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Few stories in
Encyclopedia Virginia are more dramatic than that of Elizabeth Hobbs Keckly. Born into slavery in Dinwiddie Courthouse, in the Piedmont region of Virginia, during the presidency of James Monroe, by the time that Abraham Lincoln entered the White House in 1861, not only was Keckly a free woman, but she was also Washington, D.C.’s most celebrated dressmaker.
It was Keckly’s talent with the needle that allowed her to buy her freedom and become a leader among the free Black community in Washington. She first found a following among Washington’s elite women after a silk dress she designed for Mary Randolph Custis Lee, the wife of Robert E. Lee, was a big hit at a reception for the Prince of Wales. It was a time when upper class women were fiercely competitive about the dresses they wore to balls and teas and receptions. It may seem like all vanity now, the hoop skirts with their ruffles and flounces and the yards of lace and other trim that bedecked the dre
Working on an encyclopedia day in and day out for more than a decade is rewarding and sometimes depressing. It’s rewarding to think that if you are doing your job responsibly the resource you are helping to create may contribute to an open and honest dialogue about the past and how that past informs the present. It’s depressing when you are constantly reminded about how repetitive the darkest and most malignant aspects of this history are. Discrimination and violence against Black people and the creation and preservation of systems that permit that violence are recurring themes in Virginia history. And so here we are in the year 2020 presented with incontrovertible video evidence that this violence continues on the streets of America.
Encyclopedia Virginia (
EV) encourages reader feedback on its entries. We see this as a crucial part of maintaining an accurate and up-to-date resource.
To report a factual inaccuracy or provide some other type of feedback, readers can fill out and submit the form that appears at the bottom of each entry or email us. Please include the following:
A specific explanation of what is inaccurate; and
Citations to sources, preferably primary sources.
The more information readers provide, the better we are able to evaluate their claims.
We will make every effort to correct mistakes; however, plausible interpretations of facts set forth by bylined contributors are not open for correction.
(Photo courtesy of Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division)
As
Encyclopedia Virginia director Peter Hedlund recently noted here on the
EV blog, we are committed to revising existing entries to eliminate racial bias and better reflect new historical understandings of key moments in Virginia history.
One such entry that needed revision was our entry on Woman Suffrage in Virginia, which failed to adequately note the contributions of Black women to the suffrage fight. As Brent Staples noted in the
New York Times, white suffrage leaders intentionally obscured the contributions of Black women to the movement and “looked away from the racism that tightened its grip on the fight for the women’s vote in the years after the Civil War.”