Every autumn, a quarter million people go to Virginia’s famed Shenandoah National Park to see the spectacular fall colors of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Those traveling along Skyline Drive, the park’s main road, pass a routered wood sign pointing to Lewis Mountain.
Eighty years ago, the park marker included an additional line: “Negro Area.” It indicated the way to the only purpose-built segregated camping area in the southern national parks. Today, the Shenandoah Valley Black Heritage Project is working to preserve the memory of this easily overlooked piece of park history by interviewing elderly residents who played and worked there, and bringing their story to a new generation.
“So many people don’t know,” says Elaine Taylor Blakey, 81, who grew up in nearby Luray, Virginia, and attended Sunday school picnics at the site as a young girl.
Even though the camping and picnic area at Lewis Mountain was built for racist reasons, it became a refuge for Black families.
The site was included in the Negro Motorist Green Book, an annual guide listing restaurants, resorts, and businesses across the country that welcomed Black travelers. It attracted church groups from Washington, D.C., 120 miles away, and vacationers from across the East Coast. It also hosted President Harry Truman, who twice went there to dine with Chester A. Franklin, an influential Black newspaper editor from his home state of Missouri, and with Benjamin Oliver Davis Sr., the Army’s first Black general.
Blakey says that she never asked why her family visited this one park area when she was young. “I am more upset about it now that I’m older and think about,” adds the retired banker, who grew up in the region, moved away for school and career, and returned for retirement.
As a national park, Shenandoah, should have been fully integrated, some government officials argued at the time. But state leaders insisted that Virginia’s Jim Crow laws applied even on federal property. The park’s few Black visitors had to eat in the staff area of its white-only restaurants. Most bathrooms, picnic sites, and camping areas were off-limits.