While I haven’t yet identified the woman by the pillar behind Gerald Ford in this photo at Arlington House, I do think I’ve identified another woman in the same photo, standing several figures to her right. Her face is almost totally obscured. But there is a small window formed by the chin and right arm of the two men standing in front of her. Through that window you can see the pattern of her dress, which shows a tight mesh of dots or checks.
That pattern matches the dress worn in another photograph from the same day, published in the National Park Service Newsletter on November 28, 1975. The caption notes that: “The President visited Arlington House recently to sign into law the reestablishment of U.S. citizenship to Civil War hero General Robert E. Lee. … Effie Lawrence [sic], supervisory park technician, acted as escort to the President.”
Though the caption misspelled her name, the president’s escort that day was actually Essie Hart Lawrence, whose obituary would appear only a few years later in the NPS newsletter, the Courier, for January 1982. It begins:
Essie Hart Lawrence, 52, a native of Manning, S.C., and a 14-year Park Service employee, died Sept. 18 at Greater Southeast Community Hospital in Washington, D.C., of a heart ailment.
A graduate of Claflin University in Orangeburg, S.C., Mrs. Lawrence had been the site manager at Frederick Douglass Home since 1978. Her Park Service career began at Arlington House, Va., where she worked her way up through the ranks from housekeeper and seamstress to interpretive specialist.
Prior to joining the Park Service, Mrs. Lawrence taught at Draper Elementary School in Washington, D.C. and in the South Carolina public school system. …
Other evidence I’ve found gives some more detail about the kinds of work an interpretive specialist like Lawrence did in those years. Wearing period costume, she might teach schoolchildren about gardening at Arlington House in the 1850s, or craft garlands for the house’s annual Christmas reception. She might escort other visitors on house tours, as a different woman is shown doing in 1968.
And that, in turn, helps contextualize the appearance of the other woman in the photo with Gerald Ford, the one who is leaning against a pillar in the background as the president signs a Congressional resolution to posthumously recognize Lee’s citizenship. She seems to be wearing period costume, with a brooche clasping the top of her high-necked dress.
Essie Lawrence’s experience shows that there was precedent for a Black woman to serve as an interpretive guide at Arlington House in 1975. Nor was Lawrence alone. At least two other Black women in the mid-1970s were assigned as park technicians at Arlington House, where they delivered tours in period dress: Audrey Calhoun and Regina Jones-Underwood Brake, who only “stayed at the park a year, citing repeated demeaning and racist comments from park visitors as the reason she left.”
Both Calhoun and Brake, like Lawrence, went on to long careers in the Park Service. The unidentified woman in costume behind Gerald Ford is probably not one of them, given the dates listed in their NPS biographies, though I have not ruled it out.
But experiences like theirs do raise questions worth pondering about what the women on the porch felt in 1975, as the president delivered remarks extolling Robert E. Lee. When I visited Arlington House in March, I saw a panel with the photograph of Ford’s signing ceremony, above a quote from his remarks that read: “General Lee’s character has been an example to succeeding generations, making the restoration of his citizenship an event in which every American can take pride.”
Not every American, however, took pride in the rehabilitation of a traitor. Some of those who supported the move (including Hubert Humphrey, a cosponsor) hoped that the symbolic act, completed on the eve of the nation’s 200th birthday, would be a balm for a nation riven by generational conflict over civil rights, Vietnam, and Watergate. But as noted in the New York Times, Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, who was one of ten members of Congress to vote against the resolution that Ford signed, “scoffed” at the act as nothing more than a piece of “Bicentennial fluff.”
A few weeks later, at the signing ceremony, President Ford handed the pen he had used to a young descendant of Robert E. Lee, while family members, Gov. Mills E. Goodwin, Sen. Harry F. Byrd, and former governor Linwood Holton, clapped their hands at his remarks.
Meanwhile, in an Associated Press photo from the day, the woman in period dress stood behind them on the porch. Her own hands cannot be seen, but she is not smiling.
