Reflections on Research: Race and the Virginia Blue Ridge

Abstract

In the 1930s, Shenandoah National Park was established in the Virginia Blue Ridge through the displacement of nearly 500 white families. In recent decades, my scholarship and that of others focused upon the manner in which hackneyed stereotypes about backward mountaineers were mobilized to garner public support for the condemnation of family farms and, in some cases, the institutionalization, sterilization, and incarceration of some of the most impoverished. But, in focusing solely upon the 20th century and the impacts on the white displaced, this research has perpetrated structural violence by obscuring the role of race and racism in the wider Blue Ridge. Archaeological and documentary evidence from the 1990s National Park Service–funded “Survey of Rural Mountain Settlement” is reexamined and reconsidered to begin the process of redressing the silencing of African American histories in the Blue Ridge and surrounding valley and piedmont regions.