John Mitchell Jr. Archives

In their latest exhibit, The Valentine puts a new spin on the fight to gain women the right to vote by imagining it as a social media battle between famous figures of the early 20th century.

If you’ve ever wondered what Maggie L. Walker’s social media presence would look like if virtual communication had existed during the suffrage movement of the early 20th century, you’re going to love the Valentine’s new exhibition. #BallotBattle: The Social Struggle for Suffrage, opening Thursday, November 21, showcases suffrage-era public discourse in ways that are familiar and relatable to modern Americans.

To commemorate the centennial of the 19th Amendment’s ratification in 2020, #BallotBattle features plausible interactions via Facebook feeds and Twitter threads between five high-profile Richmonders from the suffrage era, who represent a diverse cross section of the Virginia Capital’s political discourse from 1909 to 1920.

“In 2019, there’s so much political and social debate, and it all happens on our phones,” said Christina K. Vida, the Valentine’s Curator of General Collections. “So we wanted to use our current social media to represent how social this discussion was 100 years ago.”

“With the founding of the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia in 1909 and the formation of the Virginia Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage in 1912, there was an explosion of public debate in Richmond,” said Vida. “It was happening in newspapers, in the Jefferson Hotel’s auditorium, at the Woman’s Club of Richmond, and on street corners all around the capital.”

Of the five notable Richmonders selected are women suffragists Maggie L. Walker and Lila Meade Valentine, and black suffragist John Mitchell Jr. From the opposing side of the debate are anti-suffragists Mary Mason Anderson Williams and Henry Lee Valentine, Lila Valentine’s brother-in-law. The exhibition displays Facebook profiles for each of them that look just like ours, including their relationship statuses, employment and educational histories, and even places around Richmond where they’ve checked in.

The social media interactions are modernized translations of historical documents, complete with the language of today’s online discourse such as hashtags, emojis, likes, heart-reacts, and memes. The exhibition also features an array of other documents, pamphlets, photographs, and propaganda from the suffrage era, compiled from the Valentine’s collection, the Library of Virginia, the Virginia Museum of History and Culture, and the VCU Special Collections Library.

Though the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920, the Valentine’s suffrage exhibition contains decades’ worth of history on the fight for women’s rights. There’s a selection of historical documentation about the Equal Rights Amendment, including one of Elizabeth Shoemaker Parman’s ERA ratification brochures that circulated in the 1970s, and a 1973 photograph of Adèle Clark controversially lobbying against the passage of the ERA with Delegate Eva Mae Scott.

“We wanted to drive home the fact that the ratification of the 19th Amendment wasn’t a foregone conclusion,” said Vida. “There was still a lot of work to do then, and there still is now. We’ll continue that work from 2020 and on.”

The ERA was first introduced to Congress in 1923, and is designed to guarantee equal rights for all Americans by eradicating sex-based legal disparities in areas such as employment, property, and divorce. While the ERA was ratified by Congress in 1972, technically the congressional deadline for the ERA expired in 1982 when only 35 states had passed it in their legislatures. Since three-quarters of the individual states must ratify an amendment before it is added to the Constitution, three states were still needed for ratification in 1982. But after the 27th Amendment was ratified in 1992 after being introduced to Congress a record-setting 202 years earlier, validity of ratification deadlines has come under scrutiny.

Virginia is now in the national spotlight because the long fight for the ERA could soon be over. In the recent 2019 elections, Democrats won control of both houses of the Virginia legislature, and many of the newly elected have voiced their intent to vote on the ERA. Nevada ratified the ERA in 2017 and Illinois followed in 2018, so if the ERA passes in the Virginia legislature in 2020, it will be the 38th and final state needed to add the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Thus, there is an unforeseen quality of timeliness to the Valentine’s #BallotBattle exhibition, in addition to its intended concurrence with the 19th Amendment’s centennial year. “We might have to change some of the exhibition’s taglines depending on what happens in the General Assembly,” said Vida, with a palpable tone of excitement.

#BallotBattle will close on September 7, 2020. The Valentine is open from 10 am to 5 pm, Tuesday through Sunday. For more details, visit their website.

Photos by Noelle Abrahams

Artist Jake Berman has been creating maps of bygone streetcar systems around the US. Now he’s turned his focus onto the first electric streetcar system ever, which opened right here in Richmond in 1888.

Believe it or not, there used to be a way to get around Richmond that didn’t involve struggling to find an opportunity to turn left off of Broad or dealing with drivers who don’t want to share the road with bicycles. Jake Berman, an artist from New York, drew a map of Richmond’s old streetcar system, showing how Richmonders at the turn of the 20th century made their way around town.

Richmond was home to the first practical electric streetcar system on the planet. Designed and introduced by Frank Sprague in 1888, the streetcar system boasted 82 miles of track at its peak, providing transportation throughout the city and into the suburbs. Sprague’s streetcar system proved to be so successful in Richmond that it became the model for countless other streetcar systems throughout the world.

Berman, who has made a project out of mapping the country’s old transit systems, was inspired while sitting in traffic. “I was living in LA at the time and I was stuck in a traffic jam,” Berman said. “I was frustrated and started thinking, why can’t I take a train to work?”

*Richmond Trolley cars on Broad St. downtown, 1923. Printed by Louis Kaufmann & Sons, Baltimore, MD [Public domain], via Wikimedia*

After going down a rabbit-hole of research, Berman discovered that, like Richmond, Los Angeles was once home to a successful electric rail system. Interested in this mode of transportation that no longer exists in many places around America, Berman started working on a collection of sleek maps that depict historic transit lines in several cities.

When designing his maps, Berman researches fonts and commercial ads that were used at the time the streetcars were being used. This gives viewers the feeling that they are viewing a transit map straight out of the early 20th century.

”What I’m trying to capture is a certain snapshot of a city at a particular time,” Berman said. “There are lots of streets on my Richmond map that don’t exist anymore, because they’ve been demolished or re-routed. There are landmarks that would have been very recognizable to someone a long time ago, but nowadays that’s just not the case.”

Sites such as Virginia State Penitentiary, the Locomotive Works, and the Virginia State Agricultural Grounds figure prominently on the map. While these sites are often overlooked today, Berman’s map helps to shine light on a history that is usually forgotten.

*Images of the 1903 streetcar strike, taken from the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Images obtained via Library of Congress’s Chronicling America archive, by Church Hill People’s News*

But there’s more to the history of Richmond’s streetcars than old routes and landmarks; the streetcar system played a big part in the history of civil rights in Richmond. Virginia’s General Assembly passed legislation in 1904 that allowed segregated seating on streetcars. The Richmond Planet, a local black-owned newspaper edited by civil rights hero John Mitchell Jr., called for a boycott of the streetcars.

The Richmond Planet estimated that upwards of 80% of Richmond’s black population participated in the boycott. The Virginia Passenger and Power Company, which operated the streetcars, declared bankruptcy within the first three months of the boycott.

Although stricter segregation laws were passed in the years after 1904, the boycott is remembered as an important and crucial aspect of Richmond’s struggle for civil rights.

Richmond’s streetcars came to a halt in 1949. The streetcars were dramatically burned, signaling the end of rapid transit in Richmond until the introduction of the GRTC Pulse bus route in 2018. Richmond was not the only city to say goodbye to streetcars after World War II; in fact, many cities throughout the US also shut down their streetcar systems in the late 1940s.

*Remnants of rail infrastructure on Stockton St. Photo by James Shelton32 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, via* *Wikimedia*

It seems that these days we are doomed to a world devoid of light rail systems. Berman doesn’t anticipate this changing anytime soon. “I think that for now the United States is going to be a place mostly for driving,” he said, noting that most Americans live in the suburbs today. “Most of the suburbs that were built after WWII are just unnavigable unless you have a car.”

“Things could be different. Transportation infrastructure wasn’t handed down on Mt. Sinai,” Berman said. “If people are lamenting the fact that they’re stuck in traffic, or if they have to go five miles to find the nearest grocery store, then people should think about why that is. It doesn’t have to be like this.”

Regardless of how you get around, Berman’s maps provide a beautiful visual aid for imagining a future in which everyone has more options for navigating throughout the city. Check out a full-size version of Berman’s map on Reddit here.

Top Image by Jake Berman