Editor, Gazette-Journal:
At the last Mathews Board of Supervisors’ meeting, Supervisor Mike Walls stated that I failed to acknowledge the 97 White folks who left the Island between 1910 and 1920. This is yet another red herring in Walls’s ongoing attempt to deny historical fact.
Eighty-six percent of Black residents left Gwynn’s Island between 1910 and 1920, dropping from a total of 135 in 1910 to 20 people in 1920. Only 14.35 percent of White people left, dropping from 676 to 579. Some of these departures resulted from injuries or deaths in WWI and the Spanish flu, and others decided to continue in their new jobs in Norfolk, Hampton and Baltimore after the war ended. However, oral history in the Black and White community states that most of the Black families were run off the land they owned by threats of violence. People do not abandon land they own, except in extreme circumstances.
We spent four years researching these events in county archives, and uncovered information and oral hi...