Browse Items (20 total)

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.

William I. Johnson Jr., was born enslaved and was a butler for the Johnson family of Goochland County and Richmond. He describes slave auctions and slave hiring. He details his Civil War experiences, including how he escaped to Union lines. After the…

Brigadier General Robert Huston Milroy (1816–1890), commanding the United States Army units then posted in Winchester, pronounced the Emancipation Proclamation in effect, thereby freeing all enslaved Virginians in Winchester and Frederick…

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.

Thomas Nast drew these scenes as illustrations for Harper's Weekly on January 24, 1863, three weeks after Abraham Lincoln signed his Emancipation Proclamation. This later lithograph was a slightly altered depiction with a portrait of Lincoln in the…

Standing near the entrance to Hampton University, the Emancipation Oak was the site of Mary Peake's first classroom for the many African Americans who escaped slavery to freedom at Fort Monroe in 1861. In 1863 African Americans gathered there to hear…

The Thirteenth Amendment formally abolished slavery in the United States.

A few days before holding an Emancipation Proclamation celebration in October 1890, Richmond residents debated what should be the proper date for commemorating the abolition of slavery.

In 1905 African Americans in Richmond celebrated the fortieth anniversary of the end of slavery.

Enslaved Richmond residents Lucy Goode Brooks and her husband Albert Royal Brooks were permitted to live together as a family. Beginning late in the 1850s, Albert Brooks paid the owner of Lucy Brooks in installments to purchase the freedom of his…