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Out Migration & Good Ol' Boys! Will The New South Get Woke or Walk?

Good Ol' Boy Definition: A white male Southerner with an unpretentious convivial manner and conservative or intolerant attitudes and a strong sense of fellowship with and loyalty to other members of his peer group. synonyms: good ol' boy, good old boy. type of: white man. a man who is White.


The South has the worst schools. Full stop. Almost every education ranking shows it. Only one Southern state is ranked in the top 10 of U.S. News & World Report’s 2017-2019 K-12 education rankings(Virginia), and only one more (Kentucky) ranks in the top half of the country.


White flight or white exodus is the sudden or gradual large-scale migration of white people from areas becoming more racially or ethnoculturally diverse. One of the current causal factors is the rise of HBCU's and adherence to Historical truth instead of fictionalized history created to save the feelings of descendants of slaveowners! According to U.S. Census projections, at the current rate of demographic change the United States will be a majority minority nation by 2040! During the civil rights era, Atlanta thought of itself as “The City Too Busy to Hate,” a rare place in the South where the races lived and thrived together. Over the course of the 1960s and 1970s, however, so many whites fled the city for the suburbs that Atlanta earned a new nickname: “The City Too Busy Moving to Hate.” Now in the 21st century the upscale suburbs of Atlanta and cities like Houston see upscale communities growing despite economic downturns affecting the rural middle class white communities of the Midwest!


A suburb of Atlanta Buckhead is a mecca for the well-heeled, with shops selling the newest trends in haute couture and restaurants run by celebrity chefs. Black-owned businesses here range from upscale restaurants to boutique hotels, each contributing to the area's affluent ambiance. Thus there is reason to celebrate so why the white angst?


Leah Boustan, Professor of Economics at Princeton, attributes white flight both to racism and economic reasons. The business practices of redlining, mortgage discrimination, and racially restrictive covenants negatively impacted the economic growth of the rural predominantly elderly southern white towns as much or more than it contributed to the overcrowding and physical deterioration of urban areas with large minority populations.


Since the period of reconstruction to the present day although the violence as diminished greatly in comparison to decades past. The white Southerners in the USA were very eager to deny African Americans their rights as they wanted to maintain their place within a racial hierarchy. In the 1800's White society in the South was complex and had many levels. Most white Southerners fit into one of four categories: yeomen, tenant farmer, rural poor, or plantation owner.


Most white people in the South were yeomen farmers who generally owned small farms of 50 to 200 acres. These yeomen lived mostly in the Upper South and in the hilly areas of the Deep South. They grew crops to use themselves and to trade with local merchants. In 1808 congress banned the import of slaves. Slavery remained legal, but traders could no longer purchase enslaved people from other countries. They could not be bought outside of country to counter this and maintain their enslaved number white plantation owners relied on breeding farms. Slave breeding was the practice in slave states of the United States of slave owners to systematically force the impregnation of slaves to increase their profits. It included coerced sexual relations between male slaves and women or girls, forced pregnancies of female slaves, and favoring the rape of Black women or young girls in order to produce a large number of children who could be sold or used as labor.


The slaves were managed as chattel assets, similar to farm animals. Slave owners passed laws regulating slavery and the slave trade, designed to protect their financial investment. The enslaved workers had no more rights than a cow or a horse, or as famously put by the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford, "they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect".In fact the act of murder of slaves became routine and slave owners were protected by law if the maimed or killed their slaves. White cannibalism of enslaves and pedophilia was widely reported in accounts of enslaved Africans from the 16th century up through the 19th!


Robert Lumpkin was one of the South’s most prolific and brutal slave traders, presiding over a slave jail in Richmond so notorious that it was referred to as the “Devil’s Half Acre.” Mary Lumpkin was owned by him — and with the horror of who he was, she bore witness to the bloody punishments he meted out to enslaved people like her. Under Robert Lumpkin’s ownership from 1844 until the end of the Civil War, the jail/torture chambers held thousands of enslaved men and women in its dim and cramped cells, permeated by the stench of urine blood and human excrement. Many were destined for the auction block; others were captured runaways. But the most unfortunate had been delivered there by their masters to receive Lumpkin's expert punishment. The names of dead prisoners who died under his "Care" appeared on Robert Lumpkin’s insurance claims, their bodies buried in unmarked graves scattered about on the property.


The "whipping room" inside the jail allowed slaves to be fastened by their wrists and ankles to iron rings while lying on the blood encrusted stone floor, and flogged. Lumpkin's slave breeding business provided hoods to the enslaved people forced to breed to keep them from knowing with whom they were having forced sex, as it could be someone they know, a niece, aunt, sister, child, or their own mother. The jail featured "barred windows, high fences, chained gates opening to the rutted streets, and all seen and smelled through a film of cooking smoke and stench of human excrement." At times, it was filled by so many slaves that they were virtually on top of one another, often crammed into one room or floor and lacking toilets and fresh air other than through a small window. Slaves at the jail often died of disease or starvation, if they survived the beatings and torture. During this time period, the terms "breeders", "breeding slaves", "child bearing women", "breeding period", and "too old to breed" became familiar.

Mary was also Robert’s slave. She was given to him and raped and impregnated by him as a child of 12, (Robert was 39 at the time) ultimately bearing at least seven of his children, the first at the age of 13 five of whom survived. Robert Lumpkin, who never married a white woman, groomed the light skinned Mary as a life companion, sending their daughters off to boarding school up north and for her servitude left her the entire jail compound in his will?


Lumpkin’s Jail managed to thrive even during the upheaval of the Civil War, but the end of the conflict marked the demise of Robert Lumpkin’s lucrative business of misery rape and torture. He died one year later at the age of 61, the owner of a failed hotel he had fashioned from one of the old jail buildings. Likely he could never get the scent of death out of it.


By this time, Lumpkin's two daughters, Martha and Annie, who reportedly could pass for white, to finishing school in Massachusetts. (It is unclear what became of his three sons.) Later, the girls settled with their mother in Pennsylvania, perhaps to avoid their sale as slaves to pay his debts after the war. The daughters, Martha and Annie, "were so white that they passed in the community as white ladies," Before the end of the Civil War, their father "fearing that some contingency might arise when these, his own beautiful daughters, might be sold into slavery to pay his debts, kept them, after their education had been completed, in the free State of Pennsylvania, where they would be safe."


The Rev. Nathaniel Colver, an abolitionist Baptist minister from Boston, recounts he came to Richmond in 1867 on a mission to find a site for a school to train black ministers. He initially found only frustration. In despair, he encountered a cluster of black people on the street. "In the midst of that group was a large, fair-faced freedwoman, nearly white, who said that she had a place" that could serve as a school, wrote the Rev. Charles H. Corey in his history of the school that would later become Virginia Union University. Corey succeeded Colver as head of the school.

Corey called the woman Mary Jane Lumpkin. She also is known as Mary Ann Lumpkin. In her will and signed letters, she is Mary F. Lumpkin.


Corey described her as the widow of Richmond slave dealer Robert Lumpkin, who operated a slave jail at what is now 15th and Franklin streets. "For though Lumpkin was a white man and had bought this woman many years before as a slave, and she had become the mother of his children, yet, after Richmond fell, legally Robert Lumpkin married the former slave Mary and the children became his lawful heirs.


"The Cohabitation Act of 1866, passed by the General Assembly on February 27, 1866, legalized the marriages of formerly enslaved people in Virginia and declared their children to be legitimate. Because slave marriages were neither legally recognized nor protected, Governor Francis H. Pierpont recommended that the General Assembly of the Restored government of Virginia, which had remained loyal to the United States during the American Civil War (1861–1865) and had abolished slavery, pass a law to legalize and protect their existing marriages. With the end of the war, the Restored government’s jurisdiction extended across the state, and in 1866 the General Assembly in Richmond passed the law legitimizing such marriages and the children who resulted from them.


Colver entered a three-year agreement to lease the property from Mrs. Lumpkin for $1,000 a year.

The Lumpkin property, known as "The Devil's Half Acre," included the slave jail with whipping posts. $1,000 in 1867 is equivalent in purchasing power to about $27,330 today.


An enslaved woman like Mary Lumpkin was probably “first and foremost looking to stay alive and to not be separated from her children,” she said. Enslaved women in interracial relationships — including Sally Hemings, the enslaved extramarital interest of Thomas Jefferson, and Julia Chinn, enslaved partner of Richard Mentor Johnson, vice president to Martin Van Buren — were “exploiting the possibilities of their desperate circumstances.” Sharony A Greene


For a fleeting period before her impoverishment and death in Ohio in 1905, Mary Lumpkin appears to have received a small measure of financial security as the sole heir to Robert Lumpkin’s property. In 1867, Mary leased the haunted jail Lumpkin had bequeathed her to Nathaniel Colver, an abolitionist Baptist minister, to use as a seminary for freed slaves. The seminary later became Virginia Union University in Richmond. Eager black workers demolished the jail’s cells, removed iron bars from the windows and began outfitting classrooms to educate African Americans. In its dedication in 1900, the historically black school described Mary Lumpkin’s final legacy: “Lumpkin’s Jail, which had been the scene of some of the most heartless and saddest incidents of slavery, now became the seat of theological instruction. The rings in the floor to which slaves had been chained gave place to school desk and bench.”


Razed in the 1870s or '80s, the jail and Lumpkin's other buildings were long buried beneath a parking lot for university students, By the 1890s, the site had been leveled and was occupied by the large Richmond Iron Works foundry, and later by a Seaboard Air Line Railway freight depot. In the late 1950s, the western portion of the former Lumpkin property was buried beneath Interstate 95. Currently Virginia Union University is a private historically black Baptist university in Richmond, Virginia. It is affiliated with the National Baptist Convention USA, Inc. and the American Baptist Churches USA. VUU Honors Trailblazers at 159th Founders Day Convocation: Learn more about the Honorees March 11, 2024

1500 N. Lombardy Street

Virginia Union University, VA 23220

804-257-5600 or 800-368-3227

Fax: 804-342-3511


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