Dressed head-to-toe in clothes from the 1800s, Marion Ransell Dobbins’ presence at the Sully Historic Site in Fairfax County, Virginia, speaks volumes.
“As long as I have breath in my body and blood in my vein, I will be up somewhere in the heat wearing all of these clothes, and I will be talking to people about the enslavement of ancestors, the enslavement of my ancestors,” Dobbins said.
Dobbins, an African-American historian who traced her lineage to Sully, said she aims to give visitors a more personal account of American history.
The Sully manor home in Chantilly Virginia was built in the late 1700s for Richard Bland Lee, Northern Virginia’s first representative to Congress.
“We know in the early 1700s this would’ve been used as, most likely, a tobacco plantation, or what’s called absentee landholding, where there was enslaved men and women here working those crops in the field to make money for the Lee family,” said Matthew Gailani with the Fairfax County Park Authority.
More than 200 years later, Dobbins read the names of those enslaved people out loud.
“And to be able to say each name of the enslaved. But then also get people who come and say the name of the enslaved because we need to give them honor. Because their names were forgotten,” Dobbins said.
The solemn ceremony was a moment to reflect and honor the ancestors who once lived at Sully while also honoring Juneteenth, the day in 1865 the last enslaved people in the U.S. learned they were free.
“To be in the mindset of the enslaved when they saw the men come in and say ‘you’re free’ two years later, I can imagine … I can imagine how that felt. So it was powerful,” visitor Tiffany Harvey, of Brambleton, Virginia, said.
“My heart is full and it’s also broken at the same time just remembering the history and learning as much as I can about it,” Sarah Fleming, of Pataloma, California, said.
“If I change the hearts of the youth, who are then going to become the movers and shakers of this country, then we keep these types of institutions called Juneteenth alive,” Dobbins said.
from Local – NBC4 Washington https://ift.tt/keKnaZT
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