New Montpelier exhibit recalls a sad chapter in American history

On Sunday, the Culpeper Star-Exponent had a picture of the new exhibit at Montpelier, home of President James Madison in Orange County. The exhibit is the train station at the entrance to Montpelier, renovated to be how it had been from the time it was built in 1910 up until the late 1960s — which is to say it has been renovated so that it is segregated once again, with separate waiting rooms labeled “colored” and “white.”

In the newspaper picture, the signs painted on the top of the doorframes are crisp and new, and the train station looks a little too perfect, like something out of a Hallmark or American Girl movie.

Most of the “colored” signs I remember seeing as a child were dusty, faded and chipped — a permanent part of an old and tired landscape.

The Montpelier exhibit’s personal irony for me is that the only place in my childhood that I can recall seeing blacks and whites mingle socially outside of embassy parties was at Marion duPont Scott’s Montpelier steeplechases. At her annual steeplechase races, it was not unusual to see a white man and a black man sitting or standing together, watching the races and chatting man-to-man and eye-to-eye about a horse’s lineage and stride, or a particular jockey’s chances against the field.

But after the day’s races were over, everyone went back to their usual rigidly stratified social contact until the next year’s steeplechase.

The South was racially segregated, and that was all there was to that.

If my friend Paul and I wanted to go to the movies together, we had to go on colored night. If we wanted to get ice cream, we either had to find a walk-up window or I would have to go in and buy two cones to-go and bring them outside for us to eat.

As a white boy, I could freely enter his “colored” world, but Paul could not enter mine. Going with Paul and his dad to a sit-down restaurant was just not possible unless we went to a restaurant for “persons of color.” I could go with Paul to the “brown town” across the road from our farm to play “I spy” with the black children over there, but their parents would not have allowed them to do the reverse.

It was simply too dangerous to act contrary to the social norms. If you went against the system, you either wound up in jail or came up missing. We had seen the Ku Klux Klan in action, and we had seen the sheriff’s department in action, and it was my family’s firm belief and the belief of all the blacks we knew that the KKK and the county government seamlessly worked together with a shared mind-set and a common goal.

Way back in 1688, the Mennonites of Germantown, Pa., published a resolution stating that treating blacks differently than whites should be abolished. It was immoral, they said, not because of somebody’s opinion, but because the New Testament declared it to be so.

Building on the words of Jesus, they reasoned that, “There is a saying, that we should do to all men like as we will be done ourselves; making no difference of what generation, descent or colour they are. … In Europe, there are many oppressed for conscience-sake; and here there are those oppressed which are of a black colour.”

That is not simply black history; that is our commonly shared American history. Imagine the pains we could have avoided had we simply followed the New Testament. Let’s consider anew what future pains we can avoid if we will choose to follow it now.

Sharman practices law in Culpeper. His column appears each Tuesday.