Virginia Vignettes

His name was Robert Munford III, and while he is remembered today as a playwright, in his time he was best known as a member of the House of Burgesses and an officer who served under George Washington during the French and Indian War. Politically, Munford was an anti-tax moderate who opposed the Revolutionary War [...]

Moncure Daniel Conway was a Unitarian minister and abolitionist who was once described as “the most thoroughgoing white male radical produced by the antebellum South.” Born in Stafford County to a slave-owning family related to presidents George Washington and James Madison, Conway turned to abolitionism and Transcendentalism in his early 20s and moved to Boston [...]

Anthony Burns was an escaped slave from Stafford County who became a cause célèbre for the abolitionist movement when he was arrested in Boston in 1854. After stowing away on a ship to gain his freedom, Burns, who was unusual for being able to read and write, worked for a few months in a clothing [...]

Mildred Loving, who died May 2, 2008, was the Virginia woman who challenged all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court the state’s ban on interracial marriage. Loving, an African American, was only 11 years old and nicknamed Bean when she met the quiet, 17-year-old Richard Loving in Central Point. When she became pregnant six [...]