Photo courtesy of Joyce Chu. Retrieved from progress-index.com
A. Marlo Green didn’t grow up in Petersburg, but she always had deep connections to the city. As a child, she often visited Petersburg with her grandparents, who founded Emmanuel Worship Center on Grove Avenue in 1984. Her grandfather, Joseph P. Green, served as the pastor for many years until his passing in 2021.
“My brother and I both played our trumpets at the church, and it’s also where we were baptized,” Green told The Progress-Index. “I never imagined I would one day call Petersburg home, but now it feels as though it was meant to be all along.”
Green moved to Petersburg in December 2016 and began working at Virginia State University less than a year later, where she now works as the Director of Financial Compliance and Operations. But it wasn’t until around 2020 that Green says she first learned that one of the country’s oldest Black settlements was not only situated in Petersburg, but it was also only a handful of miles from her office.
Pocahontas Island, a peninsula on the north side of the Appomattox River between Petersburg and Colonial Heights, was the first predominantly free Black settlement in the nation and played a significant role in the local civil rights movement and Underground Railroad. In its heyday in the mid-1800s, Pocahontas Island was one of the largest free Black settlements in the nation.