B4 EZ M2 THE WASHINGTON POST.WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 2 , 2020
BY LAURA VOZZELLArichmond — Norfolk City
Council member Andria P. Mc-
Clellan joined the crowded 2021
race for Virginia lieutenant gov-
ernor on Tuesday, billing herself
as a “pragmatic progressive” in-
tent on both expanding the econ-
omy and addressing climate
change.
An independent on the non-
partisan council, McClellan, 50, is
running as a Democrat. She is the
11th candidate and seventh Dem-
ocrat to formally get into the race.
The incumbent, Lt. Gov. Justin
Fairfax (D), will not seek reelec-
tion because he is running for
governor.
A part-time job with limited
powers, the lieutenant governor-
ship is highly sought after as a
potential path to the Executive
Mansion.
“Right now, we can’t afford to
be divided,” McClellan says in a
campaign video that touts her
support for giving every family
access to high-speed Internet,
quality education, health care
and good-paying jobs. “We’re a
commonwealth that wins by ad-
dition, not by subtraction.”
In an interview ahead of her
announcement, McClellan also
stressed the need to address the
effects of climate change — some-
thing she said is already being felt
not just in her flood-prone coast-
al city, but also across the state.
“It’s not just sea-level rise,” she
said. “The rain bombs that are the
result of climate change are also
creating havoc.”
Other Democrats competing
for the party’s nomination next
summer are: Del. Hala S. Ayala
(Prince William), former Virginia
Democratic Party chairman Paul
Goldman, Del. Elizabeth R. Guz-
man (Prince William), FairfaxCounty NAACP President Sean
Perryman, Del. Sam Rasoul (Roa-
noke) and Arlington County busi-
nessman Xavier Warren.Babur Lateef, chair of the
Prince William County School
Board, had publicly considered
seeking the nomination but an-nounced about two weeks ago
that he would take a pass, focus-
ing instead on ways to safely
reopen schools.
The Republican hopefuls are
Fairfax County business consul-
tant Puneet Ahluwalia; Lance
Allen, a national security compa-
ny executive who lives in Fauqui-
er County; Del. Glenn R. Davis Jr.
(Virginia Beach); and former del-
egate Timothy D. Hugo (Fairfax).
A former entrepreneur mar-
ried to a Norfolk Southern senior
executive, McClellan is consid-
ered a formidable fundraiser
with the ability to substantially
bankroll her campaign. Between
July and September, she raised
$130,000 — nearly twice as much
as the next-highest contender —
through a political action com-
mittee she created for what was
then her potential campaign.
She was the PAC’s biggest do-
nor, with a $19,010 contribution.She also was the top donor to her
2016 and 2020 council cam-
paigns, to which she gave a com-
bined $51,274, and to her unsuc-
cessful state Senate bid in 2013, to
which she gave $25,015. Her late
father-in-law, James W. McClel-
lan, who died in 2016 and was
also a Norfolk Southern execu-
tive, donated $7,500 to her first
council race and $10,000 to her
Senate campaign.
The last Virginian to leap di-
rectly from local government to
the lieutenant governorship was
U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), who
won the office in 2001 while
serving as mayor of Richmond.
But McClellan represents about
125,000 citizens in a “superward”
that covers about half of Norfolk
— a considerably larger constitu-
ency than the state delegates in
the race, who each represent
about 80,000 people.
[email protected]VIRGINIA
N orfolk c ouncil member i s 1 1th candidate to enter lieutenant governor’s race
ADAM MCCALL/MCCLELLAN CAMPAIGN
A ndria McClellan, an independent on the nonpartisan Norfolk City
Council, i s running as a Democrat for lieutenant governor.Louisiana or Brazil, for example,
baptized enslaved Africans and
gave them Christian names. In
British colonies, where enslaved
people were regarded almost en-
tirely as property, names were
less likely to be recorded. The
1870 federal census, the first
after emancipation, was a boon
to researchers because it was the
first to have names of former
slaves.
The project could also be of
great value to family historians,
who will be able to access the
research of top scholars for free,
Williams said.
A digital academic journal
that launched in tandem will
include resources for family his-
torians and provide peer review
for academic contributions to
the project.
The team is exploring a part-
nership with FamilySearch, a
free genealogy database run by
the Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints.
Even with expert knowledge
of his own family tree, Gates is
excited to see what more he
might learn about his ancestors
as new data collections move
into E nslaved.org.
He descends, he said, from
freed slaves in Virginia and has
been able to identify three sets of
fourth great-grandparents. All
of them lived within 30 miles of
where Gates grew up in Pied-
mont, W.Va., which was once
part of the state of Virginia.
For Gates, there’s no such
thing as enough information.
Soon to be part of Enslaved.org:
A Library of Virginia database of
tax records for more than 50,000
free Black people who lived in
Virginia between 1793 and 1866.
They will include information
about gender, age, family, rela-
tionships and even physical de-
scriptions, he said.
A nd of course, Gates hopes to
find out how much his ancestors
paid in taxes.
“That’s gold,” he said.
[email protected]anonymously on plantations,
suffered and died. Many en-
slaved people were greatly
skilled — for example, bringing
sophisticated knowledge of rice
production to the lowlands of
Georgia and South Carolina and
northeastern Brazil.
“Their knowledge was used to
oppress them, but they also con-
tributed greatly to the develop-
ment of North America” and
other slave-holding regions,
Hawthorne said.
Enslaved.org uses a powerful
database similar to those used
by Wikipedia and Yelp to surface
information in what is known as
the Semantic Web.
Through a computing tech-
nique called the “semantic tri-
ple,” the information is entered
in three-part sentences, with a
subject, a predicate and an ob-
ject. “The simplest triple would
be something like ‘Maria born
1830,’ then ‘Maria baptized 1834’
and ‘Maria married 1849 ,’ ” Reh-
berger said.
Triples can be gleaned from
any article, register or biography
and then linked with other infor-
mation in a sprawling network
known as a “triplestore.”
A researcher can cross-refer-
ence names, places, events and
dates, and discover that multiple
documents are referring to the
same human being. Each data
point tracks back to the original
source, providing opportunities
to learn more of the context of
the enslaved person’s life.
“It’s not just about a name. It’s
not just about a date. It’s not just
a piece of evidence. You want
people to experience the con-
text,” Rehberger said. “It’s like
all the moments in a person’s
life.... You have all these little
facts, and then you have to
weave them together into a
meaningful story.”
The ability to find names of
enslaved people varies depend-
ing on where they were en-
slaved.
The Catholics who settled in“There’s millions and millions
and millions more names still
locked up in documents.”
The origins of Enslaved.org
can be traced back several years
ago to a collaboration between
Walter Hawthorne, a historian
of slavery at Michigan State and
a principal investigator, and
Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, a histo-
rian of slavery in Louisiana.
The two reached out to Wil-
liams, who like Hawthorne had
developed a robust database of
enslaved people in Brazil, with
the idea of creating a centralized
online project that would allow
researchers to cross-pollinate
their findings.
The team brainstormed the
idea with Rehberger and then
discussed it with Earl Lewis,
who at the time was president of
the Mellon Foundation. Lewis
brought Gates and David Eltis, a
slave-trade historian at Emory
University, on board. All along,
the idea for the project grew
more ambitious, adding the con-
tributions of more scholars over
time.
The Brazilian databases and
Hall’s — a compendium of about
100,000 enslaved people in Lou-
isiana — are included in the
project’s inaugural databases.
Enslaved.org also includes 75
biographical stories from Biog-
raphies of the Enslaved, a proj-
ect of the Hutchins Center, and
the Slave Voyages Trans-Atlantic
Slave Trade database, co-devel-
oped by Eltis, among others.
About 30 more databases will be
added over the next year, includ-
ing collections from the Library
of Virginia, the Maryland State
Archives and the Oatlands His-
toric House and Garden in Lees-
burg, a former working planta-
tion once owned by wealthy en-
slaver George Carter, Rehberger
said.
The founders of Enslaved.org
hope that the open-platform ac-
cess will help banish the com-
mon notion of one-dimensional
enslaved people who workedlawsuits, bills of sale.
There are lengthy histories of
just a handful of named enslaved
African Americans — think Har-
riet Tubman and Frederick
Douglass — because the data is
not organized to allow for that.
Slavery historians have tended
to work in silos, traveling the
Atlantic world at great expense
to scour records that are often
poorly preserved, said Dean Re-
hberger, a principal investigator
and director of Matrix, the Cen-
ter for D igital Humanities and
Social S ciences at Michigan
State. Their findings are gener-
ally not broadly shared.
But in the past decade,
mounting research on the slave
trade and the power of technol-
ogy have converged. The inter-
section comes amid a burgeon-
ing public desire to understand
enslaved people not as numbers
but as human beings.
“We’re just at the point of
recovering all these names
where we can pull together sev-
eral million names over the next
few years. That’s going to be
quite possible,” Rehberger said.and deeper knowledge of the
slave past, which is such an
important part of American his-
tory, inextricably intertwined
with the noble ideas embodied
in our founding documents,” he
said. “... Until now so much of
the historic record has been bur-
ied or available in fragments.”
For centuries, the lived ex-
periences of enslaved people
were overshadowed by num-
bers: the 350-year slave trade,
more than 43,000 transatlantic
voyages, 12.5 million Africans
forced onto European and
American slave ships, only
10.8 million of whom survived
the Middle Passage to arrive on
foreign shores.
Brazil received the most en-
slaved Africans: 4.9 million. Just
388,000 arrived in North Ameri-
ca, although by 1860 nearly
4 million lived in bondage in the
United States. Human identity
often took a back seat, especially
in non-Catholic jurisdictions, to
the monetary value and com-
mercial description of enslaved
people, found in tax registers,
probate and insurance records,Enslaved: Peoples of the His-
toric Slave Trade, a free, public
clearinghouse that launched
Tuesday with seven smaller,
searchable databases, will for the
first time allow anyone from aca-
demic historians to amateur fam-
ily genealogists to search for indi-
vidual enslaved people around
the globe in one central online
location.
It launches four centuries af-
ter the first enslaved Africans
arrived on the shores of the
English colony of Virginia in
- By then, the transatlantic
slave trade was already more
than a century old.
Directed by data scientists at
Michigan State University and
four principal investigators, in-
cluding Williams at U-Md., the
project debuted with informa-
tion about 500,000 named en-
slaved people and their circum-
stances, collected by some of the
world’s foremost historians of
slavery. More records of en-
slaved people, ethnic groups,
populations and places will be
entered over time as partner-
ships are forged with academics,
archives, museums and other
repositories of information.
As it evolves, Enslaved.org,
founded with a $1.5 million
grant from the Andrew W. Mel-
lon Foundation, “will revolu-
tionize our access to the past
lives and experiences of our en-
slaved ancestors more dramati-
cally and more definitively than
any other research project,” said
Henry Louis Gates Jr., director
of the Hutchins Center for Afri-
can and African American Re-
search at Harvard University
and a partner in the project.
At a time when the United
States is grappling with its slave-
owning past, the project also has
the potential to help the nation
more fully face its history, Gates
said.
“We cannot right the wrongs
of the present without a fuller
DATABASE FROM B1
Slavery database looks to shed light on human beings hidden by history
MARVIN JOSEPH/THE WASHINGTON POST
Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the Hutchins Center for African
and African American Research at Harvard University and a
partner in the Enslaved.org database project, during a d iscussion
on “Race in America” at the National Book Festival last year.JES FOUNDATION REPAIR
understands that foundation
cracks are stressful and
damage your home.Providing expert solutions with
nationally-backed transferable
warranties, we can keep your
home safe and healthy.Call Today for a FREE Inspection202-794-811 6 | 301-494-1407 | 703-574-7577FOLLOWINGGUIDELINESCDCFOLLOWINGGUIDELINESCDCSPECIAL OFFER** Financing offer subject to credit approval. Interest accrues during the promotional period. All
interest is waived if purchase amount is paid before expiration of promotional period. 17.99%
interest rate if not paid off within 12 months. Discount offer: ten percent off any job over
$2500 up to a max of $500. Coupon must be presented at time of inspection. Discount and
finance offers may not be combined. Offer may not be combined with any other offer. Limit
one per customer. Ask inspector for further details. Promo valid through 12/31/2020.NO INTERESTNO PAYMENT
UNTILJANUARY 2022$
500SAVEUP
TOBefore AfterCHECK YOUR FOUNDATION*Financing available to qualified purchasers. Contact your local dealer for financing details. Limited time offer. Valid through 1/1/21, at participating dealers only. Not available in AK; HI; or Nassau County, NY;
Suffolk County, NY; Westchester County, NY; and Buffalo County, NY. Also, may not be available in other areas. $1,000 off average price of a KOHLER® LuxStone® shower system (as defined by walls, base or tub,
accessories, and faucet). Dealer sets all prices and dealer is responsible for full amount of discount. Cannot be combined with any other advertised offer.