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

by Jonathan Sokolow, an attorney and activist from Reston, Virginia.

In March 1865, as the Civil War approached its fiery end, Congress created the United States Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, commonly known as the Freedmen’s Bureau.  “The Bureau was empowered to distribute clothing, food, and fuel to destitute freedmen and oversee ‘all subjects’ relating to their condition in the South.” The Bureau also was authorized “to divide abandoned and confiscated land into forty-acre plots for rental to freedmen and loyal refugees and eventual sale” and to create Freedmen’s schools to provide education to the newly freed population.  Eric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction (31, 43).

Freedmen’s Bureau offices were established across the south.  One of those field offices was in Buckingham County, Virginia.  Buckingham was a majority Black county before, during and after the Civil War and it was home to many freedmen who had purchased their freedom even before the end of slavery.  The Bureau took up residence at the Buckingham County Courthouse, an historic building designed by Thomas Jefferson and it established a Freedmen’s school there, known as the Lincoln School.

In February 1869, an arsonist burned the Buckingham County courthouse to the ground.  As Dr. Lakshmi Fjord, a cultural anthropologist and Visiting Scholar at the University of Virginia has written, the fire “destroyed all records of enslavement, wills [and] slave purchases of their freedom…that might be used by the 2:1 majority former slaves to sue former masters for restitution.”

Buckingham County is the geographic heart of Virginia.  But the heart holds memories and in Buckingham County, those include Virginia’s complicated and often painful past.

Which brings us to the Atlantic Coast Pipeline.

For the past three years, a consortium of companies let by Dominion Energy, Virginia’s powerful and politically connected energy monopoly, has sought approval for the Atlantic Coast Pipeline. The ACP, as it is known, is a proposed massive $5 billion, 600-mile-long pipeline meant to transport fracked gas from West Virginia through Virginia and into North Carolina.  The potential harm that the pipeline would have on the ecology, tourism, economic development and property values of the rural counties through which it would pass has been well documented.

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Blue Virginia – Jonathan Sokolow – 07/17/2017