Virginia and Joshua: A Love Story

The lives of Virginia Craft and Joshua Rose tell a story of the Black experience in America that many Americans have not heard.

Nearly 170 years ago, a fair-skinned enslaved woman named Ellen Craft dressed in drag as an aristocratic Southern white man. Her dark-skinned husband, William, also enslaved, posed as “his” manservant. Then they scammed their way from slavery in Georgia to freedom in Pennsylvania.

Ellen wore a tall hat, fine clothes, cool sunglasses. She put her arm in a sling so she wouldn’t have to write — she didn’t know how. And she put a bandage across her chin as though she had a toothache so she wouldn’t have to speak and betray her identity. Ellen adopted the persona of a sickly male patrician traveling north to find good health care, unable to write and barely able to speak, accompanied by one of his slaves.

Ellen and William Craft first tasted freedom in Philadelphia on Christmas Day, 1848.

Two years later, however, the Fugitive Slave Act was passed by Congress, which meant they could be captured and returned to bondage. So they fled to London, bore five children there and returned to the United States in 1869, after slavery was prohibited by the 13th Amendment to the Constitution.

The Crafts and most of their children settled in South Carolina.

Fast forward through Pittsburgh’s Hill District during the jazz-era of the 1920s and ‘30s to today. The Heinz History Center published “Heart and Soul: The Remarkable Courtship and Marriage of Josh and Virginia Craft Rose” written by journalist Mary Ellen Butler.

Virginia was the great-granddaughter of Ellen and William Craft, and Joshua was the man she married. They had met at the Hill District’s “colored” YMCA.

Josh Rose was brimming with idealism when he started college at the University of Pittsburgh in the spring of 1929. He wanted not only to improve his own circumstances, but also to lift up other African-Americans. He kept fit at the Centre Avenue YMCA, near his Brackenridge Street home in the Hill.

Fall semester was a reality check. Josh’s stepfather had left the family and the Great Depression set in. He had to work and care for his sister and sickly mother. And, over the next five years, he courted Virginia Craft.

Upon meeting Virginia, Josh immediately sought to marry her. This was a monumental mountain to climb. Virgina was only 16 and he was seven years older. An even more daunting obstacle was that Josh was working class and Virginia was part of the Hill District aristocracy. She was the daughter of the universally respected leader of the Centre Avenue Y, the formidable Henry Kinloch Craft. By that time, Josh had started working at the Y, so Mr. Craft was his boss, too.

A member of the pedigreed black elite, Henry Craft had arrived in Pittsburgh to lead the renowned Hill District Negro YMCA. He was a Harvard University engineering graduate and the son of Charles Craft, whose mother and father were the celebrated Ellen and William Craft.

The Crafts’ elevated status ran deep on Virginia’s mother’s side of the family as well. Her mother was Bessie Trotter Craft, an alumna of the New England Conservatory of Music and the daughter of James Monroe Trotter. Mr. Trotter had been a Civil War officer in the famous “colored” Massachusetts 55th Volunteers Infantry Regiment. He also had married a black Jewish woman who was descended from Mary Hemings, oldest sister of Sally Hemings, President Thomas Jefferson’s enslaved concubine.

Bessie Trotter Craft’s brother was the wealthy, fiery Boston Guardian publisher William Monroe Trotter. This Mr. Trotter had once challenged President Woodrow Wilson’s racist policies toward black civil servants so ardently that he — also a Harvard graduate and the nation’s first black member of Phi Beta Kappa — was forcibly removed from the Oval Office.

The story of Virginia Craft and Josh Rose is an inspiring narrative of how a woman and man from opposite ends of the black socioeconomic spectrum were able to navigate matters of family and love; to graduate from college at a time when black students were rare, indeed and to help other African-Americans in their community and beyond.

“Heart and Soul” also describes in fascinating detail five years of the couple’s Hill District-Oakland world — from when coed Virginia met working man Josh in 1929 until shortly after their wedding in 1934.

It digs deeper than a review of clips from the Pittsburgh Courier and rebuts the outsider view that all urban blacks were destitute during the Depression.

There is a reason for this. The author, Ms. Butler, is the daughter of Virginia and Josh Rose and had access to 153 letters found in her mother’s flowered pillowcase that had been exchanged between Virginia and Josh during their courtship.

After they married, Virginia and Josh Rose settled in the other Oakland, in Northern California, where Josh built the African-American YMCA, became a member of the Boule — an exclusive black men’s national professional society — remained active in his Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity and became the first black member of the Oakland City Council in 1964.

Upper middle-class Virginia collaborated with the Black Panther Party in support of children, became a leader in early childhood education and development, and remained active in her Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.

The Craft/​Rose union produced three upstanding children.

Virginia Craft and Josh Rose came from two different worlds and created their own, a world of meaning and purpose. And those touched by their world, in particular their fellow African-Americans, were much the better for it.

Robert Hill is a Pittsburgh-based communications consultant. He edited “Heart and Soul.”

Sources: Post Gazette (Apr. 2018) article by Robert Hill; Heinz History Center; Heart and Soul: The Remarkable Courtship and Marriage of Josh and Virginia Craft Rose by Mary Ellen Butler (Apr. 2018)