Browse Items (97 total)

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…

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…

Standing near the entrance to Hampton University, the Emancipation Oak was the site of Mary Peake's first classroom for the many African Americans who escaped slavery to freedom at Fort Monroe in 1861. In 1863 African Americans gathered there to hear…

Throughout the Civil War thousands of enslaved men, women, and children attained their freedom by seeking refuge with United States troops as they moved across Virginia. They were declared "contraband of war" in May 1861 and Freedmen's Villages grew…

Harper's Weekly published two political cartoons by Thomas Nast, one contrasting Confederate leaders applying for a pardon that would restore their voting rights with another of a wounded African American soldier who was denied the right of suffrage.…

Thomas Nast drew these scenes as illustrations for Harper's Weekly on January 24, 1863, three weeks after Abraham Lincoln signed his Emancipation Proclamation. This later lithograph was a slightly altered depiction with a portrait of Lincoln in the…

For decades after the Civil War African Americans searched for family members who had been separated by the domestic slave trade. In 1865 Stephen Flemming, who had been sold from Bowling Green, Virginia, to Louisiana about 1849, wrote Governor…

In June 1865 Hanover County farmer Slaughter B. Bullock contracted with his former enslaved laborers to work for him for stated wages and a place to board on his farm. The agreement was unusual (and unusually fair) in that it allowed either party "to…

In December 1865 Pollard Gaines, an African American, contracted with Royall H. Eubank to work his Nelson County farm, tend to all the livestock, repair buildings and fences, cut and haul firewood, fill the ice house, and cultivate the garden "for…

Brigadier General Robert Huston Milroy (1816–1890), commanding the United States Army units then posted in Winchester, pronounced the Emancipation Proclamation in effect, thereby freeing all enslaved Virginians in Winchester and Frederick…