By ©2023 Sarah Becker

For many, December is a month of religious remembrance. George Washington believed in a Creator God, “one that was active in the Universe.” He referred to his God by many names, most often by the name of “Providence.”

Seventy-five year old Stanley Greene also believes in a Creator God. A black-Alexandrian he frequently speaks of the Creator’s abolitionist-minded angels—Virginia Fitzhugh Wheat Thomas [1893-1987] especially.

Angel, as defined by the American Heritage dictionary: “1. An immortal spiritual creature. 2. A good kind person. 3. A financial backer of an enterprise.”

Virginia Fitzhugh Wheat [VFW], a white-Alexandrian of notable heritage, was born in 1893: ten years after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Civil Rights Act of 1875. Two years before William Smoot, Grand Commander of the Confederate Grand Camp of Virginia shared a circular-letter.

In the 1880s conservatives, reorganized as Democrats gained governmental control of the Commonwealth. It was the period when power and position, politics and nostalgic celebration gave way to racial segregation.

“I must take this occasion to congratulate every surviving patriot…on the revival of this South-land [and] the truth and justice of the ‘Lost Cause,’” Smoot wrote in 1895. Smoot then owned Colross, a W-Old Town Alexandria mansion used as a Union Civil War hospital.

Also in 1893: The U.S. Supreme Court found the Chinese Exclusion Act to be constitutional. “For the first time federal law prohibited entry of an ethnic working group on the premise that it endangered the country’s good order,” the National Archives said.

Miss Wheat grew up in Alexandria. She was not afraid of Jim Crow’s [1877-1954] master obstructionists. Conservative Virginia Democrats like U.S. Senator Thomas Staples Martin [Lynchburg, 1895-1919] and the succeeding Harry F. Byrd Organization [1920-1967]; U.S. Representative Howard Worth Smith [Alexandria, 1931-1967] or Byrd relative, State Delegate and Majority Leader James M. Thomson [Alexandria, 1956-1978]. Smith a proponent of “managed race relations” chaired the powerful House Rules Committee starting in 1954, the same year the U.S. Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education [school desegregation].

In 1896 the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a Louisiana law that allowed for equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races [Plessy v. Ferguson]. “Victims of racial discrimination were told to seek relief not from federal government, but from the states,” the National Archives explained. The Commonwealth’s reply: Support Plessy and Resist Brown.

“[T]he problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line,” Negro-American W.E.B. DuBois wrote in 1903. Education, decent housing and home ownership topped many a Negro’s list. DuBois’ Niagara Movement published its Declaration of Principles in 1905:

“Progress: The members of the conference, known as the Niagara Movement…congratulate the Negro-Americans on certain undoubted evidences of progress in the last decade [1895-1905], particularly the increase of intelligence, the buying of property, the checking of crime, the uplift in home life, the advance in literature and art, and the demonstration of constructive and executive ability in the conduct of great religious, economic and educational institutions.”

Virginia Fitzhugh Wheat—a woman ahead of her time—became a real estate entrepreneur in an era when land parcels were designated residential or commercial, white or colored.  The Commonwealth’s 1902 Constitution pretty much “eliminated blacks from the franchise:” the number of black Virginians “qualified to vote dropped from 147,000 to 21,000 immediately.”

Virginia was the only child of real estate mogul Harrie Fitzhugh [1866-1912] and Kate Duncan Houck Wheat [1869-1899]; the granddaughter of Benoni [1823-1902] and Matilda Taliafero Fitzhugh Wheat [1831-1885].

Wrote Harrie Wheat in 1912: “I hereby leave & bequeath all my property real & personal…for the sole use & benefit of my only child Virginia Fitzhugh Wheat [age 19]…The trusteeship…shall continue until [my daughter] reaches the age of 40 years, when all…is turned over to [her].” Alexandria city annexed Wheat & Suter’s Subdivision Rosemont, Shooter’s Hill, and Braddock circa 1915.

Also in 1912: The Virginia General Assembly “approved An Act to provide for designation by cities and towns of segregation districts…for residence of white and colored persons.” Why? “[T]o preserve public morals, public health and public order.”

Local segregation ordinances, if approved, designated districts as white or colored depending on whether 50 percent of the inhabitants were white or Negro. Alexandria agreed and de facto segregation became the norm. A la white Rosemont and colored Rosemont as separated by West Street.

VFW’s construal of colored Rosemont was grounded in the broad of the 1912 law. Not in the narrow of the Byrd Organization’s bombast: or Alexandria’s later interpretation of de facto segregation districts. To claim colored Rosemont was four blocks only is ludicrous.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s [D-NY] introduction of the 1937 Neighborhood Composition Rule—“That [Alexandria’s] public housing [Bland, Andrew Adkins, et.al] should not disturb the pre-existing racial composition of neighborhoods where it was placed”—surprised progressives.

“Paternalists refused to recognize…the development of a larger, more prosperous, and independent black middle class, a class able to vocalize dissatisfaction with inequality,” J. Douglas Smith author of Managing White Supremacy wrote.

In 1917 “Cornelius B. Rite and Harold E. West conveyed the property…Bounded on the north by Madison Street, on the east by Payne Street, on the south by Wythe Street, and on the west by West Street” to the estate of Harrie F. Wheat for daughter Virginia “TO HAVE AND TO HOLD…forever.”

VFW, Mrs. A.H. Thomas as of 1919 turned 40 in 1933—two years after author James Truslow Adams published his 1931 book The Epic of America. Adams’ notion of the American Dream: “a dream of a social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.”

Unlike the Byrd Organization Mrs. Thomas favored black home-ownership, the expansion of Alexandria’s black middle class. Relation William Henry Fitzhugh [1792-1830], national Vice President of the American Colonization Society—a Society that operated from 1816 until 1964—“experimented in giving slave families small farms to operate independently as tenants and buy their freedom.”

Virginia’s Vision: [Source, Applications for Permit to Build incl. drawings] Small, black-owned, single family, designer-delivered dwellings; one-story with pitched roof, built on solid land, brick on cinder block. Water lines and indoor plumbing: with the built-in potential for expansion [two lots]. Her deeds of sale had “no encumbrances.”

On June 19, 1939, Mrs. Thomas made a landmark purchase. Property “bounded by Wythe, Payne, West and Pendleton Streets:” as part of her privately-funded, colored housing project. Coincidentally?—on June 27, 1939, Alexandria’s state-chartered public housing authority, the Alexandria Redevelopment and Housing Authority [ARHA] started.

Colored Rosemont developed west to east, on land that was once a Wheat & Suter rectangle. The Library of Congress’ Sanborn [fireproof construction] Maps confirm my four-column content. Mrs. Thomas’ replicated homes were constructed circa 1940, if not before or after.

“By the 1950s, racial segregation in housing…solidified [VFWT’s colored Rosemont],” The Washington Post affirmed. “[It] became the only part of the city of Alexandria where blacks could purchase property.”

In 1952 black realtor Samuel A. Tucker, Jr., a founding member of Alexandria’s NAACP, owned land in colored Rosemont: also his son civil rights attorney Otto L. Tucker. Otto L. was the second black to purchase 1301 Wythe Street, a 1932 Thomas minimum model dwelling. Bottom line: both men forcibly lost their properties to ARHA, in 1952 and 1964.

ARHA did not discriminate when it came to acquiring property. In 1952 Colored Rosemont included both black and white land owners. Widow Virginia Wheat Thomas was among the latter. The Thomas’ and Tucker, Jr.’s, deeds of sale describe ARHA as “a political subdivision of the Commonwealth of Virginia, party of the second part.”

Mrs. Thomas’ loss: “Parcels of land…located…in the square bounded by Alfred, Patrick, Madison, and Montgomery Streets.” Tucker, Jr.’s, loss: “Parcels of land…located…in the square bounded by North Columbus, Madison, North Alfred and Montgomery Streets.” ARHA sued attorney Tucker and Tucker lost—“a home and two lots.” [ARHA v. Otto L. Tucker, et.als, 1964]

Three of Virginia Wheat Thomas’ many minimum model homes have readers curious. Black family-owned dwellings located in Alexandria’s Census Tracts 18 & 16. The first, 603 North Alfred Street sold to Mr. and Mrs. Gilbert Haggins in January 1949. The Permit to Build was issued in 1940 the house demolished in 2021-2022.

Also: 717 N. Alfred Street. Permitted in 1940, ARHA forcibly obtained the black-owned property circa 1952 then built the dwelling anew, as a rental unit [Lot 6 Subdivision of Block B James Bland]. In 2009 the parcel was given to the city; returned to ARHA in 2010 and the subdivision sold.  Mr. and Mrs. John H. Greene purchased their replicated minimum model home—1312 Wythe Street—in June 1949: a house built circa 1940 and still standing.

The telling of integrated history is hard for some to accept. Probably because President Lyndon Johnson’s 1968 Fair Housing Act, the Commonwealth’s 1972 Fair Housing Law were Alexandria’s middle class blacks’ path to freedom. According to the U.S. Census, Tract 16 was 99% black in 1950, 15% black in 1980.

“Where there is no vision the people perish,” President Johnson quoted. In 1969 State Delegate Thomson, a Byrd loyalist “spoke against passage of Alexandria’s open housing ordinance.”

Let’s be honest! The 2008 Braddock Road and Braddock East Small Area Plans failed. In part because ARHA’s 2012 strategic plan again followed FDR’s Neighborhood Composition Rule.

“The leading objectors to [ARHA’s Andrew Adkins] location were representatives of…Alexandria city’s major Negro organization,” The Washington Post wrote in 1962. “They complained that the site includes a number of [about 20] Negro-owned…homes which will be leveled.”

“The sole reason for the selection of the site was that its inhabitants are Negroes and that 50% of the dwellings are owned by members of the Negro race,” attorney Tucker told The Washington Post in 1964. “He said buildings in the area ‘provide safe and sanitary dwellings.’”

“Mrs. Thomas was a ‘shero,’” Greene recalled. She left paternalism to the politicians and instead built a burgeoning community of black home-owners.

Proverbs 3.15&18: “She is more precious than rubies; and all the things thou canst desire are not to be compared unto her…She is a tree of life to them.”

Columnist’s Reply: On November 17, 2023, NBC/Channel 4 News ran a story on Alexandria’s much debated, highly controversial Affordable Housing Plan. Reporter Cho’s take included a racist reference to the past, Deed Book 153, pg. 215.  The Deed of Dedication, dated June 17, 1939, as signed by Permanesque Homes Village, Inc., describes a city “subdivision to be known as ‘Section Five, Beverly Hills.’” According to the Deed “no house shall be erected…other than a one-family home. No lot, nor any part thereof, shall be sold rented or in any way conveyed to any person not of the Caucasian race.”

Two days later on June 19, 1939, Mrs. A.H. Thomas as noted above purchased property “bounded by Wythe, Payne, West and Pendleton Streets” in what is now known as Colored Rosemont. How, given the comparison can anyone doubt the magnitude of Mrs. Thomas undertaking, her dedication to the construction of black-owned single-family homes? For starters unlike Homes Village her Deeds of Sale have no racially restrictive covenants. Not only was Virginia Fitzhugh Wheat Thomas an abolitionist-minded angel, she was also a political mutineer.

Sarah Becker started writing for The Economist while a graduate student in England. Similar publications followed. She joined the Crier in 1996 while serving on the Alexandria Convention and Visitors Association Board. Her interest in antiquities began as a World Bank hire, with Indonesia’s need to generate hard currency. Balinese history, i.e. tourism provided the means. The New York Times describes Becker’s book, Off Your Duffs & Up the Assets, as “a blueprint for thousands of nonprofit managers.” A former museum director, SLAM’s saving grace Sarah received Alexandria’s Salute to Women Award in 2007. Email: abitofhistory53@gmail.com