This program is Free and open to the public!

Three sessions
Instructors: Etta Willson, Rita Colbert, Rondia Prescott, Linneall Naylor, Jenee Lindner, Tom Shoop
Coordinator: Camille Hodges 

An Untold Story - The free Black population of Fairfax Court house dates to at least the 1820s.  After the Civil War, newly freed Black citizens expanded the hamlet of Jermantown dramatically. Additional segregated neighborhoods, including School Street, which overlapped today's George Mason University, and Ilda, off Guinea Road, grew and thrived. In the second half of the 19th century, residents built schools, churches and a cemetery. These families persevered under Jim Crow in the early twentieth century.  After incorporation, the City of Fairfax annexed these historically Black localities, and their separate characters, began to disappear. This group of authors with deep roots in Fairfax tells the stories of their communities. The book Black Communities of Fairfax: A History by Etta Willson, Rita Colbert, Linneall Naylor, Rondia Prescott with Jenee Lidner won the Fairfax County History Commission's Cultural Heritage Engagement Award.  The book, A Place Called Ilda by Thomas Shoop won the Fairfax County History Commission's Nan Netherton Award for excellence in history.