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Early in the 1880s African Americans held public offices in the city of Danville. During this time, a biracial coalition known as the Readjuster Party had won control of the General Assembly and the statewide offices. A circular letter published with…

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…

This plat of the grounds of Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, prepared for a lawsuit settled in 1906, shows the placement of buildings as well as the use of space for raising crops, both to feed the faculty and students and to teach…

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…

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,…

Designed by architect Richard Morris Hunt, Virginia Hall was Hampton's main building and included dormitory space, classrooms, a dining hall, and a chapel.

The American Baptist Home Mission Society opened the Richmond Theological School for Freedmen in 1865. Its first classes met in the former slave jail of Richmond trader Robert Lumpkin, where iron bars remained in the windows. It was the first…

Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute was founded in 1868 by General Samuel Chapman Armstrong, an agent of the Freedmen's Bureau. The first coeducational institution in Virginia, it prepared young men and women for careers in teaching.

Virginia's public school system required racial segregation. In drawing up districts for Alexandria County (later Arlington County), the mapmaker drew what looks like a badly gerrymandered voting district with each dwelling designated as W ("white")…

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…