Chris Wade

BEGINNING OF TAPE [00:00]

(mic noises) 

LEWIS: [00:07] Thank you for being here. Like I said, I’m Charles Lewis. I lived here, actually, about over fifteen years ago. This was my wife’s first teaching job.

WADE: Oh, really?

LEWIS: But we stayed connected to the community even though we don’t live here immediately. Actually, we still have a house on Porter’s Road; we’re renting it out. 

WADE: Any relation to Chuck Lewis? 

LEWIS: No, everybody asks me that! (laughter) Yeah, everybody ask me. But, no, it’s different: my Lewis is actually from Lynchburg. My grandfather was in the military, and he actually was stationed up in Orange County when he met my grandmother. So that’s my connection to Lewises. 

WADE: Ah.

LEWIS: Yeah, my other family is from Madison or Orange, that area.

WADE: Yeah.

LEWIS: I’m sorry—so we have your contact information. You’re Mr. Chris Wade. It says that you don’t have any artifacts or things like that for us.

WADE: No. 

LEWIS: We do have snacks. Do you want something to drink first, or a snack, anything?

WADE: Oh, I snacked first, yes. (laughs)

LEWIS: [01:09] All right, so you signed the consent form. So, to start off then, what years—So do you currently live here? 

WADE: I live in Scottsville.

LEWIS: [01:22] So your involvement with Yancey and the Esmont community was what?

WADE: Well, it starts with our arrival in 1974, when we moved down from Charlottesville. And we—my late wife and I—joined a group called Southside Fellowship, which was specifically an interracial fellowship group, to create better understanding and acquaintance with the predominately-white Scottsville community and the Black community around Esmont. So we worked with Southside Fellowship. My wife and I are members of the Baha’i faith, which is why we came to Scottsville in the first place, because there were no Baha’is in this area. And so, officially, the Baha’i Group of Scottsville worked closely with Southside Fellowship, and we co-sponsored a Race Unity Day picnic every June for twenty-four years, starting in the ‘80s. And the last one was 2007, I believe.

And there have been many, many points of contact, of course, with the community. I worked at the old True Value hardware store, which was in the old shopping center, where the post office and bank are now. So I met lots of people from the Esmont community in that function. And we were invited to New Hope Friends and Family Day way back—(laughs) I don’t exactly remember when. There was a community choir that was created between some of the churches in Scottsville and the churches in Esmont—predominately white or totally white and predominately Black. So there were all these points of contact.

Probably sometime around 1990, I don’t know the exact year, I was asked to join the Martin Luther King Day Committee that plans every January’s MLK Day celebration. That’s been going on since 1987. So I’ve been doing that, and that of course establishes more contacts within the community, because the celebration goes from one to another of four churches in rotation: New Hope, Chestnut Grove, New Green Mountain, and Mount Pleasant. And then there are other churches involved—and I’m a Baha’i so that’s my engagement there. So that’s been a long history of close association with many, many different people and families here. 

LEWIS: [05:02] You also mentioned that you tutored the students at B.F. Yancey?

WADE: Not the students of B.F. Yancey. We used the facility here. My wife and I signed up with Literacy Volunteers, up in Charlottesville, so we took that training. And we had two students from the Esmont community here—she had one, I had the other—and we helped them with reading and writing and so on. So we did that for one year, and since they were here, and Literacy Volunteers likes people to meet in public spaces rather than homes, we used the school here rather than, for instance, the Scottsville Library, where the students would have had to have travelled down to town. So it was not Yancey students, per se.

Southside Fellowship did maintain a relationship with Yancey School. And as the fellowship disbanded, as we were all kind of aging out (laughs) some years ago, we donated the remainder of the funds on-hand to the Book Buddies program at Yancey. So there have been all of these peripheral things. And no real direct connection—other that coming to events here. Like Gospel Health Day has been here a time or two.  

LEWIS: [06:48] Are there other events that stand out to you as well, that you remember coming to the community, or the community coming to Scottsville, sort of showing a wider southern Albemarle pride, celebration? Is there anything else?

WADE: Well, the King Day celebrations, the health fairs that have been here. And one other thing: there was a pig roast over at the, over at the—

LEWIS: Park?

WADE: Park across the street. And I don’t know if it was—I think it was sponsored by a couple of churches. Chestnut Grove and Scottsville Presbyterian Church have a close relationship, and they exchange choirs and preachers once or twice a year—and it may have been Chestnut Grove sponsoring that, and the Scottsville Presbyterian.

LEWIS: [08:03] So that time that you came here, that’s sort of on the heels of civil rights—you know, integration and desegregation. Do you have any recollection of the community then? I’m not sure when you first started tutoring a couple children from the community, but do you have any recollection of desegregation, and maybe how things were different in Scottsville from Esmont?

WADE: (laughs) Yeah, when we first started with Southside Fellowship, there was a lot of uneasy unfamiliarity, you know? “We want to do things really step-by-step, by the book.” The proposed constitution for Southside Fellowship said that the officers would be an executive committee that could make decisions, and the membership said, “No, we want everything to be done by the whole group,” not to have an executive committee that could work between meetings to plan activities and kind of sparkplug things. 

So that was one things that I took as being kind of the tenor of the relationship between the two communities. The Baha’i group, actually at the annual planning meeting in the mid-‘80s, the first year after the fellowship had expanded its fellowship to include man, because it originally was a YWCA, you know. My wife and I came to the planning meeting, and invited the fellowship to co-sponsor the Race Unity Day Picnic, which is an event that the national Baha’i Community initiated in 1957. The American Baha’i community has been celebrating usually the second Sunday in June as Race Unity Day, with the specific purpose of calling attention to the fact that we’re all one family, we need to be all one family, and so on. And the fellowship said yes, and we began with the picnics, like I said, for twenty-four years. 

At that time originally, when we first came to Scottsville in 1974, and I discussed this once with Reverend Maynard Jones, from over in Buckingham County, who was a customer in the hardware store—I’d ask him questions every now and then. So one time, into the ‘90s I’m sure, I asked him how have things changed between the Black and white communities. I said, “Is it any better than it was? He said, “Oh, yeah. Things have changed.” The one thing he mentioned was, once, some years—probably a decade before—he said one of his deacons had been coming home from Charlottesville to come home in Buckingham. And there were a bunch of hoodlum toughs at the bridge at the river, and they would not let him go across the bridge. So he had to go out to Route 6 to Fork Union and go out across the river at Rainbow Bluff and come back that way. And there’s still some wild kids around, but they don’t do stuff like that anymore. So he said that things have improved in that record. 

Another experience that I share occasionally is: One of the pastors, who was on the planning committee for that very first Race Unity Day Picnic, went to the Daily Progress and got an extensive interview that resulted in probably twelve or fifteen column inches of story. And the Progress put the headline “Scottsville Plans Race Unity Day.” Well, a prominent Scottsville resident—which I have not named to anybody and will not—I encountered one day at the shopping center. And that person said, “The town of Scottsville should sue the Daily Progress because the town of Scottsville has nothing to do with race unity.” So that was 1984.

Some years later, the local theatre group—the Horseshoe Bend Players—put on the musical Big River, which is a dramatization of some episodes from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. And one of the numbers involves a white overseer with a shotgun crossing the stage with a Black chain gang, and they’re singing a song. I don’t remember what tat song is—you no, it’s been decades since that time. And at the end of that act, they got a standing ovation. And this person who had told me “Scottsville has nothing to do with race unity” was among the people standing up applauding that scene, that act. So added to—

LEWIS: [14:34] Was it still the ‘80s? Or was it in the ‘90s?

WADE: Oh, I think that probably was into the ‘90s by that time. I don’t know. But it’s just one little illustration of how people can change, too. And as people change, then their society changes. 

LEWISH: [14:55] I’m also curious about the play. Were there Black actors in the play? 

WADE: Oh, yeah. Yeah. The chain gang, for instance, was all-Black of course. And there were probably some other Black actors, but I honestly don’t remember. That’s the one scene—well, that and one other scene, which involved the king and the duke. If you go back and read Huckleberry Finn, it was kind of wild. (laughs) 

LEWIS: [15:31] Were there any other functions or events that crossed your mind.

WADE: Nope.

LEWIS: [15:41] So as far as other folks that you know, or maybe some other places that you feel have some preserved histories, anything or anyone you recommend we talk to? Or anyone that stands out to you that you remember?

WADE: Well, I think the people right here in the community are the biggest resource. There was a lady out there at the registration table with dozens and dozens of school photos, and she was sharing a bunch of them with—well, you saw, the ladies at the registration table. And people were recognizing, oh, that’s so-and-so when he or she was a little kid. And there are papers that were discovered in a house some years ago that had a lot of information, I think, related to Dr. Yancey. 

And, you know, the local people like Graham Page and so on. They’re on top of it. Berlinda Mills and Peggy Scott and folks that are close in the community, that have really paid attention to this. They’ll have that kind of information. Like I say, I came to Scottsville in 1974, and I have this somewhat peripheral connection with the Esmont community. Definitely peripheral with the school. 

LEWIS: [17:29] And as far as your local Baha’i chapter or service committee, do you think they would possibly have anything saved from maybe any momentous events?

WADE: Well, a person you could contact there would be Reverend Mary Carry, who was involved very early on. Or Lorraine Page, who was involved right from the very beginning with the King Day celebration. And some of the pastors, like Reverend Dorn Lewis from Chestnut Grove—and as far as that goes, Ben Page and other members of the Five Boys of Zion, they’ll know a lot of things that happened.

LEWIS: [18:21] Anything else you wanted to mention? Any thoughts?

WADE: No, just I feel very close to this community, which is why I’m here—even though I have virtually nothing to contribute the history of Yancey. (laughs)

LEWIS: Oh, no, thank you. You’re definitely part of the community. 

WADE: I was hoping also that another person who worked at the school for thirty-something years would be able to come and be here, but she had family commitments, so she’s not here.

LEWIS: [18:56] And there will be other opportunities for this as well, so you can let her know. All right, great. Chris—Mr. Wade—thank you.

WADE: “Mr. Wade.” (Lewis laughs) Chris. 

LEWIS: Thank you, I appreciate it.

WADE: Oh, more than happy to be part of—How about your connection with this? How are you connected?

LEWIS: Yeah, so, let’s see. It was roughly fifteen-plus years ago, my wife, who’s here: she’s Dr. Jones-Lewis. She’s the assistant principal now at Walton Middle School.

WADE: Ah! Okay. What is her first name?

LEWIS: Sharika.

WADE: Sharika.

LEWIS: Yeah, Jones-Lewis. Yeah, so she’s been at Walton three years. Yancey was her first full-time teaching job, roughly fifteen years ago. So we actually bought a house, brick house, down Porter’s Road about a mile. So I fell in love with the community, helped start the Esmont Community Committee, which started preserving the history, had celebrations every summer, things like that.

WADE: Hm, well you know well, then, all those people who I mentioned of course, (laughs) who were sparkplugs with that.

LEWIS: Right, so that’s our connection. We don’t live here currently, but we’re still very much part of the community. And like I said, she’s at Walton, and I work at the university.  

WADE: Oh, do you? Where are you in the university?

LEWIS: So, I’m at the Center for Tele-Health. I’m a senior engineer there, at the medical center.

WADE: Ah, okay. So you’re more on the IT side than the health side. 

LEWIS: Right, yeah.

WADE: Because my daughter’s a nurse there, at 6 West.

LEWIS: Oh, awesome! Awesome. Well, I look forward to working with you more. 

WADE: Well, thank you.

END OF TAPE [20:36]