Donald Barber has had a connection to Historic Sotterley all of his life and that bond has become even stronger lately. Barber and co-author David G. Brown released “The Barber Family: From Slavery, Through Segregation and The Civil Rights Movement” last month.
The two authors and Janice Walthour, a member of St. Mary’s NAACP and Unified Committee for Afro American Contributions, will discuss the book virtually and in person at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, May 8, as part of the Sotterley Presents: People & Perspectives series.
Barber said the 102-page book covers four generations of his St. Mary’s County family life from post-slavery through the Civil Rights Act in 1964.
“It’s about the history of my family and their struggles to survive and prosper in an environment that wasn’t always positive,” Barber said. “They endured, they persevered and they always had goals and objectives to protect their children.”
Brown and Barber have known each other for about three decades.
The Dysons, Barber’s paternal grandmother’s family, worked at Sotterley and his grandfather, James Barber, who grew up in Hillville, came to work at Sotterley as well as a free man in 1870s.
“Some of the large farms around weren’t financially stable so getting paid was a challenge,” he said of the allure of working at the plantation, “but Sotterley always paid on paydays.”
Barber’s first job was as a 7-year-old picking weeds and later strawberries from the Hollywood plantation site. He started at 50 cents an hour and was pulling in $1.35 per hour nine years later.
“My mother could not stand a male person not working,” Barber said. “She was old school. She was [of the mindset that] if there’s nothing wrong with you, go to work.”
Barber was one of six children to James -commonly referred to as Barney - and Ruth Barber, who both worked at Sotterley, and who worked hard to shelter their children.
“They were like punching bags,” Donald Barber, who is Sotterley’s longest serving board member, said of his parents. “My mother never wanted our feelings to be hurt. She didn’t want us to have our spirits crushed. They didn’t whine about our situation or say they wished things were better. It was what it was and my parents had an opportunity and an advantage that I think the average African American person that grew up in Southern Maryland did not have, which was that they were around white people from different social statuses.”
Barber was a straight A student at Banneker School, and was a third-grader when local public schools integrated.
“We were very young and young children can adapt to anything, so the little white kids were fine [with it],” Barber said. “Most of the people I met then I’m still friends with. The teachers were a mixed bag; some were great and some were horrible. They took [integration] as their heart was.”
He added the two races in St. Mary’s County basically kept to themselves, and that the Civil Rights Act didn’t really affect those in St. Mary’s directly.
“It didn’t really hit here because that was in D.C. and D.C. was like a million miles away from St. Mary’s County,” he said. “It was just a different world. Here you had work to do, you did your work and you didn’t get on anyone’s bad side and you would survive.”
For more information on the book, which is available for purchase at Historic Sotterley, or the May 8 lecture, go to www.sotterley.org.
Most Popular
Comments / 0