"How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers' names. Yet, we do not know them. Or if we do, it is only the names we know and not the lives." ~Alice Walker, In Search of our Mother’s Gardens1
Phyllis Randall
The story of Phyllis Randall’s family is the story of Black America. Her ancestor, Margaret “Peggie” Lambert, was born into slavery in Virginia. Impregnated by a white man, her son William was sold to a plantation in Tennessee. After emancipation, she lived out her life near her son Sterling, who was tied to the land by a sharecropping contract. William’s son John would be the last to be born into slavery, and John’s daughter Julia would be the first in Phyllis Randall’s line to be born free. Julia would join The Great Migration, moving to Detroit during World War II, and her daughter, Earlie Mae, would go west to Denver, CO, part of a rising middle class of Black families in the Five Points neighborhood created through Red Lining. Billie Jean would travel Europe with her husband as he served in the US Army before returning to Denver to raise a family. Their daughter Phyllis would return South with her husband, moving to Virginia near the turn of the 21st century. Nearly 200 years after Peggie was enslaved in the Old Dominion, Phyllis would be elected as the top local official in Loudoun County and rewrite the Lost Cause narrative embodied in a Confederate memorial to the culture that enslaved her ancestors.
From Peggie to Phyllis: Across Time and Geography
According to Family History with Documentation
The Beginning of the Journey in Virginia:
Reading the Silences
Working with African-American genealogy prior to 1870 can be a game of conjecture. However, the silences in the archive, as Truillot points out, can be informative as they are not simply created through neglect. Searching for records of Margaret “Peggie” Lambert, Phyllis Randall’s enslaved forebearer, is fraught with challenges and demands reading between silences. In her book, Demonic Grounds, Katherine McKitterick suggests that “the struggle between black women's geographies and geographic domination… offers a different entry point into human geography: one that recognizes the alterability of humanness, space, and place, and one that imparts the understanding that this alterability is a pathway into new geographic practices.”2 To find Peggie in the geographic space where she lived necessitates using historical imagination to read between the few appearances she makes in the historical record.
Using DNA, the current Lambert family has traced their lineage through Peggie and Julius Lambert, who they presumed was her enslaver, and their child William.3 Julius Lambert resided in Mecklenburg County, VA, but there is no listing for Peggie or any of her children in the posthumous inventory of Julius Lambert’s estate.4 Being that William was born around the time of his presumed biological father’s passing, but Peggie is missing from the record of his estate, it is unclear where she was residing.
The most concrete record of Peggie Lambert is the 1870 census,5 which finds her living in Lunenburg County, VA, with Washington and Jane Boswell, their children, and an 8-year-old boy named Robert Lambert, perhaps a grandson. The Boswells are also listed on an 1866 Freedman’s Bureau list of couples cohabiting as married couples, and that form states that Jane Boswell was enslaved in Lunenburg, VA, by J. Lambert.6 This person is presumably James Lambert, the only J. Lambert in Lunenburg at this time with an enslaved woman Jane’s age. Furthermore, the 1860 Slave Schedule also lists a much older enslaved woman approximately Peggie’s age as being enslaved by James Lambert.7 The fact that Jane and Peggie are living together in 1870, Peggie is listed with the same last name as Jane’s enslaver, and Peggie, appears to be listed on James Lambert’s 1860 Slave Schedule all indicates that the women’s relationship pre-dates emancipation. In addition, one of Peggie’s sons, Sterling Lambert, also resided in Lunenburg, VA in 1870,8 and he and his wife signed a sharecropping contract to farm David R. Stokes land.9 The last record of Peggie is her death in 1880 from pneumonia.10
With records showing Peggie in Lunenburg and Julius in Mecklenburg, it appears that the historical record has reached a dead end. However, James and Julius Lambert both have connections to Mecklenburg County, VA, which provides an additional connection. While Julius was born in Richmond, he was living in Mecklenburg around the time James was born, where the older Lambert spent most of his life.11 James, on the other hand, was born and raised in Mecklenburg, raised his family on his farm in Lunenburg, but ultimately returned to Mecklenburg to live out his last years with is son, Benjamin.12 Therefore, Julius and James Lambert might have known each other and may have even been related.
Looking for evidence of Peggie’s whereabouts necessitates looking outside the Lambert line. In 1825, David Vaughn died in Lunenburg County and listed five enslaved people among his estate; the last listed is “Peggy,” the only enslaved person with this name who appears in the recorded wills of Lunenburg County at this time.13 Of Vaughn’s five children, two of his sons were in debt to their father’s estate sixty and one hundred dollars plus interest, respectively. Is it possible that Peggie was sold to James Lambert to liquidate part of the estate, thereby making it easier to dissolve in light of the skewed apportionment? Is this how Jane, confirmed to have been enslaved by J. Lambert, and Peggie became close enough for the younger woman to bring Peggie into her household? If Julius Lambert visited his relative or vice versa, could Peggie have become pregnant at that time? In the 1880 census,14 William is listed as Mulato, while Peggie and Sterling are listed as Black in all records, indicating that the brothers do not share a biological father. Since this alternative narrative does not completely dovetail with family lore, it insinuates that more is hidden in the silences.
Leaving Virginia
The record remains murky when it comes to when William Lambert was sold to John Walker Jones. Descendants of William Lambert continue to live in Fayette, TN, where their ancestor was enslaved at Cedar Grove Plantation. The 1860 US Federal Census - Slave Schedule lists John Walker Jones as enslaving 182 people.15 There are two 32-year-old Mulatto men listed, and either of them could be William. Furthermore, Williams's place of birth appears to change on various documents, with Tennessee sometimes listed and Virginia listed other times.16 It could be that William was sold as a very young child, which could account for the variations.
Leaving the South
Like his father, John Lambert is listed as mixed race on the 1910 census.17 This was the same year that Tennessee passed its “one drop” rule, wherein even one drop of Black ancestry excluded entry into the dominion of whites and all the privileges it afforded.18 It would be John’s children who would begin leaving Fayette, TN, with Julia moving to Michigan following her parents’ deaths. However, two more generations would be born in Tennessee before that: Julia’s daughter Earlie Mae and her granddaughter Billie Jean.
By 1950, Julia was in Michigan with several of her children.19 Her husband, who had been a cotton farmer in Tennesee, found work as a truck driver for a salvage company, and her son Ellis was hired by the Veterans Administration. Earlie Mae’s husband, Robert Henderson, was a Pullman porter whose route ended in Denver, CO, and because of this, the family joined the millions of other Black families who left the South by following trains to their ultimate destinations.20
Moving West
Following the Civil War, Black men came west looking for work on the rail lines as they snaked across the country. With the completion of The Denver Pacific Line and the Kansas Pacific Line, Denver grew as a western trading hub.21 The need for labor in the growing city attracted Black people looking to escape the South,22 and, while not to the degree of Chicago or Detroit,23 Denver’s Black community multiplied as the Great Migration continued to redistribute the Black population.
Denver’s overlay of parallel and diagonal streets created a five-way intersection at Welton Street, Washington Street, 27th Street, and East 26th Avenue, and on Welton Street from 22nd to 29th Street.24 The shorthand used by the city’s street car system was Five Points, and the name became synonymous with the area. As white citizens moved to more affluent areas, Five Points became a Black enclave. A combination of Red Lining and racial solidarity reconstituted the neighborhood into a burgeoning area of a rising Black middle class.25
Five Points was “a community bound, but not defined by, segregation.”26 Black-owned businesses and the incomes of the many men who worked as train porters provided the area’s economic foundation. Prominent in the neighborhood were The Phyllis Wheatley Colored YMCA and Glanarm YMCA, the latter featuring a swimming pool, gymnasium, club rooms, dormitories, and a branch of the Denver Public Library.27 Large brick and stone churches dotted the corners, and Black congregants maintained ties to these even as later families moved to other neighborhoods in Denver.28 In 1910, a Children’s Hospital was opened in Denver that served children of all races, and in 1931, Fire Company No. 3 was located in the Points.29 Between 1940 and 1950, the period in which Earlie Mae and her family moved to Colorado, the Black population in Denver doubled.30 With its jazz clubs, neighborhood-wide Juneteenth celebration, and established Black culture, Five Points became known as the Harlem of the West.
The Black achievement occurring in Five Points did not go unnoticed, nor was it always appreciated, by Denver’s far larger white population. At fifty-thousand Knights, Colorado had among the largest KKK membership in the nation, with only Indiana’s membership outpacing it. In 1925, the NAACP held its national convention in Denver. The next year, the Klan conducted a massive march through downtown Denver that ended with a cross burning that could be seen for miles.31 Phyllis remembers her grandfather often telling her about the impact this had on the community. Throughout the 1930s and 40s, both Denver’s mayor and police chief were members of the Klan. Despite leaving former Confederate states for the promise of better opportunities in the North, outside of the area surrounding Five Points, Denver’s power structures resembled those in the South.
Just as the place Anna Thornton Miller Murray was brought up steeped her in Confederate culture, Phyllis Randall’s upbringing in a predominantly Black community with a rich history of racial uplift shaped her perspective. Despite her husband’s entreaties to move from Colorado to Virginia, his family home, Phyllis was reluctant because she had grown up understanding that the South was a place that Black people left, not where they moved to. When she told her mother of their plans, Billie Jean could not understand why they would consider moving to the South. She was fearful for her daughter, asking, “Why are you going to the South? Because that's where Virginia is, the South.”32 In both Billie Jean and Phyllis’s minds, the former Confederate states were dangerous places that Black people should avoid. However, following the end of The Great Migration, millions of the descendants of those who left are returning and, in doing so, are changing what it means to be Southern.
Returning South
Sociologists and historians can identify forces that exert a push or pull on migrants, determining their movements.33 The push type of force is exerted when the person feels they are left with few choices other than to leave. During The Great Migration, the push of racial oppression and stymied economic opportunities pushed Black people out of the South. However, the opportunity for more choices pulls people to a place, and these forces are bringing the descendants of those who left to the South. Black people migrating to former Confederate states in a reversal of the Great Migration tend to be younger, more educated, and affluent than those who left. They are drawn to economic opportunity and a sense of returning home.34 Furthermore, the promise of Northern cities decayed along with their infrastructure,35 leading many to abandon the cities that once held so much promise for their grandparents and great-grandparents. Between 2005 and 2010, Virginia ranked in the top five states for increases in its Black population.36
A graph of the increasing and decreasing population shifts of Black people living in the South
Phyllis agreed to try Virginia, but with the caveat that the family would return to Colorado if it did not work out. Pregnant with her first son, she explored her new home. Strolling through Leesburg, she turned a corner and came face to face with the Confederate memorial placed in Courthouse Square in 1908.
“I was just walking around to see where I lived,” she recalled. “And I remember walking up on the statue and reading it like four times before it went into my head, what I was looking at, and being completely appalled. Because one, I'm looking at the Confederate statue, but, more for me, because I was looking at the Confederate statue on courthouse grounds, where justice should be done…I remember just thinking, I want to get myself and this baby in my stomach away from this, from this thing right here. I just couldn't believe it. I could not believe it.”37
Later that evening, she told her husband what she had seen. His response surprised her, “He was like, ‘Yeah, we live in Virginia, Phyllis.’” She could not fathom how he could be so nonchalant about a Confederate statue sitting on the Courthouse lawn.38
“Something always told me I wasn't no rich white woman.”" ~Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun39
In April of 2008, the Loudoun chapter of the UDC made a funding request to the Board of County Supervisors to cover the cost of restoration work on the statue in preparation for the celebration of the centennial of its unveiling. Phyllis was aghast that the elected officials in Loudoun County were considering appropriating taxpayer funds to prop up the local Confederate iconography. She was confident that the Black residents of Loudoun County would not stand for having their money used to polish the metal boots of this Confederate soldier. Entering the Board Chambers for the first time, she expected to find a crowd of angry Black citizens. However, she was the lone Black woman in a sea of hoop skirts as the members of the UDC arrived in the garb of the period they sought to preserve.40
Thus began Phyllis’s focused struggle to rewrite the Lost Cause narrative in Loudoun County by removing the Silent Sentinel from the Courthouse Square.
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The spelling of Peggie (vs. Peggy) used throughout this study is based on the 1870 census, as it is the spelling used the only time she appears in the historical record as a free woman during her lifetime.
1 Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose, A Harvest Book (Orlando Austin New York San Diego Toronto London: Harcourt, 1983), 276.
2 Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 146.
3Marcus Turner, “Family Origins,” Lambert Harvey Turner Govan Family Legacy: Up From Slavery, accessed December 4, 2023, https://lambertfamilytree.com/family-2/.
4E. L. Dabb, “Posthumous Inventory of Julius Lambert” (Mecklenburg County Circuit Court, December 29, 1827), Family Search, https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3Q9M-C9TC-NYNV?cat=382696.
5 “United States Census, 1870” (Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, July 20, 1870), The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:MFGG-QVH.
6 “Lunenburg County (Va.) Register of Colored Persons Cohabiting Together as Husband and Wife, 1866 Feb. 27.” (Lunenburg County Circuit Court, 1866), Cohabitation Registers Digital Collection, Virginia Untold: The African American Narrative, http://digitool1.lva.lib.va.us:8881/R/3YF1L37QQH52FP7DKEXXD1MYCF661HLD48H9KI6TUGG5YKBJ25-01539?func=results-jump-full&set_entry=000016&set_number=131847&base=GEN01-LVA01.
7 ““United States Census- Slave Schedules, 1860” (Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, June 27, 1860), The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), https://www.ancestry.com/discoveryui-content/view/92463233:7668?tid=&pid=&queryId=06ba81479bf0dada231c9140c0ddd385&_phsrc=QjY240&_phstart=successSource.
8 “United States Census, 1870” (Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, July 28, 1870), The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:MFGG-LCC.
9 “Snead, Allen: Freedman’s Contract” (Lunenburg County Freedman’s Contracts, 1866), Virginia Untold: The African American Narrative, Library of Virginia, http://rosetta.virginiamemory.com:1801/delivery/DeliveryManagerServlet?dps_pid=IE34608.
10 “Non-Population Census Schedules for Virginia, 1850-1880,” 1880, T1132; Archive Roll Number: 19; Census Year: 1880; Census Place: Columbian Grove, Lunenburg, Virginia; Page: 950, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), https://www.ancestry.com/discoveryui-content/view/1878068:8756?ssrc=pt&tid=110860764&pid=342269347183.
11 “Mecklenburg County Personal Property 1805,” 1805, Virginia State Library and Archives, https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3Q9M-CS73-9S94-1?i=7&cat=638357; “Mecklenburg County Personal Property 1809,” 1809, Virginia State Library and Archives, https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3Q9M-CS73-9S94-1?i=7&cat=638357
12 “United States Census, 1880” (Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, June 18-19, 1880), The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:MC5K-62C.
13 David Vaughn, trans., Will of David Vaughan 1825, vol. 8, Will Book (Lunenburg, VA, 1825), https://www.ancestry.com/discoveryui-content/view/961477:62347?tid=&pid=&queryId=209ed6fa-e601-406c-8fa5-663a3576c381&_phsrc=QjY295&_phstart=successSource.
14 “1880: United States Census” (Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 1880).
15 “1860 U.S. Federal Census - Slave Schedules,” September 1, 1860, Series Number: M653; Record Group: Records of the Bureau of the Census; Record Group Number: 29, The National Archives in Washington, DC, https://www.ancestry.com/discoveryui-content/view/4171492:7668?_phsrc=QjY235&_phstart=successSource&ml_rpos=1&queryId=e3bd9cd2f76381127d58b6fd1fdbec66.
16 Tennessee Deaths, 1914-1966 (Fayette, TN: State of Tennessee, State Board of Health, 1914), https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QPC9-7VYZ : Sat Oct 14 00:50:48 UTC 2023; “1880: United States Census.”
17 “United States Census, 1910,” May 10, 1910, The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:MGFH-9LQ.
18 Daniel J. Sharfstein, “Crossing the Color Line: Racial Migration and the One-Drop Rule, 1600-1860 1600-1860,” Minnesota Law Review, Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications, 19 (2007): 596, Available at: https://scholarship.law.vanderbilt.edu/faculty-publications/386.
19 “United States Census, 1950” (Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, April 15, 1950), The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:6FSJ-QTHK.
20 “United States Census, 1950” (Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, April 12, 1950), The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:6FMD-3D9Q.
21 Laura M. Mauck, Five Points Neighborhood of Denver (Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2001), 9.
22 Ibid., 24.
23 James Gregory, “Southern-Born African Americans Living Outside the South by Decade 1900-2000,” Tableau, Great Migration (African American), March 17, 2023, https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/mapping.social.movements/viz/GreatMigrationAfricanAmerican/STORYBLACK.
24 “Five Points Designation Amendment” (WeltonCorridor.com, 2015), 2, https://weltoncorridor.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Five-Points-Designation-Amendment.pdf.
25 Residential Security Map, 1:21,120 (Denver, CO: 1:21,120, 1938).
26 “Five-Points-Whittier Neighborhood History,” Denver Public Library: Genealogy, African American & Western History Resources, n.d., https://history.denverlibrary.org/neighborhood-history-guide/five-points-whittier-neighborhood-history.
27 Ibid.
28 Mauck, Five Points Neighborhood of Denver; Phyllis Randall, Interview with Phyllis Randall, interview by Kristina Nohe, November 19, 2023.
29.“Five Points Designation Amendment,” 2.
30 Ibid., 4.
31 Randall, Interview with Phyllis Randall; Mauck, Five Points Neighborhood of Denver, 68–70.
32 Randall, Interview with Phyllis Randall.
33 William H. Frey, Diversity Explosion: How New Racial Demographics Are Remaking America, Revised and updated (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2018), 117.
34 William W. Falk, Larry L. Hunt, and Matthew O. Hunt, “Return Migrations of African-Americans to the South: Reclaiming a Land of Promise, Going Home, or Both?,” Rural Sociology 69, no. 4 (n.d.): 490–91, 500,504; Frey, Diversity Explosion, 107.
35 Falk, Hunt, and Hunt, “Return Migrations of African-Americans to the South: Reclaiming a Land of Promise, Going Home, or Both?,” 492.
36 Frey, Diversity Explosion, 120.
37 Randall, Interview with Phyllis Randall.
38 Ibid.
39 Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun, 1st Vintage Books ed (New York: Vintage Books, 1994).
40 Randall, Interview with Phyllis Randall.
Kris Nohe