Browse Items (29 total)

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.

This was one of many schools that opened in Richmond after the Civil War. Men and women arrived under the auspices of northern missionary and beneficial societies to help educate the freedpeople, who had been denied education under slavery. The…

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…

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.

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.

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.

Virginia's General Assembly passed an act to create the state's first public school system on July 11, 1870. Section 47 of the act required that "white and colored persons shall not be taught in the same school, but in separate schools, under the…