Black history museum to open in Gettysburg

By MARK WALTERS

Gettysburg Times

GETTYSBURG, Pa.

It was on a West Africa shoreline where Ron Bailey had his midlife crisis.

He stood on the coast, where his ancestors last saw their homeland prior to being shackled and shipped west to be enslaved, and convulsed into tears.

“To be reconnected to the soil,” Bailey told a crowd of roughly 50 in attendance Monday afternoon at the Rotary Club of Gettysburg’s meeting at the Gettysburg Hotel. “It gave me a deep sense of home.”

Bailey, just a couple of weeks shy of turning 60, has lived in Adams County with his wife for six years, and after those six years, is ready to begin to present a project that he sees as much bigger than him.

The Gettysburg Black History Museum will be opening its doors this year on Baltimore Street, an arm’s length from J’s at the Village.

It is a project that will entail artifacts and physical objects, of course, but what Bailey is more excited about is the stories being told about what he referred to as “a city that so commonly attracts the eyes of the world.”

Having grown up in southern Virginia in what could be described as a scene out of “Remember the Titans,” Bailey did not meet a white person until he was 16. He lived through the integration of the 1960s, feeling void of the “Old Country” mentality that many other nationalities have.

“We didn’t have a sense of that,” said Bailey, President and CEO of the Gettysburg Black History Museum. “We were referred to by a lot of different names and my grandmother didn’t like some of the newer ones. My birth certificate says I’m ‘colored,’ but that was a while ago. We used African-American for our identity.”

He said the museum is an ongoing project, and while Monday’s announcement may be “big news,” there will be more to come.

Bailey wants to tell stories of Gettysburg’s black past. Stories that have seldom been told. Some have never been told at all. Others have likely been swept under the rug, put on a shelf or fallen on deaf ears.

Stories like that of John Hopkins, a beloved, black janitor who was hired by Gettysburg College for $15 per month. He was one of the last janitors that maintained the small, liberal arts school without the help of a staff. It was just him sweeping the halls of Pennsylvania Hall and mowing the lawn around the campus.

According to Charles H. Glatfelter’s “A Salutary Influence: Gettysburg College, 1832-1985,” Hopkins was referred to as “Jack the Janitor” as well as the vice president of the college after he returned to Gettysburg after the 1863 battle between Union and Confederate troops.

Hopkins, who lived on South Washington Street and rang the college’s bell, died when he was 62. He was so widely liked and revered on campus in his time that the entire school’s student body and faculty attended his funeral service.

Stories like Hopkins’ will certainly be told by the Gettysburg Black History Museum, but also stories of Mag Palm, who was attacked by slave catchers as she was leaving work on Baltimore Street, just south of Lincoln Square. Her hands were tied and bound. However, as the story goes, she bit off a man’s thumb in the process of trying to avoid being placed in a carriage and taken as a slave.