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Virginia's General Assembly passed an act to create the state's first public school system on July 11, 1870. Section 47 of the act required that "white and colored persons shall not be taught in the same school, but in separate schools, under the…

Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute was founded in 1868 by General Samuel Chapman Armstrong, an agent of the Freedmen's Bureau. The first coeducational institution in Virginia, it prepared young men and women for careers in teaching.

The American Baptist Home Mission Society opened the Richmond Theological School for Freedmen in 1865. Its first classes met in the former slave jail of Richmond trader Robert Lumpkin, where iron bars remained in the windows. It was the first…

Designed by architect Richard Morris Hunt, Virginia Hall was Hampton's main building and included dormitory space, classrooms, a dining hall, and a chapel.

The main building for Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institution (as Virginia State University was then named) opened in 1888, five years after the school was established. It contained offices, classrooms, dormitories, a library, museum, and chapel,…

Founded in 1868, Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute educated and trained hundreds of African Americans to be teachers. Although African Americans had been denied the opportunity for education during slavery, Hampton required its students (ages…

This plat of the grounds of Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, prepared for a lawsuit settled in 1906, shows the placement of buildings as well as the use of space for raising crops, both to feed the faculty and students and to teach…

In 1882, the Virginia General Assembly, which then included thirteen African American members, created the Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute, the nation's first fully state-supported four-year institution of higher learning for African…

Early in the morning of May 1, 1866, fires damaged several African American churches in Petersburg, including the Sunday school building adjacent to one of them. Many white Virginians feared that the schools would become hotbeds of radical…

During the spring of 1868, some white Virginians established local branches of the Ku Klux Klan, which had been organized in Tennessee about two years earlier. It lasted only a few months in the state, but not before members committed acts of…