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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,…

Lorenzo L. Ivy was born in Pittsylvania County at the end of the Civil War. He described the cruel treatment of his enslaved family members and the slave trade. He attended Hampton with Booker T. Washington and graduated in 1875.

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.

Gray areas consisting of 25 to 60 percent Negroes, Black areas consisting of 60 percent or more Negroes.

This page of the official roster of the convention contains the names of twenty-three of the 105 delegates, how many days each attended during the last two months that it met, and how much payment they were due for their service.

The first page of an alphabetized list of male freed men in New Kent County recording who had formerly owned them and how much tax they owed. Under Virginia law, males older than sixteen paid an annual poll tax. At that time, payment of a poll tax…

In this detail of his lithograph celebrating the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, James Carter Beard illustrated the ability of African Americans ability to marry legally, a right they had been forbidden under slavery.