About Wilma Jones

Historian. Author. Halls Hill resident. Keeper of 150 years of primary archives.

Why Book with Wilma?

This isn't a tour.
It's a primary source experience.

Every luxury travel partner, hotel concierge, DMC, corporate incentive planner, corporate DEI and ERG program, senior living community, country club, law firms, wealth management team, and cultural organization can book a history tour.

What they can't replicate is this.

I haven't memorized these stories. I've lived them.

Your clients won't just hear history, they'll hold it in their hands.

Included in grant-funded scholarship, now expanded into something far deeper.

Four generations of my family helped to build this neighborhood. My great-grandmother settled in Halls Hill. All four of my grandparents lived in Halls Hill. Both of my parents were born and lived their entire lives here. My brother was one of the Stratford Four, the students who desegregated the Commonwealth of Virginia’s public schools in 1959.

When I guide your clients through this history, I'm not reciting facts from a guidebook. I'm sharing a living inheritance. That depth of personal connection is something no other guide in the region can offer.

Newspaper headlines. Period photographs. Copies of deeds, letters, and official documents drawn from 150+ years of primary archives. Guests hold tactile proof that these stories are real. They hold artifacts that spark conversation long after the experience ends. No other heritage tour in the region puts reproductions of the source documents directly into your clients' hands.

Wilma created and developed the Halls Hill walking tour in 2016. After becoming president of the John M. Langston Citizens Association in 2018, she included the tour as a component of a grant application that was awarded by Virginia Humanities. This was rigorous, peer-reviewed, community-validated scholarship. ABHE's private tours and Salon Sessions take Wilma's original walking tour idea further: layering in the source documents, the family stories, the community voices, and the institutional memory that standard public tours simply don't have access to.

Your clients receive the depth of a scholarly archive presented with the warmth of a family story.

Archives to Ancestors

From the Freedman’s Bureau’s management of Arlington’s contraband camps to the federal condemnation of Queen City and East Arlington for Pentagon expansion, from New Deal redlining to urban renewal displacement, Wilma traces the specific legislative and administrative decisions that shaped, and repeatedly attempted to erase Black Arlington.

She presents this history not as a story of what was done to a community, but as a chronicle of how that community read the terrain, navigated the law, and built something enduring every single time.

The segregation wall is one example.

The segregation walls of Arlington, Virginia are not accidents of history. They are the physical legacy of federal policy. Specifically, the Standard State Zoning Enabling Act, developed under the Coolidge administration in 1924, which gave localities the legal framework to encode racial separation into zoning ordinances. Wilma Jones is one of the few historians in the country who presents this story with primary source documentation, standing at the wall itself — tracing the line from a federal statute to a concrete barrier to the community that was on the other side of it and thrived anyway.

The walls that divided Arlington were built by policy, not accident. Wilma Jones connects the federal legislation that gave localities the power to create racially exclusionary zoning, to the Black community that turned those walls into the boundary of something extraordinary.

The intersection of federal policy and Black community life is not background to Wilma Jones's work - it is the work.