The Martinsville 7 pardon exhibit has been packed up and moved from its temporary home at West Piedmont Higher Education Center, leaving the Martinsville 7 Initiative looking for a new space to display the historic documents.
The exhibit had been on display at the center, formerly known as New College Institute, since 2022.
Faye Holland, among the organizers of the Martinsville 7 Initiative, said the group is working toward a long-term goal of establishing a permanent center dedicated to preserving the history of the Martinsville 7 and connecting that history with education, empowerment and community resources.
Holland said a donated building could eventually become the home of the proposed center.
“Our goal is to transform that building into a permanent Martinsville 7 Center for Social Change, Resource & Empowerment Center — a place where the history of the Martinsville 7 can be preserved and where that history can be connected to education, empowerment, opportunity and positive change,” she said.
“We believe that building can become that place. But getting there will take time,” Holland added, and expressed the initiative’s appreciation to West Piedmont Higher Education Center for providing space for the exhibit for more than four years.
“For more than four years, New College Institute has provided a welcoming and meaningful space where these important pieces of our history could be seen, contemplated and discussed by residents, visitors, students, families and community members,” Holland said.
The exhibit features the posthumous pardons issued to the Martinsville 7, seven Black men who were executed in 1951 after they were accused of the rape of a white woman in Martinsville.
On Aug. 31, 2021 — 70 years after the executions — then-Gov. Ralph Northam granted posthumous pardons to all seven men. The pardons did not determine the men’s guilt or innocence. Rather, Northam said they acknowledged the unfairness of the proceedings against them.
Northam said the men had been denied adequate due process and that their death sentences were racially biased.
“These men were executed because they were Black, and that’s not right,” Northam said at the time.
The Martinsville 7 Initiative said the pardons remain significant to the men’s descendants, their families and the community.
“The pardons are not simply documents. They represent 7 men. 7 families. 7 lives,” Holland said.
The men were John Clabon Taylor, Frank Hairston Jr., Howard Lee Hairston, James Luther Hairston, Joe Henry Hampton, Booker T. Millner and Francis DeSales Grayson.
West Piedmont Higher Education Center said it was honored to host the exhibit.
“West Piedmont Higher Education Center, formerly New College Institute, has been honored to share the story of the Martinsville 7 for the past four years,” said Olivia Garrett, chief advancement officer for the center. “What began as a temporary exhibit grew into a four-year partnership with the Martinsville 7 Initiative, providing thousands of visitors to the Baldwin Building an opportunity to learn about an important chapter in Martinsville and Virginia history and the fundamental importance of constitutional protections, particularly the right to due process.”
Garrett said the center looks forward to future opportunities to work with the initiative.
“As this chapter of the partnership concludes, we are grateful to Ms. Holland and the Martinsville 7 Initiative for their advocacy and commitment to preserving and sharing this history,” she said. “We look forward to continued opportunities to engage with them and others in our community.”
