and

spent his old age as a kind of

unofficial mayor and handyman.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s

New Deal for a grant to build

better housing for working-class

black families from the nearby

shipyards, railroads and dock-

yards.

Every one of those houses still

stands in Aberdeen Gardens. All

seven neighborhood streets were

named for prominent African

Americans, including Peake,

Richmond banker Maggie Walker

and John Mercer Langston, Vir-

ginia’s first black congressman

and the first dean of Howard

University Law School.

Aberdeen Gardens was so at-

tractive — each home had at least

three-quarters of an acre for

growing vegetables, as well as

chicken coops and community

hogs — that the local newspaper

called for it to be turned over to

white workers.

But the president of Hampton

Institute, Arthur Howe, appealed

directly to Eleanor Roosevelt,

who visited the neighborhood in

1938 and advocated for its black

residents.

“She said, ‘They will not be

moved,’ ” Wilson said.

“Eleanor Roosevelt would get a

served history, from reconstruct-

ed Colonial villages to Civil War

battlefields, the artifacts of Afri-

can American heritage have

largely vanished with time and

neglect.

But traces remain. And one of

the deepest — just off the city’s

major commercial strip, between

a Wawa and a CVS — is at Ab-

erdeen Gardens.

The community’s roots span

centuries, possibly all the way to

those first Africans. The genera-

tions who followed tell a story of

mutual reliance and security, of a

place that sheltered its members

and helped them succeed. Today’s

Aberdeeners, as they call them-

selves, are fighting to keep the

legacy alive — not just the collec-

tion of 158 modest brick houses

but the powerful sense of black

community formed here.

“I think Aberdeen Gardens

represents a microcosm of the

journey that we’ve taken,” said

Steven Bond, 45, a Hampton as-

sistant city manager, who is

black. “A lot of African American

history has been lost because

those in power with the resources

to preserve it chose not to. It’s

different in Aberdeen Gardens.”

The neighborhood, said histo-

rian Cassandra Newby-Alexan-

der, “is something that didn’t get

erased.”

M

argaret Wilson’s grand-

parents were the first

family to move in, in 1937.

She remembers them describing

the thrill of that day — their three

boys unloading furniture from a

wagon across the muddy, unfin-

ished roads. The excitement of

the tidy brick house, the hard-

wood floors, indoor plumbing,

modern appliances. A huge step

up from the run-down place

where her shipyard-working

grandfather had lived.

Their oldest son managed to

get one of the houses a year later,

and that’s where Wilson was born

in 1939.

Black children from all over

the region were brought to the

community’s Aberdeen Elemen-

tary School, and there Wilson

learned a different history than

was taught in many of the area’s

white schools.

She learned about the White

Lion, the English ship that traded

“20 and odd” Africans for provi-

sions at Point Comfort in 1619.

About how those and others who

followed settled all around the

area, most bound into slavery.

How those slaves built the

stone Fort Monroe on Point Com-

fort in the 1830s. And how in 1861

three black men — Shepard Mal-

lory, Frank Baker and James

Townsend — escaped white slave

owners and demanded the feder-

al troops at Fort Monroe give

them refuge.

Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler de-

clared them “contraband” and

refused to return them to the

Confederates. As word spread,

hundreds and then thousands of

black Virginians escaped slavery

and flocked to Fort Monroe. They

lived at first in crude lean-tos in

the ruins of Hampton, burned by

its own residents rather than

leave it to the Union.

Vast “contraband camps” grew

up around the fort. Abolitionist

charities brought in teachers for

the children in the camps. Under

a giant oak, educator Mary Peake

read the Emancipation Procla-

mation aloud to the former

slaves.

Hampton Institute evolved

from the contraband camps as a

place to train black teachers. The

Emancipation Oak still stands on

the campus of what is now Hamp-

ton University.

And in the depths of Jim Crow

and the Depression, leaders at

Hampton Institute applied to

HAMPTON FROM A

Much African American heritage has been erased. Not here.

JOHN VACHON/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

RYAN M. KELLY FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

TOP: A row of finished homes in what was then known as Newport News Homesteads, in 1937. The community was built as part of

a New Deal program to provide housing for working-class black families from the nearby shipyards, railroads and dockyards. It was

designed by a black architect, overseen by a black supervisor and built by black laborers. ABOVE: What the Hampton, Va.,

community, now known as Aberdeen Gardens and granted landmark status, looks like today. All of the original homes still stand.

RYAN M. KELLY FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

One of the homes, now the Aberdeen Gardens Historic

Museum, has been restored with period furniture.

BY SUDARSAN RAGHAVAN

AND MISSY RYAN

cairo — An American military

drone was shot down in a rugged

patch of northern Yemen, said

U.S. officials and Yemeni rebels,

immediately triggering accusa-

tions of Iranian involvement in a

region where tensions between

Washington and Tehran are

growing.

On Wednesday, a military

spokesman for the Iran-aligned

rebels, known as the Houthis,

said in a tweet and on the group’s

TV station, al-Masirah, that an

MQ-9 Reaper drone was brought

down by the rebels’ air defense

system late Tuesday.

Lt. Col. Earl Brown, a spokes-

man for U.S. Central Command,

said in a statement, “We are

investigating reports of an attack

by Iranian-backed Houthis... on

a U.S. unmanned aircraft system

(UAS) operating in authorized

airspace over Yemen.”

U.S. officials, speaking on the

condition of anonymity to dis-

cuss undisclosed details of the

event, said an American MQ-

drone had been shot down.

The attack, the second such

instance in three months, threat-

ens to worsen tensions in a

region that has become a battle-

ground for the United States and

its Sunni Muslim allies against

Shiite Iran. On Wednesday,

Brown said, “We have been clear

that Iran’s provocative actions

and support to militants and

proxies, like the Iranian-backed

Houthis, poses a serious threat to

stability in the region and our

partners.”

In June, the U.S. military said

the Houthis had shot down a U.S.

drone with Iranian assistance.

The attacks underscore the grow-

ing military capabilities of the

rebels, who only a few years ago

were mountain fighters with no

access to armed drones or the

surface-to-air missiles that they

claimed were used to strike the

U.S. drones.

Houthi military spokesman

Yahya Saria claimed in a tweet

that the missile that brought

down the MQ-9 drone was “built

locally and will be unveiled soon

at a press conference.”

“We affirm to the powers of

aggression that they need to

think about the consequences of

their actions,” Saria said. “Our

aerial zone will no longer be

violated like before.”

It was unclear what mission

the U.S. military drone was un-

dertaking, but the U.S. military

has deployed drones and air-

strikes in previous years to target

Yemen’s al-Qaeda affiliate,

known as al-Qaeda in the Ara-

bian Peninsula.

The United States is backing a

Saudi-led coalition of regional

Sunni countries that is fighting

the Shiite Houthis to help restore

Yemen’s internationally recog-

nized government and stem

Iran’s regional influence. Iran

has denied providing military

and financial backing to the

Houthis.

Tensions between the United

States and Iran have escalated

since the Trump administration

withdrew from an international

pact to contain Iran’s nuclear

capabilities and increased sanc-

tions. That has triggered back-

and-forth accusations between

President Trump and senior Ira-

nian officials, as well as tit-for-tat

attacks and seizures involving oil

tankers in the Persian Gulf and

the Mediterranean Sea.

In June, Iran’s Islamic Revolu-

tionary Guard Corps shot down a

U.S. surveillance drone in the

Strait of Hormuz, further height-

ening tensions.

[email protected]

[email protected]

Ryan reported from Washington.

U.S. military drone is shot down over northern Yemen

OMAR SOBHANI/REUTERS

A U.S. MQ-9 Reaper drone in Afghanistan. The downing Tuesday

in Yemen was the second such attack there in three months.