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After the U.S. Supreme Court determined in 1896 that “separate but equal” was not unconstitutional in Plessy v. Ferguson, southern state legislatures passed a flurry of segregation laws. In truth, Virginia had already begun codifying segregation in…

Henry Box Brown gained fame after escaping slavery in Richmond in 1849. Although many others self-emancipated to freedom, Brown is the only person documented to have shipped himself to freedom. He used his fame to speak out against slavery as a…

Although he is one of the best-known leaders of the American Revolution, Benjamin Franklin spent years attemping to encourage Americans and the British government to better understand the other before war broke out. Born in 1706, Benjamin Franklin…

In October 1859, white abolitionist John Brown led an armed raid on the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia), in an attempt to overthrow the system of slavery. Sixteen people died in the raid. Brown and six of his…

Black Americans understood the meaning of citizenship and the possibilities afforded by the prospect of emancipation long before the end of the Civil War. Among their demands for equality was the right to participate in the political process as…

By the end of the 19th century, the conservative Democratic Party dominated Virginia’s General Assembly. After wresting control from the short-lived bi-racial Readjuster Party early in the 1880s, legislators passed a series of laws designed to weaken…

The American woman suffrage movement is traditionally dated to the first women's rights convention held in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, where Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and others called for women's equality in the home, education,…

The fight for woman suffrage was a decades-long struggle that included many participants who held different opinions on how to achieve the goal of voting rights for women. In 1915, suffragists in Virginia split over this issue. Since its founding in…

At the turn of the twentieth century, many Black women advocated women's voting rights, but their voices often went unheard and their actions were ignored or unwelcomed by the larger white-dominated woman suffrage movement. This was particularly true…

Virginia was a critical battleground during the Civil War. Not only was Richmond the seat of the Confederate government, but the Commonwealth was also the site of some of the war’s major battles. Tens of thousands of Virginians fought in the Civil…