In March 2023, a historical marker was unveiled at Roanoke College.
The subject matter was unusual enough: It recognized Kim Kyusik, a leader in the Korean independence movement, who had been a student at the Salem school in the early 1900s. At a time when segregation was the order of the day in Virginia, Roanoke College had made a concerted effort to recruit students from Korea. Between 1894 and 1930, some 30 Korean students matriculated at Roanoke College.
Research by Roanoke College professors Whitney Leeson and Stella Xu suggests that Roanoke College at the time had more Korean students than any other college in the United States.
So close were the ties between Roanoke College and Korea that the Korean emperor sent one of his sons, His Imperial Highness Prince Eui Wha, and what contemporaries described as two “fine-looking companions.” Almost every year the Korean minister in Washington attended Roanoke College’s commencement ceremonies, and one year the minister’s son was among the graduates.
Another graduate was Kyusik, who went on to advocate for Korean independence at the Paris Peace Conference that followed World War I, found a pro-independence party when the Japanese controlled the peninsula and, after World War II, became involved in pushing for an independent Korea. During the Korean War, he was kidnapped by North Koreans and died in captivity.
That’s a lot of geopolitical history for one school — and one historical marker.
What was also unusual about that marker was who proposed it: a group of middle school students from Cumberland County, a county that’s closer to Richmond than it is to the Roanoke Valley.
That was just the start. Since then, students at Cumberland Middle School have had no fewer than five historical markers approved by the Department of Historic Resources, the state agency that governs such things. The fourth of those went up in April, not long after the state approved the fifth one, which will likely go up sometime in the coming year.
The teacher driving this is Lewis Longenecker. We’ve written about him before, but he deserves another shout-out.
That first marker, about Kyusik, was prompted by an initiative that then-Gov. Ralph Northam launched to promote more historical markers dealing with parts of Virginia history that haven’t always made it into our history books. Specifically, the Northam administration sponsored student contests related to Black History Month and Asian American Pacific Islanders History Month. It was out of that latter contest that Cumberland generated two suggestions that were later approved by the state: Kyusik and Art Matsu, the first Asian American student to graduate from the College of William & Mary. He also was a four-year starter at quarterback on the football team and in 1928, he became the first player of Japanese ancestry to play in the National Football League and the first of any Asian ancestry to take a snap at quarterback. (He started four games in his only season before he left to go into teaching and coaching.)
A third Cumberland Middle School-nominated marker came through the Black History program: a marker in Cumberland to Samuel Bolling, who was born in slavery, later purchased his freedom, and went on to become a successful businessman who was elected to the House of Delegates in the 1880s during the brief Readjuster Party era that saw many Black politicians elected to office. (Note that this was well after the Reconstruction Era formally ended.) It’s believed that half the brick houses in Farmville built in those days used bricks from Bolling’s brickyard.
Longenecker wasn’t the only teacher in the state to get his students involved in these contests, but he might have been the most enthusiastic. The story doesn’t end there, though. When Glenn Youngkin became governor, he ended these programs. About the same time, the department announced it would be approving fewer historical markers, because it simply didn’t have enough staff to deal with all the submissions coming. “The volume is unsustainable,” a department report said, noting that the historical marker program is staffed by just one full-time employee and a part-time employee — and that each nomination must be researched and verified for historical accuracy.
“When these contests were discontinued,” Longenecker tells me, “CMS students had about two dozen submissions ready to go. Nominations would have ranged from Henry Cox, Powhatan County’s representative in the House of Delegates following the Civil War, to James ‘Pee Wee’ Jenkins, a Prince Edward County resident, who on August 15, 1947, earned a win over Satchel Paige in Yankee Stadium.”
Longenecker’s students, though, kept on with their research and have continued to make nominations for historical markers through the department’s regular channels — and even though the department is approving fewer markers, Cumberland students have still managed to get theirs approved, bringing their total up to five. The fourth, which went up recently, tells the story of Lucyville, a Black community founded in Cumberland by a freed slave. The fifth one is about John Robinson, a free person of color from Cumberland County who was a prominent businessman and landowner before the Civil War. “Twice attacked by white men in 1864, he fled to Amelia County and later used the local courts to convict many of his attackers and defend his property rights,” according to the Department of Historic Resources. Robinson later went on to serve in the postwar convention that wrote a new constitution for Virginia, and was then elected a state senator.
“When the John Robinson marker is installed, all of Cumberland County’s state legislators who were previously enslaved or were free African Americans prior to the Civil War will be named on a Virginia Historical Roadside Marker,” Longenecker says. His students are still researching, and might have other nominations to make in the future.
Here’s the point I’m driving toward: Is Cumberland County unique in its history? Probably not; it’s unique only in that it’s had someone actively involved in researching that history and bringing it to the attention of the modern public.
Wouldn’t it be great if every county could get its students involved in researching their own history, the way Longenecker has with his students?
I grew up in Virginia and had Virginia history drummed into me in fourth grade, seventh grade and 11th grade, and again in college. I even minored in history in college and thought I was pretty knowledgeable about such things. In recent years, though, I’ve become painfully aware of how little I really learned. Some of that was being of an age where I was indoctrinated with politically inspired textbooks from the 1950s that specifically overlooked whole sections of history. Some of it is simply because no book can ever include everything.
I’ve often joked that in my day our Virginia history started with Jamestown and ended sometime about Appomattox. There’s much truth to that. It’s only the past decade that I’ve really learned about that Readjuster Party era in the 1880s when a very different future for Virginia seemed possible — before there was a voter backlash that ushered in Jim Crow. All five of Cumberland Middle School’s historical markers come from either that era or the early 1900s, another period that my history teachers never got around to.
It’s not just that era that Virginians haven’t been told much about. We at Cardinal have been publishing a monthly series of stories about the little-known aspects of Virginia’s march to independence. (You can sign up for our free monthly newsletter to get notified about them.) When we started this Cardinal 250 project, I gathered up a bunch of Virginia history books. They’ve been virtually useless, because the stories we’re trying to tell didn’t make it into those books. Those stories are often living in local history books that aren’t widely circulated.
Our history, much like the truth, is out there.
We should be grateful to Longenecker and his students for bringing more of it to light. Now we need more like them.
Early voting begins today
I write a free weekly political newsletter that goes out every Friday at 3 p.m. You can sign up for that or any of our other free newsletters on our newsletter page. Here’s what’s in this week’s West of the Capital newsletter:
- A look at early voting in the June 18 primaries and the races in Southwest and Southside.
- How the timing of the special session might give Gov. Glenn Youngkin an advantage in budget negotiations (or not).
- Sen. Ghazala Hashmi, D-Chesterfield County, has expanded the field of candidates for the Democratic nomination for lieutenant governor. A new look at those dynamics.
- The unusual demographics of the 2025 statewide races.
- Del. Sam Rasoul, D-Roanoke, criticizes Virginia Tech and Mary Washington for arresting student protesters. Meanwhile, House Minority Leader Todd Gilbert, R-Shenandoah County, quotes a 1960s protest song to criticize a new generation of protesters.