Ed Dugger | August 24, 2017

I’ve never been to Charlottesville.

I’m told it’s a lovely town, steeped in American history preserved in the foothills of the scenic Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Not far from the homes of several of our Founding Fathers and earliest Presidents: Jefferson, Madison and Monroe.  Not more than two days ride, in those days, from Mt Vernon, the home of our most honored Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army and first President, George Washington.

Charlottesville is a place these future Presidents all knew well.  It was a part of the fabric of colonial life in Virginia and they were the fabric makers.  Men of great stature who were revolutionary in thought and deed.  Signatories to our most noble expressions of the American Ideal: the legal and moral framework for what it means for our citizens to be responsibly free to pursue life, liberty and happiness.

But they were also members of the planter class and, throughout their lifetimes, each owned vast amounts of land, comprising multiple plantations, and hundreds of slaves. Charlottesville and the surrounding area, for as far as one can see, had its soil and its landowners enriched by the toil, tears and blood of enslaved men, women and children for over 200 years.  Our Founding Fathers had the opportunity to reject slavery, as a direct contradiction to their lofty expressions of the new nation’s aspirations, and change the course of our nation’s history.

They did not.

Instead, Virginia flourished as the epicenter for our nation’s slave trade. There, slavery was first institutionalized and the worst immoral practices were legalized by noble men who justified their immorality as a necessary solution to the growing shortage of white indentured servants to work their expanding plantations.  In the years leading up to the Civil War in 1860, Virginia had the largest population of slaves in the US, at nearly 500,000, making up over 30% of its residents. In the county in which Charlottesville sits, 54% of its residents were slaves.

“The past is never dead.  It’s not even past.” — William Faulkner

Contemplating the past and present in Charlottesville, here is what I see.  For me it is a place where our nation’s original demons are alive and with us.

I see the ancient footprints left by my enslaved ancestors who crisscrossed Virginia from plantation to plantation for generations.  Creating wealth from tobacco and cotton and sharing in none.  All the while suffering indignities they could not protest, and enduring the shame of having loved ones they could not protect.

I see my earliest known forefather, my 5th great grandfather, Neptune Branch, who was the slave of Benjamin Branch III, a prominent land and slave owner near Willow Hill, in Chesterfield County, along the James River.  Trusted slave, Neptune was by the side of Branch as his “body servant” when Branch was commissioned Captain of the Colonial Virginia Militia in 1775 and fought under George Washington to create a new nation and preserve his property.  After the war, Neptune was returned to farming tobacco fields when Branch reneged on his commitment to set him free once the war was over:  Branch found his plantation disrupted by the war, and listened to the demons who counseled that he could not “afford” to keep his promise, particularly to a loyal and hardworking slave.

Determined to be free, Neptune did not run away, but rather resolved to buy himself.  After the death of Captain Branch in 1786, Neptune struck a deal with his new master to purchase himself and his freedom for $700.  He paid his new owner $50 a year for the privilege to rent himself out to others as a stevedore from time to time, and eventually earned enough to buy his freedom.  It didn’t last long. When that owner died, Neptune was re-enslaved due to the lack of a never issued bill-of-sale proving he had purchased his freedom.

Neptune did not give up.  Many years later, when he was nearly 80, he purchased himself and his freedom once again, this time for $1,300.

Although Neptune lived another 10 years proudly as a free man, it was small redress for him, his wife and 12 children who lived their most productive years as slaves in a culture of slavery that kept them on different plantations miles apart, discouraging, if not forbidding, any family life.  One by one his children were sold to slave owners throughout Virginia, some nearby and some much further away.  Perhaps some around Charlottesville. Perhaps to George Washington at Mount Vernon, or to James Madison at Montpelier, or Thomas Jefferson at Monticello or his neighbor James Monroe at Oak Hill Mansion.  Their past is certainly not dead for me.

It’s not just Charlottesville.

Demons of our ugly past do not want to simply haunt us, they want to make us surrender.  And our demons are not confined to Charlottesville.  They threaten to ensnare us everywhere in this country where a blind eye is turned to racism, bigotry is tolerated for more than a minute, and white supremacy propaganda is not challenged immediately and vigorously.

In every generation since our Founding Fathers, and in every part of our nation, our hearts have been torn between the promise of equality and the fact of persistent inequality, increasing concentration of wealth and short supply of moral leadership.  Like Neptune, we have made important but agonizingly slow and incomplete progress.

If we are ever to escape our demons, our hearts must move faster.

Let us resolve to secure our freedom.

I hear a clarion sounding in Charlottesville, and it is sounding for you too.

It sounds not from our past nor our present, but from our future.  It is a forceful, yet pleading invitation for us to be as courageous as we possibly can in facing the demons of our history and providing them no quarter.  It is proclaiming that the answer to our current strife lies in more equality not less, more inclusion not less, more sharing of wealth not less, and more opportunity for more people not less.  It is calling us to live up to the American Ideal.  It is challenging us to conspire together to overcome whatever obstacles there may be, as if our lives depended on it.

They do.

We at Reinventure Capital want to help make a place at the table for our next multicultural generation of innovators and leaders.  Founders who are women and people of color who can contribute to making, through their success, our more perfect union.  Together we can escape the demons of our past and create a future that truly fulfills the American Ideal.  Please join us in answering the call.