Browse Items (29 total)

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.

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.

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.

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…

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…

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…

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.

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…

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.

In this detail of his lithograph celebrating the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, James Carter Beard illustrated the importance of education to African Americans, who had been denied such opportunities under slavery.