Virginia Vignettes

Westmoreland Davis, who served as governor from 1918 to 1922, was born on a ship in the North Atlantic. His parents belonged to a wealthy southern planting family and were in the midst of their annual voyage to Liverpool, England. Sadly, Davis’s father died ten months later, leaving young Morley and his mother to face [...]

Actually, it was the Richmond-based Southern Literary Messenger. One of the most successful and influential literary magazines in the antebellum South, the magazine declared, in 1834, its intent to be “a kind of pioneer, to spy out the land of literary promise [in the South], and to report whether the same be fruitful or barren.” [...]

Helen Henderson was one of the first two women elected to Virginia’s House of Delegates after women won the right to vote in 1920. A Missouri native, Henderson was a teacher in Buchanan County and helped found the Baptist Mountain School, which opened there in 1911. In 1923, a group of local Democratic men invited [...]

Gordon Blaine Hancock was a professor at Virginia Union University, pastor of Moore Street Baptist church in Richmond and a leading spokesman for African-American equality in the generation before the civil rights movement. Hancock co-founded the Richmond chapter of the Urban League and wrote newspaper columns for the Associated Negro Press, advising his mostly black [...]