Mathews supervisors have adopted a resolution asking the Virginia Department of Historic Resources to rescind its recent approval of a highway marker recognizing the early 20th century exodus of black residents from Gwynn’s Island. Members voted 3-2 to approve the resolution during the board’s Oct. 17 board meeting, held in the historic courthouse.

The motion to approve the resolution was presented by supervisor Mike Walls and supported by Dave Jones and Tim Doss. Chair Janice Phillips and supervisor Tom Bowen dissented.

The vote came after a half dozen or so Gwynn’s Island residents took turns objecting to the marker being placed on the island and reading an approximately 1,200-word document outlining their argument that the text of the marker is based on conjecture rather than facts.

The marker states that racial tension following a confrontation between a black man and a white man in December 1915 was the primary factor that caused the black population of the island to move to the mainland in the decade between 1910 and 1921. The text reads as follows:

“In 1910, Gwynn’s Island was home to 135 Black residents (17% of the population), many of them landowners. This community, which likely originated in the 1600s, had its own church and school—yet by 1921, all Black citizens had departed. Some may have left for economic reasons, but the primary cause of the exodus was racial tension that followed a Dec. 1915 fight among Black and White men. Subsequent threats against Black residents led them to fear for their safety. They left, selling their property under pressure and losing their community and the institutions they had built. During the Jim Crow era, threats and violence drove many Black families from localities across the U.S.”

The Virginia Board of Historic Resources voted unanimously to approve the marker at its September meeting. Over a dozen Mathews residents attended the meeting either in person or virtually, some speaking for and others against.

In voting his approval, one board member said the marker had been through “more review than any marker proposal I’m aware of,” and he didn’t see anything racist in it. Another board member identified herself as Native American and said that, although economics did drive people from their communities in that era, it’s also true that Jim Crow segregation and eugenics eroded opportunities for people of color.

The central argument Gwynn’s Island residents made in opposing the marker was that the black population left the island for economic reasons, including a decline in the seafood business and a rise in opportunities in the shipbuilding industry on the Peninsula and Southside. The document they prepared stated that the black population of the island had decreased almost continuously for 100 years prior to the incident, and that highway marker program personnel downplayed economic information that they were provided, including that there was a “boom and inflation during World War I, a short but brutal recession (1918-1919), brief recovery, and finally a deflationary depression (1920-1921).”

They claimed there was no recorded evidence of threats or violence against black residents, thus such assertions were based on hearsay, and that there was no evidence of below-market sales of property by black residents.

Finally, the speakers didn’t limit their arguments to the footnotes provided with the marker. Instead, they included arguments against comments made by marker researchers on their own website and in an email exchanged with the DHR.

Island resident Vicky Armentrout said during public comment period that “markers are intended to present historically accurate information. The economics in play are known, significant, and nationwide. To downplay their effects on an isolated community is just wrong.”

Dave Skirvin of Gwynn, talked about the decrease in both black and white populations on the island, pointing out that there was a migration of black people from the South to the industrialized North beginning in 1915, and Tyrone Hudgins of Grimstead said he opposed the sign because “in a time when we are supposed to be moving forward with better relations, I see no purpose for this sign.”

“There is little, if any, factual evidence to support the points they try to render,” he said. “We are not opposed to a sign that is fact-based and presents a history of the black community that did exist. Let’s portray the good things these black people contributed.”

James E. Hudgins Jr. said his father was the 14-year-old who was mentioned as being present at the store the night the fight mentioned in the marker text occurred. He said the reason it happened was that a black man named Smith had been drinking and sexually assaulted the daughter of the store’s white owner, and that her boyfriend, who was working in the store at the time, “took it up.”

According to documentation, Smith was charged and convicted of wounding another man, but received a relatively light sentence. Hudgins did not address evidence presented in the footnotes to the marker text that the judge overseeing Smith’s trial gave instructions to the jury that refer to evidence that he had acted in self-defense during the altercation.

Island resident Glen Gwynn said the black exodus from Gwynn’s Island was a hundred-year process that “didn’t happen overnight, didn’t start overnight.” People who lived on the island didn’t have a bridge then, he said, and “they couldn’t go to work and come home and feed their families.”

“The migration occurred, the population changed,” he said. “The hearsay is the why.”

Speaking on behalf of the Mathews Chapter of the NAACP, which sponsored the marker, chapter president Edith Turner said the text of the marker was based on historical facts that were cited from several sources and that they “should not be rewritten or denied despite several attempts to do so.” She said the research had been vetted by DHR, and she denied that the marker was aimed at current residents of the island, “as some letters claimed.” She said she had seen no evidence to support the claim that Smith assaulted a girl, “but we know that during the Jim Crow era there’s plenty of documented evidence of what would’ve happened to Mr. Smith and what his fate would’ve been had that occurred.” She said the information “would’ve been helpful during the vetting process.”

“What will history 100 years from now say about Mathews and its residents?” she said. “With their 50-foot Confederate flags and statues of past losing generals and a current convicted felon insurrectionist. Why are folks today aligning themselves with things that happened so long ago? … This is another incident where we need to acknowledge the past, including injustices committed, in order to shape a better future.”

Sheila Crowley of Port Haywood, said that social science research has found that “the story written in the time may not be the whole story” because there are marginalized people whose “voices get suppressed.” She pointed to oral histories as a way of correcting that discrepancy. She said that, although Hudgins had presented his oral history as fact, “you can’t have just one person’s view.”

“But when you find a story that gets repeated … by different people in different places, that have similarity,” she said, “you can in fact make a statement about that being accurate for the people in that time at that moment.”

Marker documentation

Allison Thomas of Los Angeles, California, whose ancestors were Gwynn’s Island residents and who was instrumental in getting the marker approved, provided the Gazette-Journal with eight pages of footnotes she gave DHR that document research she and others made to support the assertions made in the marker.

Among the points made in the footnotes were that records show there was a “colored” school on Gwynn’s Island from at least 1905 until 1916, but that it had “ceased to function before the 1916-1917 school year.” Reference is made to an article in the Aug. 31, 1916 Mathews Journal, eight months after the fight, which says, “Most of the colored people have moved away to Hampton. The few that are here are making preparations to leave.” At the time of the January 1920 census, there were only 19 black residents on the island, say the footnotes, and the Mathews Journal reported on Sept. 16, 1920, that “The last colored family moved off the island last week.”

While economic factors may have played a part in some of the black families leaving the island, the footnotes maintain that “most of the black residents of Gwynn’s Island had departed by August 2016, well before the U.S. entered the war (World War I) and the wartime economy truly accelerated,” that the economy on the island “was broadly stable during the 1910s,” and that “we did not find evidence of serious economic problems that might have forced the community to scatter in search of better opportunities.” While only 14 percent of the white population left the island during the 1910s, say the footnotes, 100 percent of the black population left.

The footnotes also list statements from a number of people who said they had always heard that black people were not welcome on Gwynn’s Island, statements by descendants of black island residents who had been told their families had been “run off” the island, and articles in various publications referring to Gwynn’s Island as a “white man’s paradise.”

The footnotes make reference to census records, birth and death certificates, and World War I draft registrations; deeds and other land records recorded in the Mathews County Clerk’s Office; John Dixon’s book “The Black Americans of Gwynn’s Island, (1600s through 1900s)”; articles written in the Mathews Journal, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, and the Southside Sentinel; Virginia Department of Education records; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics records; local oral histories; and various texts that document the history of black flight and racial cleansing in America.