Assistant Professor of History Erin Devlin

Assistant Professor of History and American Studies Erin Devlin was interviewed by WVTF 88.3 Radio IQ about her study on segregation in Virginia’s national parks, commissioned by the National Park Service with the Organization of American Historians:

She’s poured over planning documents, blueprints, and maps in the hopes of understanding how segregation was implemented at the park. She’s built a whole filing cabinet full of sources. One drawer holds documents relevant to the state of Virginia, which resisted federal efforts to desegregate.

That evidence of segregation is right in front of park visitors all over Virginia, it’s just a matter of seeing it. “There are some picnic tables that are in an open meadow and there are other picnic tables that are in a shaded wood,” Devlin notes. “And that is a product of, in some cases, this legacy of planning for segregation and that there was a desire to tuck away African-American visitors in quiet corners of the parks.” Read more.

Assistant Professor of History Erin Devlin

Erin Devlin, assistant professor of history and American studies, was interviewed in an article on OutsideOnline.com entitled “Shenandoah National Park Is Confronting Its History.” She discussed her research into sites in national parks in Virginia that were associated with segregation during the first half of the 20th century.

“‘Basically, the park was segregated on an ad hoc basis,’ says Erin Devlin, associate professor of history and American studies at the University of Mary Washington, who is leading the study of the five national parks in Virginia. African American visitors wrote letters of complaint both to the park and the Department of the Interior, reporting that rangers told them certain areas of the park were off-limits to them. Some white visitors also wrote letters to the National Park Service, arguing that this kind of race-based practice was un-American. But the policies continued.” Read more.