Arlington Public Library, in partnership with the Arlington Historical Society and the Black Heritage Museum of Arlington, will host a Stumbling Stone dedication ceremony on Saturday, Oct. 3 at 11 a.m. to honor the lives of former enslaved African Americans Bess (born ca. 1735) and Nann (born ca. 1747).
The ceremony will take place at the intersection of N. Quincy Street and 10th Street North. Nann and Bess were once enslaved by the Wheeler and Triplett families in the 18th century, living and working on the land where the Central Library now stands.
Featured speakers include Diane Kresh, Director of Arlington Public Library; Tim Aiken, representative of Memorializing the Enslaved Arlington; Holly Karapetkova, former Arlington Poet Laureate; and Dr. Scott Taylor, President of the Black Heritage Museum of Arlington.
Later this fall, the Library's Charlie Clark Center for Local History will host "Black History Revealed," a day of interactive African American genealogy workshops, free and open to the public as part of the Library's Arlington 250 programming. On Nov. 21 from 10 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., participants can join breakout sessions led by four nationally recognized genealogists: Andre Kearns, founder and CEO of Black Ancestries; Lisa Fanning, board member of the Directors of the National Genealogical Society; Tyrone Goodwyn, Vice President of the North Carolina Genealogy Society; and Luke Alexander, a genealogist focusing on African American and Indigenous heritage in the Carolinas.
Attendees are encouraged to bring a laptop, tablet or smartphone for the afternoon sessions, along with family names, dates, locations, documents or research questions. The Library offers genealogy tools including Ancestry Library Edition and HeritageQuest, plus newspaper archives featuring The Washington Post, Alexandria Gazette and Evening Star.
The workshop is made possible by a grant from Virginia Humanities and is a collaboration among Arlington Public Library, the Charlie Clark Center for Local History and Memorializing the Enslaved in Arlington. Now in its third year, the initiative has installed 19 memorial bronze plaques across the county, identifying 1,050 former slaves by name. The plaques, called "stumbling stones," are made by students at Arlington Tech High School, and Arlington is the first southern community in the United States to memorialize enslaved individuals in this way.