Virginia Vignettes

Sarah Patton Boyle was one of Virginia’s most prominent white civil rights activist during the 1950s and 1960s and author of the widely acclaimed autobiography, The Desegregated Heart: A Virginian’s Stand in Time of Transition (1962). Her efforts began with an awkward and hesitant welcome to the University of Virginia’s first black law student in [...]

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 [...]

John Stewart Battle served as governor of Virginia from 1950 to 1954. A loyal Democrat in line with the Byrd Organization, the state machine run by U.S. Senator Harry Flood Byrd Sr., Battle overcame a spirited challenge by three fellow Democrats to win the 1949 gubernatorial primary. His greatest achievement as governor was a massive [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Louis Isaac Jaffé, editor of the influential Norfolk Virginian-Pilot newspaper from 1919 until his death in 1950, earned renown for his sponsorship and promotion of Virginia’s anti-lynching law and his racial activism. A lifelong liberal, Jaffé battled bigotry and championed reforms that improved the daily lives of southern blacks, especially those residing in Hampton Roads. [...]

Traditional racial attitudes were certainly a factor in the creation of massive resistance. Age-old customs and attitudes that had been legalized for half a century were challenged by the Brown decision of 1954. The loudest voices defending the overturned separate-but-equal policy came from the Southside, where the black percentage of the population was highest and [...]

By virtue of service and power, Harry Flood Byrd Sr. was the most prominent Virginian of the twentieth century. As a state senator, governor, and U.S. senator, Byrd made notable contributions to his state and nation, but it was through his leadership of the Democratic political organization–the “Byrd machine”–that he wielded the authority that shaped [...]

Opposition to President Harry Truman’s civil rights proposals caused many Southerners to join a National States Rights Party and nominate Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina for president in 1948. These “Dixiecrats” hoped to unite the South behind Thurmond and throw the election into the House of Representatives. Not wanting to jeopardize the election prospects of Virginia [...]