Browse Items (29 total)

Annie Wallace was the daughter of an enslaved woman and a white man. She described her youth before, during and after the Civil War. She and her late husband, a blacksmith, raised a large family, sometimes under very poor conditions. Although she…

Arthur Greene was born enslaved in Nottoway County. He describes the treatment of slaves, punishments, meetings, patrollers, fugitive slaves, and conditions of freedpeople after the end of the Civil War.

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…

Isaiah Wallace was one of thirteen children of a formerly enslaved woman. In this interview he describes the difficult times faced by his family after the end of the Civil War. Wallace ran away as a teenager, and after working in different jobs and…

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.

Mary Dangerfield Wallace was born during the 1870s. She describes her education and her forty-four years of teaching in public schools, some of which she and later her husband helped found and build.

Includes information on background and education of an unnamed African American lawyer (likely Thomas Calhoun Walker), who lived with his wife, a former teacher, in Gloucester County. He describes his struggles to attend Hampton Institute and his…

Willis J. Madden was born in 1862 and was the son of a mixed-race woman and a white man. He discusses his childhood, education, and work as a teacher and Baptist preacher.

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.

Jacob Eschbach Yoder (1838-1905), a Pennsylvania native, came to Lynchburg in 1866 to help educate freedpeople. He left after a few months, but returned in 1868 and continued to teach and serve as an administrator for the African American schools in…