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Hampton Institute student and former slave Lorenzo Ivy tells a story about the relationship between his family, his former master, and the Freedmen's Bureau after emancipation.

Includes information on background and education of an unnamed African American lawyer (likely Thomas Calhoun Walker), who lived with his wife, a former teacher, in Gloucester County. He describes his struggles to attend Hampton Institute and his…

For several months after the end of the war, the army stationed soldiers, including African Americans, throughout Virginia to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation and protect the freedpeople. White Lunenburg County residents petitioned Governor…

In the spring of 1867, Congress passed an act that required the former Confederate states to hold conventions, in which African Americans were eligible to serve, and to write new state constitutions. In Virginia, African Americans, former Unionists,…

Annie Wallace was the daughter of an enslaved woman and a white man. She described her youth before, during and after the Civil War. She and her late husband, a blacksmith, raised a large family, sometimes under very poor conditions. Although she…

Isaiah Wallace was one of thirteen children of a formerly enslaved woman. In this interview he describes the difficult times faced by his family after the end of the Civil War. Wallace ran away as a teenager, and after working in different jobs and…

Mary Dangerfield Wallace was born during the 1870s. She describes her education and her forty-four years of teaching in public schools, some of which she and later her husband helped found and build.