Kemp

As a graduate teaching student at the University of Maryland, Kemp decided that she wanted her dissertation to focus on preserving African American culture and history in rural communities. What began as an academic and social endeavor quickly became something more personal.

“They [the Hazels] were courageous, they stayed and fought and that’s why I’m able to be in Powhatan today.”

As a Civil War soldier, Charles was injured and later treated at a hospital by Martha, a black woman. After the war the two left Virginia and were married. The couple returned in 1879, and would, over the next four years, face seven suits from the Commonwealth of Virginia for violating the Virginia Miscegenation Laws, dictates that forbade interracial marriage

“I’m hoping young people will have the chance to learn about slave codes, runaway codes, miscegenation codes, Plessey v. Ferguson, and Brown v. the Board of Education,” said Kemp. “I want people to see how the community handled all of that locally.”

The state’s inability to handle the Hazel’s challenge to entrenched custom is indicated by Charles’ varying racial status in census reports. According to Kemp’s research, “later censuses recorded his race changing from white to mulatto to black during Jim Crow days when Dr. W. A. Plecker served as Virginia Register of Vital Statistics and supported the eugenics movement to ban race mixing and the Race Integrity Act.”

When “Charles died in 1915 [in the African American hamlet of Mohemenco], his death certificate noted that he was a white male farmer,” notes Kemp’s research.

According to a family member’s account included in Kemp’s work, “a white undertaker had to handle the burial of Charles in a white cemetery,” due to segregation policies.

“I almost get tears in my eyes when I think about Martha,” said Kemp. “They fought during their lifetime to be together and then they couldn’t be together in death.”

In 2004, Kemp became a board member of St. Francis/St. Emma Inc., an organization aimed at preserving Belmead Plantation on Cartersville Road. She is in charge of the project to restore the granary, the property’s oldest building, and hopes that her book’s publication will coincide with the conclusion of that project this year. 

“I want to tell the story of the African American and European experience on the Belmead property…I want people to know what happened, I want everyone to know,” said Kemp. “My effort is just to preserve the history.”