“Sixty Slaves for Sale” Reckoning with Enslavement in the Shenandoah Valley

Calvin Schermerhorn grew up in Southern Maryland, a place eager to forget its past of enslavement and legacies of racism. After graduate degrees at Harvard Divinity School and the University of Virginia he became a historian of slavery, capitalism, and African American inequality with a focus on nineteenth-century American history.

He is currently Professor of History at Arizona State University and was a Fulbright Senior Scholar to the University of Nottingham in 2022.

He has contributed to The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, and The Washington Post, among other popular venues, and his work has been featured in national discussions of racial inequality including the New York Times Magazine’s “1619 Project.”

He is author of four books on American slavery and inequality including The Plunder of Black America: How the Racial Wealth Gap Was Made, which will be published by Yale University Press in 2025.

Rebecca is a Ph.D. candidate from UC Santa Cruz and an archaeologist and oral historian at James Madison’s Montpelier. Rebecca’s role is to assist The Montpelier Foundation (TMF) and the Montpelier Descendant Committee (MDC) with developing and implementing a memorial dedicated to the over 250 enslaved individuals who lived there.

A crucial part of memorialization is understanding how enslaved African Americans navigated this landscape and intentionally created “space” and “place” during the 19th and 20th centuries. If Montpelier’s “space” is the warp, the institutional framework used to manage and regulate plantation production, then “place” is the weft or the threads of daily life confined by the frame but creatively woven through practice and meaning-making.

Rebecca’s training as an archaeologist and oral historian will help weave these aspects of the archaeological record and oral history accounts into a more dynamic narrative informing the memorialization process.

Jane Ailes has had careers divided into areas of research in the biological sciences and the humanities that share some techniques in research methods, data collection and preservation, relational database design and maintenance, and data analysis.

Since 2001, as an independent consultant she has specialized in African American history research in the 18th and 19th century mostly in the records of the Mid-Atlantic states serving a variety of clients in state and federal institutions, and the private sector.

Two projects available online are: 

• Virginia Emigrants to Liberia
• Patriots of Color

An avid genealogist for over 30 years, Dr. Shelley Viola Murphy, aka “familytreegirl,” was born and raised in Michigan and now lives in central Virginia. She conducts genealogy workshops at local, state, and national conferences. Murphy is known for her inspiring and interactive “SO WHAT” approach to genealogical research, along with her engaging problem-solving methodology lectures, such as the use of timelines.

Murphy serves on the boards of the Library of Virginia and the Albemarle-Charlottesville Historical Societies.

She is a coordinator and instructor at the Midwest African American Genealogy Institute (MAAGI) and develops staff and public genealogy educational programs for the Center for Family History at the International African American Museum (IAAM).

She serves as the Genealogist General for the Society of the First African Families of English America and as a trustee for the International Society for British Genealogy and Family History. She also serves on the Genealogists Council for the 10 Million Names Project. She holds memberships in AAHGS, NGS, DAR, and local genealogy groups.

Currently, she works for the University of Virginia as the Descendant Project Researcher, seeking descendants of the enslaved laborers who helped build the university and at the Blandy Experimental Farm-Tuleyries. She is also the host of “Freedmen’s Bureau Fridays” and has been an adjunct professor at Averett University since 2009. Dr. Murphy’s personal research focuses on Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Virginia/West Virginia, South Carolina, Tennessee, and the UK.

Michael L. Blakey is National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of Anthropology, Africana Studies, and American Studies, and Founding Director of the Institute for Historical Biology at William & Mary. He received the B.A. at Howard University, the M. A. and Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and completed specialized studies at Oxford and London Universities.

Blakey held professorships at Spelman College, Columbia, Brown, La Sapienza, and Howard University, where he founded the W. Montague Cobb Biological Anthropology Laboratory. 

He has served as president of the Association of Black Anthropologists (1987-1989), and member of the editorial boards of American Anthropologist (2012-2016) and American Antiquity (2021-).

Blakey represented the United States on the Council of the 4th World Archaeological Congress in Cape Town, South Africa (1999). 

He is a member of the Scholarly Advisory Committee of the National Museum of African American History and Culture of the Smithsonian Institution (2006-), where he previously held the position of Research Associate in Physical Anthropology at the National Museum of Natural History (1985-1994). 

He was a Key Advisor to the Race: Are We So Different exhibition and website (understandingrace.org) of the American Anthropological Association (from 2008).  

Blakey was Scientific Director of the New York African Burial Ground Project (1992-2009), the most sophisticated bioarchaeological project in the United States. His team began ethical bioarchaeology, the term ‘descendant community,’ and its use in an empowered public engagement intended for the democratization of knowledge. The Manhattan site became a U.S. National Monument in 2007.  He continues to help facilitate descendant communities’ empowerment to tell their own stories and memorialize their dead. 

The African Burial Ground’s clientage model of public engagement contributed to the new best practices of the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 2018. 

Blakey has been appointed Co-Chair of the American Anthropological Association’s Commission for the Ethical Treatment of Human Remains mandated to consolidate and advance the highest ethical standards for the treatment of all human skeletons and tissue samples at archaeological sites, museums, and laboratories in the United States (2022-2024). 

In 2021, Blakey was presented the President’s Award of the American Anthropological Association, the Legacy Award of the Association of Black Anthropologists, and, in 2022, the Plumeri Award for Faculty Excellence at William & Mary. 

He is currently completing a 1,500-page monograph on race and racism in science and society, adding to his approximately 90 reports, refereed articles, and edited volumes.   

8 AM
Building Opens
Coffee and pastries served

9 AM
Conference Begins
Welcome and Introductions

9:30 – 10:45 AM
Enslavement at Belle Grove: Historical Accounting and Accountability
Dr. Calvin Schermerhorn, Professor of History, Arizona State University

10:45 – 11:00 AM
Break

11 AM – 12:15 PM
Descendant’s Design: The Process of Memorialization to the Enslaved Workers at James Madison’s Presidential Plantation
Rebecca J. Davis, Oral History Specialist, James Madison’s Montpelier

12:15 – 1:45 PM
Lunch
Buffet by Hittin’ the Spot Catering (link to menu below)
Opportunity to network, visit information and organizational tables, and engage in creative healing through art

1:45 – 3:15 PM
Panel Presentation and Discussion
Topic: How historical research and genealogy can lead to institutional and individual empowerment, reconciliation, or healing

Moderator: Dr. Michael Blakey, National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of Anthropology, Africana Studies, and American Studies, and Founding Director of the Institute for Historical Biology at William & Mary

Panelists:

• Jane Ailes, Professional Historical Researcher
• Shelley Murphy, Descendant Project Researcher, Division for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, University of Virginia
• Lisa Johnson, Genealogist, Administrator of the Facebook Group “African American Descendants of Warren County, Virginia”

3:15 – 3:30 PM
Break

3:30 – 4 PM
Commemoration and Remembrance

4 – 5 PM
Additional Time for Networking and Information Sharing

Lunch Menu from Hittin‘ the Spot Catering 

• Fried Chicken 
• Macaroni and Cheese
• Green Beans
• Dinner Rolls
• Garden Salad
• Cookies
• Cupcakes
• Lemonade
• Sweet Tea
• Unsweet Tea