I had expected to have the opportunity to write about this year’s Virginia General Assembly session, which began last week and runs through the middle of March. But today’s Virginia Gazette didn’t include a story about this topic, so I needed to find something else to write about (according to the rules I have set for myself). This story about a fairly obscure question about the location of a corporate boundary seems an unlikely candidate for exploration, but I think there’s something to say.
As I teach history classes and continue to explore what it means to be a historian, I keep coming back to the same conclusion: The answers you get depend on the questions you ask. In this article, the question framed by the newspaper’s editor is simple: Where’s the York County and Poquoson Border? The answer lies in maps and government actions, as the article explores. But if you ask a different question – Why is there a border between York County and Poquoson? – you get a different and more interesting answer.
Note: Poquoson is pronounced “Po-COE-sen,” derived from a Native American word that roughly translates to “great marsh.” This is an accurate description of a community that has a mean elevation lower than seven feet above sea level.
So we’re going to play a game. What hypothesis can you propose to query the following dates?
One possible hypothesis goes something like this:
These four events are elements of the policy of Massive Resistance to racial integration that characterized Virginia politics in the 1950s and 960s.
It’s not hard to find evidence to support some parts of this hypothesis. First of all, the academies have been specifically labeled as “segregation academies,” established to resist the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education mandate to integrate public schools. These schools have bowed to a more evolved sensibility and now have a racially mixed student body, but that does not negate the motives behind their founding.
So what about Poquoson? It was originally part of neighboring York County, but (according to the city’s website) the city “was incorporated in 1952 to retain control over its schools.” Coincidence or intentional? That’s what is of interest to historians, who have explored this possibility in the past. The Center for History and Social Justice at Tougaloo College (an HBCU in Jackson, Mississippi) identified Poquoson as a possible Sundown Town, as this map illustrates.
In case you’re unfamiliar with the concept – “sundown towns” were all-white communities that were identified– either informally or with actual signage – as places where African Americans were not welcome to stay in town after sunset.
Current data shows the local impact of this history:
Here’s another piece of data: the partisan breakdown of voting in the 2022 congressional midterm elections in Virginia:
The Tougaloo Center provides information about Poquoson’s designation as a sundown town, including anecdotes relating to the town’s history. Here are a couple of examples from its website.
A soldier stationed nearby from 1993-1997 reported “being told by the base housing office that because I was black, I should not look for a home in Poquoson (a few miles away) because they actively tried to keep the town “lily-white”. They didn’t even want Blacks driving through to look at homes in the town. A few Blacks moved in and were regularly harrassed.”
Testimony of a former resident: “My high-school diploma was from a town that didn’t even exist until 1954 [sic], when the desegregation ruling was put out, and so the white section of York County, Virginia separated into a small town called Poquoson.
I think this story in today’s newspaper is much more interesting when it’s framed by a different question – instead of “where is the boundary,” the question of “why is there a boundary” opens the possibilities of a deeper meaning. I don’t mean to suggest that every story reported in the “news” part of the paper should also contain this kind of analytical information, but I do think that readers of the news should query the story – and themselves – for a deeper understanding of its meaning.
As I have probably said before, I have a close black Army friend (a retired Lieutenant Colonel). One afternoon we spent a little time talking about our lives growing up. His father had enlisted in the Army in WWII and stayed in after the war. He spent several assignments around Fort Benning. I can guarantee you that the America he grew up in was much different that the America that I grew up in as a white kid in the Midwest.
Wow! always thought Poquoson was just a nice little area - had no idea that this was its history. Just another glaring illustration of institutional racism, sadly not just in Virginia but across the country. I always find it interesting that while the South is often named as the racist part of the country, you map shows that it was - er, is - everywhere. What the heck do we have to do to end it? First, we could publish this essay widely.