Dear Editor,

As someone who grew up in Powhatan and who is currently a teacher, I can say that no matter whether the conviction of Mr. Parrish was fair, this case and its outcome deserves much more than a polite deflection from our local schools.

I hope the administrative leadership at Blessed Sacrament-Huguenot and Powhatan schools will use it as an opportunity to discuss the issue of race relations—a conversation that almost never happens in the county.

Perhaps this is because Powhatan’s history around race is not an especially proud one.

BSH (then as Huguenot Academy) itself was founded in response to school integration. Ample time has elapsed, and BSH is rightly a thriving and proud school.But when I have tried to discuss this history with everyone ranging from family members to professional contemporaries, an apologist tone ensues. Other discussions about race in the county lead me to believe that there is a general refusal to grapple with the reality that many there have never embraced the notion that, as President Truman said sixty years ago, “Every segment of our population, and every individual, has a right to expect from his government a fair deal.”

If one visits the Powhatan County website and reads about its history, one will find the tactless sentence, “The first record of a white man being in the area known as Powhatan County was in 1608,” which, if read by a minority, would suggest that the record prior to that date is basically irrelevant.

Finally, the Powhatan County Historical Society, which should contend with the county’s history directly, has not done so in any real or holistic way. Its first act as a group was to place a Bronze Plaque at Derwent, Robert E. Lee’s post-war sanctuary - not inherently insensitive, perhaps, but certainly a representative occurrence.

It appears that the Society has entirely not dealt with, either out of convenience or ignorance, what might be termed the “peoples’ history” of Powhatan.

Catharsis is a powerful thing. But it can’t happen when people refuse to open the dark closets of history.

Nathan Goodwyn
Powhatan