His name leaps out at me. “In Science Hall there was Walker Lee, the janitor. Short, rotund, and coal black, Walker’s smile, cheerful disposition and willingness to be of help made him a favorite with the girls. He could out spell many of them and was said to write a finer hand than President Burruss himself.” These sentences appear in Chapter 5 of Raymond C. Dingledine, Jr.’s Madison College (1958), a celebratory review of this institution’s first fifty years. Although the name is right there in black and white, the customary honorific “Mr.” is missing. Following the customs of the day, Dingledine, the
long-time professor and later chair of the History Department, used Mr., Mrs., and Miss liberally in front of white names, but intentionally omitted them for black ones. The pattern is obvious: a few sentences above Lee’s mention, Dingledine references “Miss Maggie Lyons,” a white maid; a few sentences later, he mentions “Page, the agreeable and able chef.” Page didn’t even merit a last name.
In searching for information about Walker Lee (and other Black employees) in the historic record, I’m reminded of anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s famous work, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995).
“The presences and absences in sources (artifacts and bodies that turn an event into fact) or archives (facts collected, thematized, and processed as documents and monuments) are neither neutral or natural. They are created,” he argued. “As such, they are not mere presences or absences, but mentions and silences of various kinds and degrees. By silence, I mean an active and transitive process: one ‘silences’ a fact or an individual as a silencer silences a gun. One engages in the practice of silencing. Mentions and silences are thus active, dialectical counterparts of which history is the synthesis.” (Silencing, p48)
Dingledine’s reference to Walker Lee is both a mention and a silence.
The campus as Walker Lee would have known it ca 1910. L to R: Science Hall, Dormitory 1 and Dormitory 2.
As janitor, Lee would have been responsible for a variety of tasks. Most obviously, he cleaned the building known today as Maury Hall. Built in 1909, this structure, called Science Hall, originally housed all of the administrative and academic spaces needed for the State Normal and Industrial school for Women: the library, classrooms, President Burruss’s office, the bookstore, and the Registrar. The building has been substantially remodeled several times; my current office occupies a portion of the old library. But period photos of the interior spaces make it easy to imagine Lee sweeping and mopping floors, erasing chalkboards, emptying trash cans, polishing furniture, cleaning the bathroom, washing windows, and making repairs. He was a visible, constant presence in this building and on campus. Everyone knew him. That is what accounts for the mention of his name in Dingledine’s book; Dingledine’s father taught History classes in this building, where his mother, the former Agness Stribling, had been a student. Dingledine, Jr., grew up on the campus and knew Lee personally. But Lee’s status as a Black employee here during the Jim Crow era means that mentions of him in campus sources are rare.
Lee was apparently a beloved figure on the all-white campus. When he died in 1929, Harrisonburg’s newspaper, The Daily News Record, mentioned his funeral. That fact tells us a great deal about him and his contributions to this institution.
“BRIDGEWATER, May 20—Walker Lee, highly respected colored citizen, was buried here Sunday afternoon. He had been an invalid for over a year. The funeral, held from the colored church here, was one attended by one of the largest crowds that have ever attended the funeral of a colored Bridgewater citizen. Many friends from the Teacher’s College in Harrisonburg attended. He had been employed at the college for many years. He leaves a widow and seven children.”
Although the honorific is missing in this article, too, he would have been known as “Mr. Lee” in the Black community. In the early 20th century, segregation meant that black families in Bridgewater lived and worshiped apart from their white neighbors. The death notice tells us that he had a family: his headstone in the former Ames Cemetery reads “Father,” and he lies beside a woman named “Ida Lee.” Information about them undoubtedly lies in federal census records. Property records may reveal where they lived and if they owned their own home.
Typescript of voter registration rolls for Bridgewater, VA, showing Lee and Mitchell, who also worked on campus.
Voter registration records (See image) for Bridgewater mention that “Robert Walker Lee, laborer” registered in that community in 1902, so his legal residence was there. That he was able to register to vote at all indicates his literacy. That he was actually well educated is corroborated by other sources: Dr. John Wayland, a professor at the Normal noted in 1912 that “Walker Lee, janitor of Maury Hall,” had won a “colored” spelling bee, and Dingledine recalled that Lee regularly left messages on blackboards that “would intrigue early morning classes.” These mentions appear in white-authored texts because, to them, Lee was unusual. Like other black Virginians, Lee acquired his ability to read and write and spell despite the racism that denied him equal access to education and confined him to menial labor.
1930 fire insurance map of campus overlaying Google Earth map of modern structures. Note “janitor’s quarters.”
As the janitor, Lee resided on campus in the “Janitor’s quarters.” Historic maps of the campus grounds plainly show the structure. (See image) In a 1911 report, President Julian Burruss informed the President of the Board of Trustees that, “During the past year a four-room frame cottage has been erected on the grounds for the colored employees. This was done entirely on my own responsibility. The question of service is such a difficult one for us, and having secured some reliable and efficient help which we cannot afford to lose, I considered it very urgent that accommodations be provided for them on school grounds, this being the only way in which we could keep them permanently in our employ [emphasis added].” Burruss indicated that six employees were “rooming” there. “Rooming” suggests they all had permanent residences elsewhere. What was like to “room” in this small, two-story, wood-frame structure? Did Lee have his own bed? Where did he eat? Where did he bathe? Period sources imply that Lee worked long hours, often on the weekends, and always on call. After classes ended at 5 o-clock, the spaces inside Maury Hall accommodated faculty meetings, student clubs, and often, performances and social events. Lee may have spent little time in the “quarters.”
Who were the other five employees and what did they do on campus? Burruss’s report mentions a laundry, and there is a small, wooden building identified as such on maps. I confess I’m fascinated by this space. Each student paid a monthly laundry fee. In the 1910s and ’20s, when Lee worked here, there were hundreds of women in residence: hundreds of white dresses; hundreds of white bed sheets; hundreds of white towels. Were some of Lee’s housemates involved in what would have traditionally been work for black women? At the moment, I can only speculate, but I suspect not. Instead, it seems likely that one or more of the black men had responsibility for keeping the laundry’s equipment operational. Maps and other sources indicate the presence on campus of a coal-fired steam plant, which provided heat, hot water, and electricity to adjacent buildings. Other men likely served as groundskeepers. At present, their names and duties are a mystery.
Dining room, ca 1915, in Student Services Building (Harrison Hall). The kitchen, not visible, adjoined this space.
“Page,” however, had a unique position. Dingledine calls him the “chef.” In that capacity, he would have managed all of the preparations required to feed hundreds of students and faculty three times a day. The original dining room occupied a dedicated space in the basement of Dormitory No. 1; in 1915 it moved to the brand-new Student Services Building, later renamed Harrison Hall (See image). Page’s domain would have been the kitchen, which can also be seen in historic maps. In the list of registered voters for Bridgewater, the name “Page Mitchell” appears two lines below Walker Lee’s. The two men were close in age, lived in the same town, and worked and lived together. But Mitchell does not appear in the white-authored records the way Lee does. Dingledine did not even recall his last name. Was he not as well known to the white faculty and students? Did the nature of Mitchell’s work mean he interacted with them far less frequently than Lee did? Or did he leave the Normal to find work elsewhere?
My search has revealed many tantalizing clues to the constant, essential presence of black employees on this campus. Census records for 1920 indicate that Harriet Bayne, a “mulatto,” aged 40, worked as a live-in domestic for President and Mrs. Duke, who occupied Hillcrest House. Hillcrest, the president’s house, had been built in 1913-4 for the Burrusses—they, too, would had have live-in help, just like many white families in Harrisonburg. Did the Black women interact with Lee and Mitchell? I can’t say, but they undoubtedly knew of each other, given the complementary nature of their roles and their common workplace.
I think a lot about what was it like for these black men and women to be on campus during this institution’s early decades. Historians have written a great deal about race relations in this period, which saw the consolidation of Jim Crow segregation, the proliferation of monuments to the Confederacy’s Lost Cause and stories about “faithful slaves,” the use of lynching as a form of organized violence, and the resurgence of the Klan. The daily interactions “Walker Lee, the janitor” had with presidents Burruss and Duke, with Dr. Wayland or Miss Bell, the librarian and registrar, must have been perpetually challenging. The de facto customs of Jim Crow demanded black deference at all times. What about the teen-aged white women who filled the class rooms with their chatter? Lee had to address each one as “Miss,” but could only do so after they addressed him first. Did he worry about making eye contact? Lee was born in 1885, so he was only 25 when he started work at the Normal around 1910. What did he think when the Board of Visitors voted in 1917 to rename Science Hall in honor of Admiral Mathew Fontaine Maury? A literate man, Lee may have read about Maury’s efforts to establish a slave-holding society in Mexico in the 1870s, as well as his role in the Confederate navy and his work as an oceanographer. What did Lee think when whites destroyed Greenwood, the black Wall Street of Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921? The white riot, which purportedly started when a seventeen-year-old black man “assaulted” a white woman on an elevator, made national news even in the Shenandoah Valley. Was Lee worried when the Klan paraded down Harrisonburg’s Main Street a few years later in 1924? I will never find answers to these questions.
Classroom in Maury Hall, where Lee worked. Note the chalkboards.
I do know that Lee worked in Maury Hall and adjacent buildings for nearly thirty years. During that time, he undoubtedly moved back and forth from his home in Bridgewater, where was Mr. Lee, a respected member of the black community, to the State Teacher’s College in Harrisonburg, where most people knew him as “Walker,” or perhaps just “the janitor.” I hope to find more information about “Mr. Lee” from local sources. Meanwhile, I picture him moving through this building. Historic photos of white students in blackface taken on new meaning when you know that certain performances took place upstairs on the second floor. I imagine the young, white women filing into the room, laughing and looking forward to the annual Junior Class minstrel show as they took their seats, which had been specially arranged by Lee for the event. I imagine him watching Elsie Loewer make her entrance as “Abraham Lincoln Washington, running for chickens,” knowing he had to clean the bathroom down the hall where she and the cast had blacked up. I imagine him, in the quiet hours, after the crowd had gone, returning the room to its usual order, then leaving an intriguing message on the chalkboard for the students to read the next day. Dingledine suggests that everyone knew it was “Walker, the janitor” who left those anonymous messages. But I doubt he ever admitted it. Mr. Lee’s silence speaks volumes.
Walker Lee, from the School Ma’am, 1919.
Special thanks to Kate Morris, Tiffany Cole, and Sarah Roth-Mullet in JMU Special Collections for locating some of the sources used here.
POSTSCRIPT (April 2020)
Tiffany Cole found this image of Lee in the 1918 School Ma’am, while searching for information about the 1918 influenza outbreak that closed the Normal school. The accompanying text reads: “We took Walker’s picture, confident that some mention would be made of his faithful services as guardian of the immaculate Maury Hall, and of his secret code for learning the names of every girl in school. For when it comes to that, the highest praise we can give is to Mr.. Burruss, even is “Why, he knows us almost as well as Walker does.”
