Browse Items (377 total)

Engraving of slave auction

A few days before holding an Emancipation Proclamation celebration in October 1890, Richmond residents debated what should be the proper date for commemorating the abolition of slavery.

Abolitionist Samuel May Jr, the compiler, sent this copy to fellow abolitionist Lysander Spooner with a note that “give me additions to this catalogue, or corrections of it, I shall be much obliged.”

After slavery, African Americans controlled their own labor and by the end of the nineteenth century more African Americans owned their own farms in Virginia than in any other state.

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…

African American Methodists in Portsmouth constructed their own church in 1857. The building was used by escaping slaves as part of the Underground Railroad. Required by Virginia law to have a white minister, the congregation called its first African…

Groups of enslaved people being sent south