A BIT OF HISTORY | © SARAH BECKER
Virginia Fitzhugh Wheat Thomas and Colored Rosemont “The idea of slavery being connected with the Black Colour, and Liberty with the White, where false Ideas are twisted into our Minds, it is with difficulty we get fairly disentangled,” New Jersey Quaker John Woolman [1720-1772] wrote. The time has come to articulate a historical truth, to acknowledge a woman black Alexandria homeowner Stanley Greene describes as “an abolitionist-minded angel.” March is Women’s History Month: her name is Virginia Fitzhugh Wheat Thomas (1893-1987). A descendant of William Fitzhugh The Immigrant [1651-1701]; an indirect descendant of The Immigrant’s great grandson William Fitzhugh of Chatham [17411809]; his son William Henry Fitzhugh [1792-1830] of Ravensworth and Alexandria; granddaughter of Benoni [1823-1902] and Matilda Taliaferro Fitzhugh Wheat [1831-1885], daughter of Wheat & Suter real estate developer 8
March 2022
Harrie Fitzhugh [1866-1912] and Kate Duncan Houck Wheat [1869-1899]. Virginia was an inspired realtor whose post-World War interpretation of home ownership contributed to the construction of Alexandria’s Colored Rosemont. “The verdict of our voters… enjoins upon the people’s servants the duty of exposing and destroying the brood of kindred evils which are the wholesome progeny of paternalism,” President Grover Cleveland [D-NY] said in Virginia Fitzhugh Wheat’s birth year, in his 1893 Inaugural Address. “If in lifting burdens from the daily life of our people we reduce inordinate and unequal advantages too long ignored, this is but a necessary incident of our return to right and justice.” On May 18, 1896—the same year the National Association of Colored Women formed—the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that “all railway companies carrying passengers in their coaches…shall provide equal
but separate accommodations for the white and colored races.” [Plessy v. Ferguson 163U.S.537 (1896)] Soon after, the Reconstruction-era “Colored Republicans…served notice.” The lily-whites reply: rewrite Virginia’s constitution. The Commonwealth’s new constitution became final in 1902, Benoni Wheat’s death year. “Discrimination…is precisely what we propose,” State Senator Carter Glass [D-VA] explained. “As has been said, we have accomplished our purpose strictly within the limitations of the Federal Constitution by legislating against the characteristics of the black race, not against the ‘race, color or previous condition’ of the people themselves.” Benoni Wheat, “among Alexandria’s wealthiest and most enterprising merchants,” was a member of the preCivil War Whig Party [1840s]; the post-Civil War Temperance Party
[1880s]. During the War he was captured by Confederate authorities, held hostage; ransomed and released. “There have lived but few, if any, men in Alexandria who were more universally respected and beloved by all classes than Benoni Wheat,” The Washington Post wrote. The Niagara Movement, a black protest movement led by W.E.B. Du Bois distributed its Negro Declaration of Independence in 1905. The organizers demanded “full equality,” including “decent housing and neighborhoods...We plead for health, for an opportunity to live in decent houses and localities.” Virginia Fitzhugh Wheat [414 Duke Street] was then 12 years old; her mother Kate was dead, and Duke Street neighbor Kate Waller Barrett [408]—vice president and general superintendent of the
A BIT OF HISTORY > PAGE 9
Old Town Crier
