Montpelier—President James Madison’s home in Orange County, Virginia—is embroiled in controversy over what authority it allows descendants of the enslaved people who built and powered his family’s plantation.
On Friday afternoon, The Montpelier Foundation board rescinded its earlier commitment and stripped 50-50 power sharing from the Montpelier Descendants Committee representing African Americans who trace their roots to the plantation’s community.
Five descendants of enslaved people serve on the board, three chosen by the committee and two by the foundation. The bylaws change bars the committee from naming future members. That gives the foundation more control over the board’s composition.
Critics of the board’s decision have mounted a petition drive, which garnered 3,000 signatures in less than 24 hours.
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A majority of the historic site’s staff protested the board’s move, saying the foundation failed to make any headway implementing its promise of equality with the descendants’ group more than nine months after making that pledge.
Matt Reeves, the foundation’s director of archaeology and landscape restoration, is among those professionals. He has been on Montpelier’s staff for 22 years.
“It’s a supreme irony that The Montpelier Foundation board, which professes to promote a pro-Madison philosophy, is completely missing Madison’s political philosophy of critical thinking and seeing how two opposing factions can balance each other and create a stronger, more diverse whole—such as could be attained at Montpelier,” Reeves said Saturday afternoon.
The impasse has halted work on important projects, already funded, that need collaboration with the descendants, the staff said in a statement.
Foundation leaders have systematically prevented staff interacting and collaborating with the Montpelier Descendants Committee, and threatened staff members with termination for doing so, they said.
Dr. Elizabeth Chew, Montpelier’s vice president and chief curator, said that after more than 20 years of partnership with descendants, staff have been threatened with fiiring since 2020. That’s when foundation Chairman Gene Hickok and Montpelier President Roy F. Young II assumed leadership posts.
“Montpelier leadership has lied to staff about progress toward sharing governance with MDC,” Chew said.
“Our fight is about so much more than a historic plantation in rural Virginia,” said Dr. Iris Ford, an MDC board member who is an associate professor emerita of anthropology at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. “Over 200 years after the ratification of the Constitution, African Americans are still fighting for the protection and liberties that it claims to guarantee. What we are doing at Montpelier is fighting for the very soul of our nation.”
Hickok told The Washington Post the board isn’t reneging on fully representing descendants, a concept called “structural parity.” Rather, the board wants to pick descendant members from a bigger pool than the committee, he said.
“This is an effort to reset the process,” Hickok told the newspaper. “It certainly doesn’t have the board backing away from parity. We are very committed to parity. The challenge has been organizationally getting there.”
The conflict, which has long been brewing, has outraged Montpelier curators, historians and archaeologists. They say the descendants committee is their crucial partner in interpreting the complicated past of the “Father of the Constitution,” his family and the 300-some enslaved people who toiled there over 140 years.
Dr. Bettye Kearse, one of the few descendents on The Montpelier Foundation’s board, said the committee is committed to “the rich and important history told at Montpelier, to the beauty and power of the Montpelier estate and grounds, and to the longevity and strength of The Montpelier Foundation.”
“MDC members have spent decades of their lives researching Montpelier’s history and archaeology and developing innovative and award-winning historical interpretation projects,” said Kearse, a pediatrician who wrote “The Other Madisons: The Lost History of a President’s Black Family.” “Montpelier is not the board, but the board must be receptive to substantive change for Montpelier to survive and thrive.”
The National Trust for Historic Preservation, which owns the Madison plantation’s 2,400 acres, warned Hickok on Thursday that the board’s change to its bylaws “would undermine decades of important work that led to the formation of the Committee in the first place, and in turn would set back Montpelier’s efforts to continue the necessary work of uplifting descendants’ voices, and repairing the relationship between the broader African American community and Montpelier, the former site of generations of enslavement.”
Before the vote, a majority of the foundation’s roughly 40 full-time employees wrote aresolution urging the board not to OK the change.
On Thursday evening, National Trust Chief Executive Paul Edmondson wrote Hickok and urged him “in the strongest possible terms” not to press ahead with changing the bylaws.
Edmondson was blunt, noting that Montepelier descendants chose the committee as their formal voice. The foundation’s commitment to give them equal seats on the board “acknowledged the right of the descendant community to define itself, rather than to be defined by the foundation,” he wrote Hickok. “The newly proposed revisions to the bylaws would do the opposite.”
The trust provided grant money and other support to The Montpelier Foundation and the Montpelier Descendants Committee to encourage their reaching an agreement on power sharing, recognizing it is “a deeply challenging process,” Edmondson wrote.
Several Montpelier staffers and board members told the Post they believe the foundation’s leaders are unwilling to share control over how the site depicts the fourth U.S. president and his legacy.
Other presidential homes in Virginia—notably Monticello, Mount Vernon and James Monroe’s Highlands—have wrestled in recent years with the issue of slavery and how they depict their owners’ entanglement with it.
The MDC’s attorney, Greg Werkheiser of Cultural Heritage Partners in Richmond, said of Montpelier that “the whole point of including descendant voices is to broaden the perspective of leadership, not to reinforce a historically narrow approach to telling history.”
In February, the committee proposed a compromise allowing the foundation to reject MDC board nominees for ethical and legal reasons, but not because Black descendants “didn’t fit the profile of the current board,” he said.
Werkheiser said Saturday that, working with the committee, he submitted to the foundation board a list of “40 hugely impressive prospects that any board in America would be lucky to have, and they refused to look at it.”
“The public tends to think of the battle for civil rights as taking place through speeches, marches, and courtrooms,” he said. “But the modern struggle for fairness also occurs in quiet board rooms of places like Montpelier, and only comes to light when people like the descendants and staff say, ‘Enough is enough.’”
Montpelier’s earlier work to more closely collaborate with enslaved people’s descendants garnered wide publicity and respect from other historic sites and professionals.
In 2018, a conference at Montpelier on teaching about slavery produced “The Rubric.” The document, titled “Engaging Descendant Communities,” set standards for guiding institutions toward more completely representing Black people.
But the committee’s relationship with foundation leaders began to break down after the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, when leaders couldn’t agree on a joint statement about his death with the MDC, staff said. The foundation issued a statement lamenting Floyd’s death, but the descendants committee felt it should more strongly condemn systemic racial inequities, and submitted stronger language.
Late Saturday, Montpelier CEO Young said, in reaction to the Post’s story, that some staff members have expressed concern that last week’s staff statement “mischaracterizes them and their work.”
He said one staff member said, “I am concerned about a number of aspects of this statement, the way it’s been presented, and that it does not speak for many employees of Montpelier. The statement seems to ignore the efforts of the Interpretive staff working to present to Visitors the tragedies of individual and generations of enslaved people at Montpelier, as well as the amazing impact that James Madison has on democratic principles.”
Orange County resident James French, the elected chair of the descendants committee, said Saturday, “There might be boards somewhere where an ‘equal partnership’ consists of choosing others’ leaders for them, shamelessly trying to pit community members against one another in an attempt to divide and conquer, and preventing members with different views than yours from speaking—since difficult conversations are, after all, inconvenient.
“But what is certain is that such a board would be unqualified to engage honestly with Madisonian concepts, the U.S. Constitution or the completeness of the history of slavery,” added French, who is a member of The Montpelier Foundation’s board. “Montpelier deserves better.”