CML's fourth and latest Black Lives Next Door symposium showcased modes of storytelling that convey the variety and innovation enabled by the center's research methods in projects that challenge long-held narratives about Northern Virginia’s past. The event was co-hosted on February 10 with the Department of African and African American Studies as a celebration of Black History Month. It featured four projects employing CML's trademark blend of digital, archival and community-based interdisciplinary scholarship, presented by by graduate students Samantha Chevalier (Chevi) Chung, Jenaveve (Evie) Quigley, Jayme Kurland, and Shemika Curvey.
For Black History Month, Works of Fortitude
AAAS Director LaNitra Berger opened the event with praise for the long-running Black Lives Next Door research project as a productive partnership between her program and Mason Legacies that has uniquely "transformed our campus and the way we see our institution."
"This work," of uncovering neglected and sometimes dark histories, "is not easy," she told an audience that filled Fenwick Library's Main Reading Room. "There are many more Black stories at Mason that need to be told, but it takes fortitude to be able to tell them." Scholars gain fortitude through the collaborative environment and active mentorship available from CML, whose professors frame the work as not just intellectually important but reparative.
Following the public presentations, at a lunch hosted by the Center and AAAS, scholars from Mason met with enthusiastic representatives of local history organizations and archives to brainstorm expanded campus-community collaborations to enhance local and Black history efforts for wider public audiences. CML is optimistic about being able to expand its reach through these partnerships, the best of which were exemplified in the day's presentations.
Chevi Chung: Breeding, Branding, Grooming
Master's candidate Chevi Chung, who will be pursuing her doctorate at University of Maryland this year, began the program with “Black Lives and Horse Culture: Breeding, Branding, Grooming, Racing in Middleburg and Fairfax,” jumping off from the "spatializing" study of Loudoun's Black equestrian communities conducted by her fellow CML scholars and presented at 2025's symposium. Chung's begins her analysis earlier, in the Colonial period, drawing incisive connections between the era's culture of breeding, branding and grooming steeds for work and entertainment (through horse racing) and elites' analogous approaches toward the people they enslaved, who also were "bred," "branded" and groomed for their owners' profit and use.
As an illustration of the empowering nature of CML's approach, and the "affective" piece of CML's pedagogy of Affective Historical Praxis, she recounted her distress at seeing Black jockeys casually demeaned in even a recent, 2016, history. Her CML professors, she said, "encouraged me to feel my feelings" and also handed her books containing rigorously researched counter-narratives that permitted her, Chung said, "to take this degrading description and thoroughly debunk it." She closed with the inspiring story of horse-breeder and sometime jockey Eliza Carpenter, who was born into slavery in Virginia yet managed in adulthood to acquire multiple race horses and profit from Kentucky's equestrian economy.
Evie Quigley: Digitizing Shiloh Baptist
Mason alumna Evie Quigley, now the archivist at George Mason's Gunston Hall historic site, presented an archival digitization project showing how CML collaborations can document and make available community-based collections that otherwise might stay hidden -- risking deterioration -- in both literal and figurative attics and storerooms. The project, "Addressing Historical Gaps: Researching and Digitizing the History of the Shiloh Baptist Community," Quigley conducted the research as part of an internship (toward her master's in library and information science at UNIVERSITY NAME), under the supervision of CML Director George Oberle, a history librarian she had previously worked as a student in the archives of Gunston Hall, now her professional home.
Quigley's expectations is that access to regional archives like Shiloh's, on Mason Neck, will help fill gaps in Gunston Hall records while also augmenting a broader regional and national archive, "increasing accessibility to materials based on Black experience," she emphasized, as opposed to those, like "the papers of George Mason," centered on White people and touching only glancingly on African Americans. She was also providing a service, as she explained, to an aging congregation worried about the longevity of its rich historic materials.
Working with members of Shiloh's Descendants' Advisory Board, she combed the historic Black congregation's ledgers, documents and objects, stretching from the plantation to modern eras, and chose a selection to photograph, scan, and upload to the Omeka-S platform on which CML hosts datasets and exhibits. Such uploads are accompanied by meticulously organized metadata (descriptive information), cross-referenced with data and archival materials from multiple institutions, to ensure entries usefulness to scholars pursuing varied topics related to the region's history and culture.
Jayme Kurland: A County of Contrasts
Mason doctoral candidate Jayme Kurland shared a study, “A County of Contrasts: Fairfax County in the Age of Suburbanization” tracing how power and race shaped development decisions in suburbanizing Fairfax. Kurland documented and created an interactive timeline a twenty-year effort, started in the 1960s, by residents of the Black Lincoln-Lewis-Vannoy Park community to secure the same county water, sewage and infrastructure build-outs granted without question to nearby White subdivisions. Kurland said her study was scaffolded by Affective Historical Praxis, CML's pedagogy, in granting recognition to subjects treated as faceless and nameless in contemporary news accounts that used terms like "blighted area" to describe their leafy but underserved neighborhoods.
Through the use of county records, newspaper reports and oral histories, Kurland documented the effects of government neglect on the area and showed how residents like the Mott family—whose surname now graces a local recreation center—organized to advocate for their community's needs. She compares amenities received by neighboring communities like "historic" Greenbriar to the repeated denials lobbed at Lincoln-Lewis-Vannoy, as in the cancellation of a long-sought basketball court and recreation space along with fundamental water and sewer services. Soon after the county finally completed the waste hook-up, in 1985, residents' longstanding fears of gentrification were realized: Kurland shows that by 1988, multimillion-dollar houses were replacing modest local homes devalued by years of inadequate services.
Shemika Curvey: Relation is a Method
The symposium's final presentation was from Shemika Curvey, a repeat presenter[ACADEMIC STATUS - M.A. 2025?], who explored how Black families and congregations forged freedom through kinship and spiritual practice in her talk, "Relation is a Method: Black Freedom, Family and Congregation." Over several years and including the Loudoun spatializing study linked above, Curvey's made a specialty of understanding land-acquisition and naming devices used by free and enslaved Black Virginians of the nineteenth-century to solidify their standing and raise strong families. Her approach draws family stories out of combinations of sources, including census listings, deeds and other family documents, personal photos and artifacts, oral histories, and government records like birth, death and marriage certificates and freedmen's registries.
Her symposium project centered on the Ambers family, some of whom went by Ambrose, and their ties to the Baptist church for which the Leesburg area of Mount Pleasant was named—a Black community known locally but absent from Google Maps. Curvey described "working backward" from an Ambers descendant's oral history in the Balch Library. She traced the family to the 1850s, when the several children of Martha Ambers were dispersed by unknown circumstances, most likely going into service for White households.
In 1906, Martha's descendants created the church with a gift of one acre of land Martha and her son-in-law had purchased for $200 in 1867. Curvey, who has bolstered her genealogical and historical studies with not just citations but also poetry, draws from them a connection between freedom and mobility, in its physical, social and economic forms. She also stressed the importance in precarious Black lives of not just blood ties but kinship-like relationships such as marriage-like partnerships (absent full freedom to marry), mother- and sisterhood in name if not law, and partnerships like Martha's with her daughter's husband, through which they acquired family land.
The symposium this year enjoyed grant support from Coherent Digital and funding for refreshments from TheirStory, whose oral history tools have been key to CML community history projects.
February 17, 2026