Danville native Jeff Bennett grew up hearing stories about his ancestry from his parents. His mother told him that he got his height — Bennett stands 6 feet, 3 inches tall — from his oldest known ancestor, Flem Adams Sr., who was born into slavery in Pittsylvania in 1830 and died a free man in 1916.
Adams stood 7 feet tall, wore a size 22 shoe, had to duck through doorways and wore people’s used jeans as cutoff shorts, Bennett’s mother told him. He was enslaved at the Oak Ridge plantation near Berry Hill in Pittsylvania.
“As I got older, I wanted to learn more — not just about him, but kind of the times that he grew up in,” said Bennett during a recent author talk in the county.
Bennett’s book, “The Black Belt of Virginia: Untold Stories of African American History,” was published this year and details the overlooked history of the state’s Black communities.
It includes stories about a Black woman spy disguised as an enslaved woman working in the home of Jefferson Davis, the first and only president of the Confederate States of America. It also explains a network of free Black communities during slavery and the years after emancipation when dozens of Black politicians took office.
Bennett, a writer specializing in Black history, race relations and the African diaspora, now lives in Alexandria, but he comes home to Southside about four times a year.
Recently, he’s been in town to promote his book, which started with a fascination with his own ancestry and investigating local and state history that he didn’t learn in school.
“I didn’t know that there were over 80 Black politicians serving throughout the commonwealth in 1870, just five years after emancipation,” Bennet said. “I didn’t know that there were free Black communities in slaveholding states.”
His research into these untold stories inspired him to write his book, which he called “a shorter work with a lot of facts that aren’t covered so much” in Virginia’s history.
Bennett studied existing research and literature on Black history and gathered oral histories from community elders for the book. Since there’s a lot of Black history that isn’t formally codified, he also used resources like Bibles with handwritten ancestries inside and funeral programs.
“Older folks didn’t have resources online, but they did keep funeral programs,” Bennett said. “For example, I knew that my grandfather had worked at Dan River Mills, but I didn’t know what he did. I came across the funeral program, which said that he had worked in the dye house. If someone didn’t keep those resources, we wouldn’t know that information.”
The title of his book refers to “the Black belt regions of the South with high populations of Black people,” Bennett said, although a Floyd resident once asked him if it referred to martial arts.
During the event, he read several excerpts from his book and answered questions from attendees.
Karice Luck-Brimmer, a local Black historian and genealogist, organized the event, which was held at the Harvey School, an 1880s schoolhouse for Black children that has been restored by former student Annie Mosby.
The book also contains a collection of Bennett’s essays, covering the graves of enslaved people at the Berry Hill megasite, which is now a large industrial park in Pittsylvania County; how Lexington’s Black community supported the Virginia Military Institute (Bennett’s alma mater); Black baseball; and the Pittsylvania County land that his mother left him.
Bennett’s book can be purchased on Amazon.
