Patricia Gunn, Associate Professor of African American Studies at Ohio University, was quoted in a Washington Post story headlined “‘This is sacred land’: Nuns fight their own order to save historical plantation from being sold.”
POWHATAN, Va. — Each day, the sisters of a black order of nuns pass the cemetery lined with white crosses, where enslaved people who worked this plantation are buried.
“This is sacred land,” said Sister Maureen T. Carroll as she looked over its rolling hills 40 miles west of Richmond and worried about the future.
It was her religious order — the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament — that transformed a plantation that once profited from slavery into Catholic boarding schools for African American children. St. Emma Military Academy for boys and St. Francis de Sales School for girls are credited with educating 15,000 black students. But the schools were closed in the early 1970s, and now the cash-strapped order, headquartered in Philadelphia, wants to sell the 2,265 acres known as Belmead Plantation, or Belmead-on-the-James.
The remaining five nuns living here say they fear that the land, which has an assessed value of more than $8 million, will wind up in the hands of developers. They are waging a desperate fight to save it….
“This land and property embody extraordinary American history, African American history,” said Patricia C. Gunn, a graduate of St. Francis de Sales High School and an associate professor of law at Ohio University. “It’s extremely important that we save it.”
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