Browse Items (20 total)

Sections of the 3166th Quartermaster Service Company, Color Guard and 3167th Quartermaster Service Company of Camp Hill, march down Jefferson Avenue, in Newport News, during a parade marking the 81st Anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation.…

Newspapers reported that about 20,000 African Americans turned out on April 3, 1866, to celebrate their emancipation in a parade from the fairgrounds to Capitol Square. Although many white Richmonders had expressed anger at the celebration, African…

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.

On January 1, 1866, the third anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, African Americans in Hampton and Norfolk celebrated their freedom with parades, speakers, a reading of the proclamation, and a feast. The True Southerner, a radical newspaper…

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…

African Americans cheered as Abraham Lincoln toured the city of Richmond a day after it had been liberated by the United States Army in April 1865.

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.

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…

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…

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…