from room to room and everywhere you looked there were paintings of old white men. There were no portraits of African Americans displayed on the walls of the mansion. Not one. We changed that.
Dorothy and I decided that the first piece of art we’d put up would be a portrait of an unnamed African American working man painted by Pierre Daura, a Catalan artist who fought in the Spanish Civil War before relocating to Virginia with his American wife. The portrait, lent to us by the Library of Virginia, is of a custodian at Randolph–Macon Women’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia, where Daura taught in the late 1940s. We were proud to honor that working man as a symbol of so many other working people who were not being celebrated, but we knew it was only a start.
We also wanted to honor Oliver Hill, the great African American civil rights lawyer from Richmond whose work was a critical part of the Brown v. Board of Education case before the United States Supreme Court in the 1950s. Hill lived to be one hundred. On Juneteenth in 2015 we had a ceremony at the governor’s mansion to unveil a portrait of Hill that we displayed in the front room right next to Patrick Henry’s desk. Our mansion director, Kaci Easley, arranged for the painting to be loaned from the University of Richmond Black Law Students Association. We had more than one hundred guests for the occasion, including Hill’s son, Dr. Oliver W. Hill Jr., a psychology professor at Virginia State University.
“Mr. Hill was a trailblazer like no other,” I said at the ceremony.
Next we located a portrait to borrow from the historic Robert Russa Moton Museum of remarkable leader Barbara Johns, who in April 1951 led the famous Moton High School walkout in Farmville, Virginia. That walkout ultimately became part of the Brown v. Board of Education case. She was sixteen years old at the time. Imagine the courage! She could have been lynched for gathering the students, more than four hundred of them, in the school gymnasium and marching them to the local courthouse to protest segregation and the overcrowding and dilapidated conditions of her blacks-only school. That courage helped lead to the Supreme Court’s decision on Brown v. Board of Education overturning state-sponsored segregation of public schools. And after the verdict, you know what they did in Farmville? They shut down all the schools for six years rather than integrating their schools under Supreme Court order. That was one of the worst things done in the history of the commonwealth, literally offering no education to these students.
We had a ceremony at the mansion to honor Barbara Johns and invited her sister, brothers, children, and grandchildren to attend. It was a celebration of a remarkable person, but it was also a celebration of telling the full story of Virginia and the United States. And from that day on her portrait has been displayed in the ballroom where all official receptions at the mansion are held.
I thought of those portraits and the larger story they told in the aftermath of the Charlottesville tragedy. That horrible weekend shook up the country. It held up a mirror and showed us a picture of America that caused many of us to recoil. It may have been only a fringe element showing up in the streets of Charlottesville, but they were marching in broad daylight, seemingly unashamed of having such a twisted view of humanity and acting out, often with savage violence.
It’s not as if we’re going to turn the pain of Charlottesville into instant and obvious progress. Maybe we’re past the point of believing in progress as anything other than an awkward, slow succession of advances and setbacks, but that only means we redouble our efforts and keep fighting for progress. Breakthroughs do happen. Surprises do come.
I don’t think I’ve met a more inspirational figure in my life than the South African leader Nelson Mandela, imprisoned all those years on Robben Island, who emerged with no bitterness and led his people to freedom after years of apartheid. I visited him in South Africa on his ninetieth birthday and he reiterated to me his famous quote: “No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”
But Mandela