Invisible History Growing Up Colored in Cape Charles, Virginia

This book is a memoir about growing up Black in Cape Charles, Virginia on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake. It details the origin of the town as a railroad terminus and connecting to ferry barges across the Chesapeake Bay to Norfolk, through its golden age in the Jim Crow South and its decline with the ascendancy of automobiles and the building of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. Now the town is rising again as a tourist destination and replacing the Black section with White weekend second home owners, and the Black presence has considerably diminished. Without a recording of its history, its entire memory will be gone, as if the robust and thriving parallel Black community that evolved in response to the segregation of the Jim Crow South was never there at all. This memoir details the life of one Black man, the grandson of a slave, who became the first elected Black member of the Town Council and later the first Black member electe