African American Studies

A cohabitation register, or as it is properly titled, Register of Colored Persons…cohabiting together as Husband and Wife on 27th February 1866, was the legal vehicle by which former slaves legitimized both their marriages and their children. The information about an individual person contained in a cohabitation register is ... often the first time that a former sl

Read this 2005 article that links to copies of documents relating to freedmen's marriages in several Southern states. From the National Archives' journal Prologue. See also transcriptions of marriage records from Virginia, Arkansas, D.C. and other states, from Freedman's Bureau Online.

A digital collection of advertisements for runaway and captured slaves and servants in 18th- and 19th-century Virginia newspapers.

From the University of Richmond. "Mapping Richmond's Slave Trade" is a 3D model of a portion of the city's commercial district as it stood in 1853. Richmond's slave trading market was among the largest in the United States between the 1830s and 1860s. With auction houses and slave jails colored red (a red flag was typically hung outside of these buildings to indicate an auction would occur that day), this 3D model reveals—and lets you explore—the slave market's large physical footprint in the city.

Information on more than 600 individuals "who lived in slavery on Thomas Jefferson's Virginia plantations."

Nearly the full run of the Richmond Daily Dispatch from the eve of Lincoln's election in November 1860 to the evacuation of the city in April 1865. A project from the University of Richmond.

From UVA's Professor Patrica C. Click. Documents and maps relating to a colony of former slaves on Roanoke Island, formed during the Civil War. Includes letters of missionary teachers who worked on the island.

Correspondence of slaves of Virginia Governor David Campbell. From Duke University.

From the Library of Congress. See the Virginia material.

Details life in a Virginia and a Pennsylvania community, from the time of John Brown's raid through the era of Reconstruction. Letters and diaries, newspapers and speeches, census and church records. See also Freedmen's Bureau material.

"The website now includes a searchable database of nearly 3700 Virginia emigrants to Liberia and nearly 250 Virginia emancipators, a timeline of relevant events and documents between 1787 and 1866, and a compilation of important related sources...".

From UVA Special Collections Library's Jackson Davis Collection. See also letters, speeches and articles by Davis, an educational reformer, from the first half of the 20th century.

From the Holsinger Collection at UVA's Small Special Collections Library. Nearly 500 portraits of African-American citizens of Charlottesville and the surrounding area from the end of the 19th century up to WWI.

Fourteen oral history interviews conducted in 1992 by Virginia Commonwealth University students with African-Americans residing in the Richmond, Virginia metropolitan area. More digital resources at VCU's Virginia Black History Archives.

From UVA Special Collections Library.

By graduates from the 1950s through 2000.

Scroll down this page for links to full-text of selected 1950s articles from the Cavalier Daily. See also links to articles from the 1957, "Jim Crow" issue of the Virginia Spectator. This resource is part of UVA professor Stephen Railton's Faulkner at Virginia web site.

From the Subject (Virginia) page of the website for Historical Publications of the United States Commission on Civil Rights.

Includes Timeline 1966-75, as well as sections on UVA and the USA in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. NOTE: click on "Preface" in first section for photos of and information on African-American Trailblazers at UVA.

Massive resistance was Virginia's policy to prevent school desegregation in the wake of the Brown Supreme Court decision in 1954. Covers the history of massive resistance in Virginia and some of its legacies.

An archive about the racial segregation laws, or the 'Jim Crow' laws from the late 1880s until the mid-twentieth century. The focus of the collection is the town of Charlottesville in Virginia.

Includes full speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., Presidents Kennedy and Nixon, Virginia governors, as well as original footage of school desegregation, public meetings, local debates over civil rights matters, and interviews with citizens.

An African-American newspaper printed in Charlottesville from 1933-1935,...a source for understanding the lives of Charlotteville's African Americans during the Jim Crow period. From UVA's Virginia Center for Digital History.