As Women’s History Month kicks off, we wanted to use this week’s Richmond Story blog to discuss Mary-Cook Branch Munford.

Munford once wrote to a friend: “Education has been my deepest interest from my girlhood, beginning with an almost passionate desire for the best in education for myself, which was denied because it was not the custom for girls in my class to receive a college education at that time. This interest has grown with my growth and strengthened with each succeeding year in my life.”

Mary-Cooke Branch at 17, 1882, V.46.03.14, The Valentine

Around the time this picture was taken of Mary-Cooke Branch in 1882, she was pleading with her mother to attend college. Though her Richmond family was prominent and wealthy enough to afford tuition, her mother refused. Her mother agreed with public opinion that the education of women was not only unnecessary, but downright scandalous. And so, Mary went to a finishing school instead—the common fate of most wealthy daughters at the time. Finishing school taught social graces and etiquette. Academic studies there largely aimed to make women interesting conversationalists for prospective husbands.

Undeterred, in the 1890s, Branch founded a women’s discussion group to harness the resources, influence and energies of other Richmond socialites for the greater good. But her efforts to talk about Jackson Ward’s sewage and hookworm problem over tea did not appeal to most members. The meetings inevitably devolved into finishing school-style conversations about poetry. Clever as she was, Branch did put her “husbandry degree” to good use. By 1893, she had attracted Beverly Bland Munford, a local lawyer and state legislator with a reputation for social activism. In this marriage, Mary Cooke-Branch Munford was much more than a conversationalist. She was a co-conspirator.  The couple would combine their talents and wills to fight educational discrimination by sex, race and class in Virginia and throughout the South.

In 1901, the Munfords and four other women founded the Richmond Education Association. The group raised awareness for the need for public schools for both Black and white children. Child labor was still the norm and, at the time, the state’s public education system was so sparse and underfunded that it was inaccessible to most Virginians. Wanting to expand her activism beyond Richmond’s borders, Munford also became president of the Cooperative Education Association, which sought to expand public education in rural areas. She traveled through the South as part of an interracial coalition to lobby governments and provoke citizens to demand more for their children. She co-founded the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls and served on its board of trustees. With these efforts, Munford helped to build new rural high schools, improve teacher training and establish agricultural and industrial schools in areas that had severely lacked in formal education.

When Munford’s husband died in 1910, she shifted her tactics from stoking public support for educational progress to provoking Virginia legislators directly. She likely learned a great deal about how power works from Beverly, who had served as both a state senator and a state delegate. At this time, Virginia funded four colleges to educate men, though none for women. Any woman with academic aspirations who wanted to further her education went to one the state normal schools, to be trained as teachers. Normal schools lacked accreditation and ranked far below college standards.

No doubt Munford had her own college dreams in mind when she created the Co-ordinate College League. The sole mission of this body was to lobby the General Assembly to build a sister college for women at the University of Virginia. Shrewdly, she argued that improving women’s education would improve men’s education as well, since most teachers of boys were, in fact, women. Despite opposition from lawmakers and the school itself, she mustered significant public support and incessantly revived the issue before the General Assembly. All efforts—in 1910, 1912, 1914, 1916, and 1918—failed.  In 1916, the measure failed by only two votes. Her persistence finally paid off when the legislators caved and agreed to admit women to William and Mary in 1918. Two years later, the college appointed Munford as the first woman on their Board of Visitors. She would also serve as a trustee of the Black college, Fisk University. UVA granted her a place on their Board of Visitors in 1926, though the school would not admit women as undergraduates until 1970.

In 1920, Munford became the first woman to serve on Richmond’s School Board. Mary Munford Elementary was named after her in 1951, 13 years after her death. And though her most lasting impact remains on Virginia’s educational system, Munford’s activism was multi-faceted. From suffrage to labor to race relations, she fought for improved equality—although, notably, she never targeted segregation itself. She held office or influential appointments in several other progressive organizations throughout her life, including the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia, the YWCA, the National Child Labor Committee, the National Urban League, the regional Commission on Interracial Cooperation, the Virginia Inter-Racial Committee and many others. All this, she accomplished without a formal education and with two children. But if her finishing school education has taught us one thing it is that a woman cannot be finished—if she doesn’t want to be.

In the antebellum era, the Baptist church was popular in southern African American communities in part because it conferred more rights to Black members than other denominations. Often, Baptist churches offered free and enslaved Blacks full membership, and sometimes even administrative roles. This may be difficult to imagine now, but many Baptists churches at that time were not only integrated, but claimed many more Black members than white. In Richmond, this was indeed the case. By 1840, 400 white Baptists worshipped regularly with 2,000 Black Baptists. Membership, however, did not mean equality.  Black congregants could not hold leadership roles and were consigned to segregated seating. This double imbalance—with greater numbers and lesser rights—emboldened Richmond’s Black community to finally demand a church of their own—an unprecedented undertaking that would lead to more unprecedented demands for autonomy, justice, self-governance, freedom and, eventually, the full rights of citizenship.

But in 1840, when Black members of First Baptist Church asked their white deacons for permission to form their own congregation, the simple idea of Black assembly seemed far off.  Nine years before, in 1831, Nat Turner’s rebellion had made white Virginians terrified of Blacks convening at all.  And since Turner had been a preacher, the act of unsupervised Black worship had been deemed even more of a threat. For this, the General Assembly had specifically banned independent Black worship and Black preachers, a law enforced with whipping. These restrictions were still in affect when the deacons of First Baptist Church agreed to the radical proposition.

To accommodate state law, the establishment of an all-Black church in Richmond had qualifications. First and foremost, the new church had to be led by a white preacher, appointed by an all-white Baptist board of male overseers. Secondly, the church’s constitution and any changes to the document had to be approved by that body. Services could only be held during daylight hours.

First African Baptist Church, 1860s, Cook0287, The Valentine

Within a year, First African Baptist Church raised $7,500 to buy the brick building that had housed their parent church, First Baptist. Though white members gave generously to the fund, Black members, including many who were enslaved, contributed more than half the amount. The building on College Street at Broad was theirs. And within it, 940 members who held virtually no power in the city could aggregate their skills and passions into a powerful institution that served the needs of Richmond’s Black community. The potential became clear very soon, as their appointed white pastor, Robert Ryland, granted Black members a lot of leeway in managing their own institution.

Ryland was no abolitionist. In fact, he routinely preached about the submission of servants to masters. One enslaved congregant, Henry “Box” Brown, who would mail himself to freedom in a wooden box, later recalled that Ryland relished in these calls for submission. Maybe it was a ruse to pacify white anxiety—maybe not. In practice, though, Ryland allowed the 30 Black deacons (elected by Black congregants) to coordinate church activities, handle finances, regulate membership, run the administration and more with little interference. He allowed the members to elect “assistant preachers.” The white overseers, too, rarely intervened in these matters. Perhaps these glimmers of autonomy for an otherwise highly controlled community was what caused the membership of FABC to nearly double in its first year.

Ryland began his services with an opening prayer. Often, he’d call on one of the elected assistant preachers to stand up and give this opening prayer. Then, perhaps 30 minutes later, that same opening prayer was still going on, sounding less like a prayer and more like a full sermon. In this way, Black preachers slyly claimed the right to preach to Black congregants in Richmond. One of these assistant preachers Ryland routinely called upon was John Jasper, who would later gain national fame for his sermonizing and founding Sixth Mount Zion Baptist Church here in Richmond.

The independent structure of the Baptist Church in general allowed First African Baptist Church to forge local partnerships and committees, pouring their resources into causes that uplifted and empowered the Black community. They formed mutual beneficial societies and aided those in poverty. With so much poverty and suffering in their own community, the church was nevertheless liberal in their charity.  Members—both enslaved and free—raised money to aid the victims of the 1840s Irish Potato Famine.

One of the more extraordinary developments within the First African Baptist Church was the creation of a community court to mediate disputes and handle discipline. At the time, outside the church’s walls, a Black person was not allowed to testify in court or have a jury trial. An enslaved person could not pursue justice without the approval of a master and, even if justice prevailed, compensation went to that master. With little faith in the white-run government court system just a few blocks away, FABC members found that the justice meted out by their Black deacons was much more fair and compassionate, albeit very strict. It was also cheaper than hiring a lawyer.  And so the FABC court tried cases ranging from adultery to theft to immoral dancing. They also heard complaints against insulted honor or shame. Amazingly, an enslaved congregant could seek justice for the most fundamental and yet most elusive of human rights denied to them in the outside world: dignity.

At their harshest, the FABC court could revoke church membership. While That may not seem exceedingly strict, being cast out from an institution with such reach and resources and thrown into a world where you hold no rights at all, could seem like a death sentence.

First African Baptist Church, built 1876, Circa 1930, V.86.153.726, Richmond Chamber of Commerce Collection, The Valentine

The loosely democratic structure of the church—only free males could vote—prepared some in the Black community for wider government participation. And though enslaved members could not vote on church matters, they had agitated for that right for years, which initiated them into the practice of democratic protest. So with emancipation in 1865, FABC was perfectly poised to harness and direct Black ambition during such a chaotic time. In 1867, they hired their first Black pastor, Dr. James H. Holmes, who had been born into slavery. Membership exploded and the congregation outgrew their building yet again (they had already split to create Ebenezer Baptist Church in 1858). They demolished the brick building and built a new one in its place in 1876. That building, with its grand Doric columns, still stands today, though the congregation moved to Barton Heights in 1955. With full Black control, the church fostered new generations of Black leadership—John Mitchell, Daniel Webster Davis and Doug Wilder were counted amongst its members.

But the legacy of First African Baptist amounts to much more than its illustrious members. In the radical act of fostering dignity in a population that legally had no claim to it, the church empowered everyday people to demand more for themselves and more for their community. Dignity was the first and most important step for everyone: young and old, enslaved and free, male and female. Church leaders knew this above all else.

Around 1875, the FABC Sunday school teacher noticed a dirty, disheveled little girl of about ten years old, playing on the sidewalk outside the church. He invited her to join the Sunday School and she accepted the offer, coming in for the first time, though she only lived a block away. As the teacher’s son later recalled, “The little girl liked what she found, and next Sunday, clean and neat as a pin, she came back.” The little girl who made that small yet dignified step would soon rise through the leadership ranks of the church.  She’d cut her teeth there on civic, business, and political engagement. Her name was Maggie L. Walker.

Stay tuned for another in-depth and fascinating blog exploring another Richmond Story as a part of Black History Month on Sunday, February 21!

Black History is Richmond history. From Richmond’s founding in 1737 to the present day, Black Richmonders not only built this city with their hands, but  also indelibly shaped its politics, religion, entertainment, businesses and institutions. As we get closer to Black History Month, the next few posts will highlight Black Richmonders who have done just that. In some cases, their influence has spread beyond Richmond. In others, the impact comes not an from individual, but a collective of everyday people. Of course, while it’s impossible to adequately represent the breadth of Black influence, but we will endeavor to tell fascinating, complicated and important stories about Black Richmonders.  The first of these subjects was an entertainment giant who gained worldwide fame on the big screen, though he started out as a little boy shelling peas for two cents a basket at the 17^th Street Market.

Birthplace of Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, 915 N. 3rd Street, Circa 1950, V.79.120.1094.01, Edith K. Shelton Collection, The Valentine

Luther Robinson was born in 1878 in a small wooden house on 3^rd Street in Jackson Ward. Orphaned early in his childhood, he was raised by his grandmother, a formerly enslaved woman. Black Richmonders had few educational opportunities, and Luther had to blaze his own path early on. At the age of five, he began dancing for pennies on the sidewalk. By seven, he had snagged his first role as a dancer in a traveling show. These early years elude a hard historical record, as the origins of cultural giants often do. Some accounts show him running away to D.C. at the age of nine to dance full time, while others place him in Richmond dancing in local beer gardens at that age. No matter the specifics, we do know that by the time he was a teenager, Luther had changed his name to Bill and was established in Black vaudeville circuits around D.C. Among his friends, he had also earned a nickname— Bojangles—for his contentious attitude. This nickname and its future contradictions would perfectly encapsulate his blockbuster career that has been called both groundbreaking and retrograde, both defiant and subservient.

Bill “Bojangles” Robinson’s dance career unfolded at a peculiar time in this nation’s history—the forces of segregation were rising at the same time as the appeal of Black entertainment. Popular, everyday entertainment began to threaten the “color line.” For this, many laws and industry norms dictated what Black performers could do, for whom they could perform, where they could perform and with whom they could perform. Blackface was still popular and even expected of Black artists. The “two-colored” vaudeville rule prevented Black performers from appearing alone onstage. Because of these restrictions, from 1902 until 1914, Robinson was required to have an onstage partner. He also danced almost exclusively in Black theaters for Black audiences. But, during this time, he pioneered a new form of tap-dancing. His style was elegant, quick and mesmerizing to behold.

Into the 20^th century, white audiences grew less content to watch white performers going through the motions in front of more skilled Black background dancers.  So the astonishingly talented Robinson and his partner, George W. Cooper, attracted notice. They soon became so popular that the duo began to flout the rules of segregation. They performed in white-only venues in addition to Black venues. By World War I, Robinson went solo. In 1918, he became one of the few Black performers to headline a show at the prestigious Palace Theater, in New York. At that show, he introduced his new “stair dance,” in which he danced up and down a staircase not only with dizzying ease and skill, but also producing different rhythms and tones on each step. It was a masterpiece of showmanship that would make him world famous, which you can watch here.

Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Jack Dabney, and Jesse Owens, 1936, V.99.61.15, The Valentine

In the 1930s, As Robinson broke down barriers of segregation with sheer talent, he found himself breaking out of the vaudeville world and into the stages of Broadway and Hollywood. But more complicated barriers arose in tandem with his stardom. In these worlds, he was limited to the roles written for him by white writers.  Unsurprisingly, they were nearly always stereotypical. His most famous and frequent role was that of a cheerful, enslaved butler dancing alongside Shirley Temple. The pair made four movies together.

With fame, Robinson’s nickname ‘Bojangles’ took on an ironic meaning. Initially derived from the term ‘jangler”—an argumentative, angry person—white fans began to associate his nickname with the smiling, docile roles written for him. The nickname itself then became a stereotype of Black servility, even though Robinson was famous among his friends for his temper, his gambling and for carrying a gold-plated pistol.

In defiance of both interpretations of his nickname, however, Robinson was not complacent when it came to race relations, nor was he hard-hearted. Though he made millions over the course of his career, he gave away vast amounts to Black charities in Harlem, where he lived.  In one year alone, he performed in four hundred benefits. He was a founding member of the Negro Actors Guild of America. He even co-founded a Negro League baseball team, the New York Black Yankees. Visiting Richmond in 1931, he joined Maggie Walker’s Independent Order of St. Luke. While here in 1933, he witnessed Black children attempting a dangerous intersection in Jackson Ward in order to get to school. He contacted the city and paid all costs to install a set of traffic lights at the intersection—the first traffic light “North of Broad.” For this act of charity, Richmond would later get its first monument to a Black citizen, in 1973, in Robinson’s honor at that intersection. But after a lifetime of charitable acts just like that one, Robinson died penniless in 1949, at the age of 71.

Ceremony at Bill Bojangles Robinson Monument, 6/24/1986, V.91.04.1032, Richmond Newspapers, Inc., The Valentine

Robinson died a decade before the first modern civil rights movement in this country. He never saw a lunch counter sit-in. That is important to keep in mind when discussing his legacy. He may have performed in stereotypical roles, but his mere presence in mainstream movies in the 1930s was a revolution in itself. He bucked plenty of trends that threatened to limit his career: he never performed in blackface, he performed solo, he performed with white performers and before white audiences before any of these things were considered acceptable. But what does it mean that most Americans remember him as a smiling, antebellum butler? One can imagine that it was a very skillful, difficult way of moving ahead—an optical illusion—through hostile territory.

Ps- The “stairs dance” is as amazing as it sounds and worth watching:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtHvetGnOdM

There’s a good chance you’re reading this right now in sweatpants. If you feel any shame in the frumpiness that has defined 2020, you’ll likely feel better after considering other eras in fashion history that were not so comfy. One punishing fashion in particular—the Gibson Girl look—has its roots in Richmond history.

In the 1890s and early 1900s, writers and culture-makers in America began to sell the idea of a “New Woman.” Post-Victorian, white, liberated, talented, educated, athletic, opinionated, politically-active, superior and stunningly beautiful, this new American woman infiltrated newspapers, magazines and advertising. She was the exact opposite of the pure and immobilized Southern Belle. She hiked, painted, played tennis, wrote serious poetry, played the violin, could hail a taxi and crack dry jokes. 

The New Woman trend did help to make real ambitious women acceptable and even fashionable in mainstream society. But what made the image so popular was not simply her superhero talents, but the fact that she could do this all effortlessly, while laced into a corset, balancing a top-heavy hairstyle and dragging a long skirt. At least the corseted, cinched-up Southern Belle wasn’t expected to climb mountains! Ironically, though she had shed bustles and hoopskirts, the liberated New Woman was still tightly bound to a very narrow visual ideal of beauty.   

Warning: there will be more ironic turns before this post is through.

Illustration from Everyday People, Charles Dana Gibson, 1904, V.72.109, The Valentine

The symbol of this ideal came to be called the Gibson Girl, named after Charles Dana Gibson, the illustrator from Massachusetts who is credited with creating her image in the early 1890s. Gibson’s illustrated women were wasp-waisted, with a big, flounced hairstyle that implied a hasty solution amid a flurry of activities. She often appeared bored and superior to her suitors and her surroundings, even the mountains she scaled. And all this—from her disdain to her sporting records—the Gibson Girl doled out with absolute grace.

 In what some scholars call the first American fashion craze, real women began to model themselves on the Gibson look, which in turn became a satirical cartoon of their ambitions. The floppy hair, the bored expression, and the impossible waist dominated American fashion for decades, until World War I.  But what real woman could possibly embody all that the fictional Gibson Girl represented?  Could a woman of such beauty, talent, brains, artistry, ambition, fitness, and grace possibly exist?

In another twist of irony and fate, Charles Dana Gibson himself found one. Her name was Irene Langhorne. She was from Richmond. And he married her.

Irene Langhorne was born in 1873, in Danville. Like many families in post-war Virginia, her family struggled financially. But Irene’s father eventually struck success in the railroad industry and he moved his family to Richmond. Here, Irene received the best private education available to girls at the time.

Irene Langhorne, Late 19th Century, P.71.47.61, The Valentine

With her poise, beauty and charm, she became popular among Virginia’s illustrious social circles. Of course, she dressed and cinched herself in the popular Gibson style. Then, Irene’s fame crossed state lines. In 1893, she was invited to lead the grand march at the Patriarch’s Ball in New York City—one of the most prestigious social events in the country at the time. She was the first Southern woman to do so. A year later, in 1894, she was seated next to Charles Dana Gibson at a dinner in New York. He had already gained notoriety with his Gibson Girl illustrations and now found himself sitting next to a woman who so closely resembled his fantasy. They were married in 1895 at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in downtown Richmond.

The newly-wedded Gibsons moved to New York City, where Charles continued to draw with his wife as his main model. The woman who had fashioned herself after the style developed by her husband’s hand had now become a real life model for his future drawings. As for Irene, she dedicated herself to progressive politics—a fitting vocation for a New Woman. At first, she was simply acting out the ideal. As she admitted in late interviews, she first got into politics “for fun.” But she soon developed a true passion fighting for government aid for the underserved, especially children, and for politics. She helped to found Big Sisters, campaigned for women’s suffrage, built an orphanage, and chaired the Eastern Women’s Bureau of the Democratic National Committee. During the first World War, she worked with the Red Cross and was appointed by New York City’s mayor to chair the Committee on Local Defense. 

By the 1920s, the Gibson Girl look had been overtaken by the flapper craze—a loose style defined by its lack of corsets. Though critics labeled it a silly party-girl fashion, it was quite plainly a style that allowed more comfortable movement through the world. But Irene Langhorne Gibson and other successful women proved that the New Woman had outgrown the male fantasy as a mere fashion trend. She and others ensured that new generations of New Women were here to stay, no matter how they dressed—even if they wore sweatpants.