Virginia Vignettes

The Morrill Land-Grant Act transformed American education, establishing what became a network of state-run colleges and universities combining practical and academic teaching. Two Virginia universities owe their beginnings to it, and a third benefited as well. Proposed by Rep. Justin Morrill (Vermont), it passed Congress in 1859 but President Buchanan vetoed it. Enacted in 1862 [...]

In 1951, Barbara Rose Johns, then 16 years old, organized a student walkout at the all-black Moton High School in Farmville to protest the conditions of their education. At Moton, the facilities included tar paper shacks but no gymnasium, no cafeteria, no science laboratories, and no athletic field. The buildings had no plumbing and were [...]

It began as the Belgian Pavilion and was built for the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. Designed by the Art Nouveau architect Henri Van de Velde, the structure and its distinctive, 161-foot tower were intended to be the centrepiece of a new university back in Belgium. But when the Nazis invaded, the pavilion became [...]

Mary Elizabeth Bowser is a mysterious figure for historians. As the story goes, she was a slave belonging to Richmond’s wealthy Van Lew family. Freed through the efforts of the Van Lews’ abolitionist daughter, Elizabeth, she attended the Quaker Negro College in Philadelphia. During the Civil War, Elizabeth Van Lew worked as a Union spy, [...]

Anne Spencer was a Lynchburg poet, civil rights activist, librarian, and gardener. While fewer than thirty of her poems were published in her lifetime, she was an important figure of the Harlem Renaissance and only the second African American poet to be included in the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. Noted for verse preoccupied with [...]

The tennis great Arthur Ashe, who died February 6, 1993, was the first person so honored since the death of Confederate general Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson. Although nearly 6,000 people attended his funeral, the legacy of this Richmond native, who in 1975 beat Jimmy Connors to become the first African American male to win Wimbledon, [...]

Arthur Ashe, the first black men’s tennis champion at the U.S. Open and Wimbledon, grew up in a house located smack in the middle of a playground. And the playground had tennis courts. This was in 1940s Richmond, and Ashe’s father had taken a job as a special police officer assigned to Brook Field, an [...]

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 [...]

Yes. While not recommended, it’s how the ingenious Henry Brown gained his freedom from slavery. To help him escape, Brown sought the help of two men: James Smith, a black freedman, and Samuel Smith, a white shoemaker who, ironically, owned slaves himself. On March 23, 1849, Brown crawled into a tiny wooden box – it [...]