Browse Items (29 total)

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.

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…

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…

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

In 1865-1866 the American Tract Society printed several textbooks, including The Freedman's Spelling-Book, for use by freedpeople. In addition to teaching literacy, the spelling book illustrated words "in connection with important practical subjects;…

Mary Peake began teaching contraband at Fort Monroe in the autumn of 1861. Two years later, General Benjamin F. Butler had this school constructed and it remained under military control until 1865, when the American Missionary Association began…

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")…

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…

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…