Virginia’s historical highway marker program was created in 1927 with a white audience in mind.
These markers turned the state into “an open-air museum, guiding travelers on their journeys,” according to a 2019 guidebook on the markers and African American history.
But this idea was far more accessible to white travelers than Black travelers at the time, says the guidebook, written by Jennifer Loux, the highway marker program manager for the Virginia Department of Historic Resources.
“While the open road promised freedom and adventure to white motorists, African Americans had reason to find automobile tourism much less inviting,” Loux wrote. “Segregation and racial prejudice meant that black travelers were often denied service at roadside businesses, or were served on an unequal basis.”
And the primarily white audience also shaped the topics featured on the markers themselves.
Only three of the 700 markers erected before 1930 directly featured Black history, and by 1941, that number had risen to a mere nine. Meanwhile, a full third of the first 700 markers revolved around Civil War history.
Almost 100 years later, there is still a dearth of historical markers relating to Black history. But DHR is working to remedy that.
There are 2,698 markers in Virginia, excluding those that simply identify county borders. About 17% of those, or 451, focus on Black history, according to Loux.
But that’s a significant increase from just a few years ago. In the last five years, 63% of all new markers have focused on Black history, she said.
Some of these new markers in Southwest and Southside tell the story of people like Charles Spurgeon Johnson, a sociologist and civil rights leader who was born in Bristol, and Samuel F. Kelso, who was born into slavery and then became one of Lynchburg’s first Black teachers after the Civil War. Other markers recognize places, like the African American section of Maple Hill Cemetery in Bluefield.
Still, the work to present a more holistic history of Virginia through historical markers is far from complete.
Part of the source of this imbalance is that the field of historic preservation is relatively young, said Julie Langan, director of DHR.
“When it really got its legs in the late ’60s, people focused on the most obviously historic properties and gave them the most attention,” she said. “Sites associated with presidents or military battles or really beautiful buildings. … What we weren’t looking at was all the rest of it.”
In its early days, the historical marker program was skewed toward topics like colonial churches and houses, the Revolutionary War, the Civil War and westward expansion.
Not only was Black history glossed over, but so was history about women and indigenous people, Langan said.
“It’s the same with the Virginia Landmarks Register for all the same reasons,” she said. “It’s understandable why we focused on what we did in the ’60s, but we have a much broader sense of history now and a stronger commitment to being inclusive.”
Now, DHR is making a concerted effort to fill the gaps created by what Langan called a “skewed portrayal of history.”
A few things have happened recently to help the number of markers focusing on Black history climb, Loux said.
One was that the Northam administration organized a Black History Month K-12 highway marker contest that resulted in about 15 new markers on topics proposed by children across Virginia.
The DHR also received $100,000 in funding from the General Assembly in 2021 to help diversify the subject matter of the highway marker program.
That money is going to result in between 33 and 35 new markers on Black history, on topics that DHR determined to be “high-priority,” Loux said. So far, 16 of those markers have been installed, six have been manufactured and are awaiting installation, two are on order, and the rest are in various stages of the approval process.
On top of that, most marker ideas are now coming to DHR through applications from community groups or individuals.
“There’s just been such a groundswell of interest in African American history,” Loux said. “In the last five years or more, a large percentage of the applications that we receive are on topics of Black history.”
DHR began accepting applications for highway markers from the public in 1979. Up until then, the topics of markers were decided by staff only.
“Until the 1970s, the topics were primarily chosen by just the staff, whoever was working in the marker program,” Loux said. “That’s why in the early decades, the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s, African American history was completely ignored.”
The application system opened this process up to the public, resulting in more diverse suggestions and making the program more inclusive, she said.
However, “public interest definitely exceeds our capacity,” Langan said. “It’s very difficult to turn people away or to tell them that they’re at the end of a very long line. That’s just our reality.”
Successful applicants must also pay for the marker to be manufactured and installed, which costs about $3,000 today.
DHR gets most of its discretionary funding from the General Assembly, but it hasn’t received any since the 2021 grant. And when DHR staff thinks something deserves a marker, but no application has come from the public, funding is a big obstacle.
“We have a working wish list,” Langan said. “But sometimes a topic will stay on that wish list for a very long time.”
The wish list includes a marker in Franklin County about Adam Clayton Powell Sr., pastor of Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church, which in the 1930s was one of the largest Protestant congregations in the world, and a marker in Appomattox County about CCC Camp 1351, composed of Black World War I veterans who worked on what became the Appomattox Court House Historical Park.
DHR has heard some grumbling about its recent focus on underrepresented topics, Langan said, but there has been lots of positive feedback, too.
“We take some criticism from people who say, ‘Well, you’re only focusing on minority topics,’ but that’s because we ignored them for so long,” she said. “Even as it is, there’s a disparity. Yes, we have added more African American markers in the last few years than other topics, but there’s still an insufficient percentage of the overall markers that address topics related to African Americans.”
Loux and Langan emphasized that there’s a difference between a historical marker, which is meant to be educational, and something like a monument or memorial that is meant to be celebratory.
According to DHR’s application guidelines for a marker, the “purpose in erecting markers is to educate the public about Virginia’s history, not to honor, memorialize or commemorate persons, events or places.”
Markers are “not honorific in nature,” it says. Instead, they focus on accuracy, Langan said.
The text on markers must be vetted by scholars multiple times, she said. When a marker is erected, DHR is confident that the information being presented to the public is factual.
And whenever an older marker has to be replaced, DHR reviews the text and updates it “in light of modern historical scholarship,” Loux said. This has been the practice since the 1990s.
“We add context and include information that is historically significant but was overlooked or ignored at the time the original marker was erected,” she said. “Doing so makes the markers’ texts more accurate and complete.”
Erecting a monument may not require that level of verification, and monuments can often convey the bias of whoever is putting them up, Langan said.
“I can think of monuments that, maybe at the time they were done, people thought they were factual,” she said. “But now we look at them and we say, that’s not an accurate portrayal of history.”
Loux added that a community will often celebrate a marker’s installation, especially if they applied for it, but the marker itself is strictly educational.
While there’s been immense progress in this area in the last few years, Langan said that DHR will continue its effort to emphasize Black history — and other topics that haven’t received their due.
“What I would like to see happen is that we add a number of additional markers that deal with indigenous history, because we’re really behind in that area,” she said. “And I’m embarrassed that we don’t have more markers that recognize the contributions of women.”
These topics will hopefully start to see more markers as well, she said.
“We want to continue to focus on underrepresented segments,” Langan said. “Not exclusively African American history, although we’re going to continue down that path as well, but we want to do a better job of addressing this larger imbalance, too.”