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In addition to teaching freed men, women, and children to read and write, northern missionary and relief associations also established industrial schools for adults to help African Americans achieve self-sufficiency in the new free labor market.

George Lewis was born free before the Civil War and attended Freedmen's Bureau schools in Richmond before earning a law degree from Howard University. In this interview he talks about his family background, his education, the Civil War and the…

In this detail of his lithograph celebrating the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, James Carter Beard illustrated the ability of African Americans families to live together without facing the threat of separation as had been the case under…

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…

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.…

The Fourteenth Amendment consists of five sections that conferred citizenship on former slaves and protected the rights of citizens from state abridgement thereof. It was passed by Congress in 1866 and ratified in 1868.

African Americans in several states, including Virginia, voted for the first time in the autumn of 1867. In this image, a white man is seen conducting the election. An old African American, probably a former slave and wearing patched clothes,…

Taken shortly after the end of the Civil War in 1865, this photograph shows a group of African Americans in front of First African Baptist Church, which had been founded in Richmond in 1841 when the white and black members of the city's First Baptist…

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…

The Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution prohibits the United States government and the government of any state from denying the vote to any citizen "on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." It was passed by Congress in…