As a Black person living in Hanover County, Jody Lynn Allen always wanted to learn the stories of the people who came before her.

A native of Hampton, an assistant professor of history and the Robert Francis Engs Director of the Lemon Project: A Journey of Reconciliation at William & Mary, Allen’s research interests cover the U.S. Civil War through the Long Civil Rights Movement—the years between the 1930s and 1970s—with a focus on Black agency.

She began researching and writing the stories of Black Hanoverians for her doctoral dissertation. When she later received a tenure track position in history, those stories again became her focus. “You typically don’t receive tenure without a published book,” Allen says. “As a result, I took my unbound dissertation out of its box and began to work on the book project.”

The result, “Roses in December: Black Life in Hanover County, Virginia from the Civil War to Civil Rights” will be the subject of Allen’s talk on Thursday, March 13 at the Virginia Museum of History and Culture. Her lecture will also be livestreamed on the museum’s Facebook and YouTube pages.

The research process was challenging given how little Black history had been documented. As a result, she started from scratch, beginning with reading Freedmen’s Bureau papers and going through local newspapers for clues. “Although there was some information in secondary publications, there wasn’t much in terms of Black history,” she says. “It takes a long time to do this kind of county level and people-focused research.”

Accordingly, it’s hard to know if Black life in Hanover County was typical of other rural areas after Reconstruction. With very few county-level studies that focus on Black history, Allen is hoping that her work attests to the value of researching and writing such histories. “I was surprised to learn that George Washington Carver spoke at Randolph Macon College in Ashland in 1926,” Allen says.

According to the 1860 census, in Hanover County there were 9,740 enslaved Black people and 257 free Black people. Almost 10,000 had been freed in 1865. There was a Black majority in the country throughout the slavery era, but that changed by 1880.

Hanover’s proximity to Richmond may have been a factor in the evolution of Black lifestyles in the county. “It’s difficult to know the extent of involvement of Black Hanoverians in Richmond,” Allen says. “But there were religious and secular organizations headquartered in Richmond that counted Black Hanoverians among their membership.”

Beginning in the era of Reconstruction and ending with desegregation, Allen’s book chronicles the lives of newly freed people and their descendants in Hanover County. Allen’s goal was to provide an unprecedented look at rural Black Virginians’ resilience after disfranchisement. “In the century between 1865 and 1965, Black residents of Hanover County embraced liberty as they organized for education, employment, and religious freedom,” she says. “They built a community that flourished in the face of white retrenchment and day-to-day oppression.”

The book lays out the case for how Black Hanoverians embraced freedom. It was clear from Allen’s research that they wanted to live as free men and women. “They sought paid employment, education, and places of worship, and they organized among themselves to make these desires a reality,” she says. “In short, they wanted to act as citizens with all that status entailed.”

Long before Jim Crow laws became the new normal, Black Hanoverians faced an uphill climb with assimilation. There was never a time when they were fully embraced by their white neighbors as part of the community, and always some residents resented Black people and placed obstacles in the way of their full freedom. “The era of disfranchisement simply legalized some of the obstacles they’d always lived with” Allen says. “Black residents continued to do what they needed to do to survive and kept moving forward.”

As with many first-time authors, Allen had her own challenges in writing the book. When writing a dissertation, one isn’t limited to a certain number of pages, but publishers set limits. “That meant that I had to cut a lot and, of course, this was difficult because I believed every word was too important to cut,” she says. “As I got closer to the deadline, the cutting became much easier, and I think the book is better for it.”

“Roses in December” offers up poignancy, a bit of humor, and a powerful examination of lives long overlooked. The attention to local, community-level history also offers another perspective of the Civil Rights Movement in the rural South. “I hoped and still hope that this book will open the eyes of anyone who wasn’t aware of Hanover’s Black history,” says Allen. “Black people have overcome many challenges and continue to do so. My hope is that this book adds to the public’s understanding of Black resilience.”

“Roses in December: Black Life in Hanover County, Virginia During the Era of Disfranchisement” book talk with Dr. Jody Lynn Allen, March 13 at noon at the Virginia Museum of History and Culture, 428 N. Arthur Ashe Boulevard. Tickets