DO NO HARM: HOW FREDERICKSBURG’S CIVIL RIGHTS TRAIL EMERGED THROUGH COLLABORATION and CARE

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ABSTRACT Reworking how the public understands a place’s past requires changing how that history is written and how it is practiced in public spaces. Freedom, A Work in Progress, the new civil rights trail in Fredericksburg, Virginia, is an attempt to center Black history in the ways both residents and visitors remember the past in a small Southern city. Throughout the twentieth century, heritage-themed tours, historical markers, and Civil War battle reenactments ensured that a white-centric version of Fredericksburg’s past was both written and practiced on the landscape. When coauthors Chris Williams and Victoria Matthews began working on the trail in 2020, they understood that a century of marginalizing Black experiences in local public history practices had made many Black residents hesitant to share their memories and family histories with Fredericksburg City officials and public history practitioners. In this paper, we detail how our commitment to partnerships between members of the Black community, the local government, and the University of Mary Washington allowed us to collect oral histories, access archives, and map both painful and celebratory Black memories onto public streets, neighborhoods, and a university campus. The result is a physical and virtual trail that, when practiced, has the potential to engrave stories of segregation, racial violence, Black resistance, and Black achievement into Fredericksburg’s collective memory.