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On May 17, 1954, after nearly two decades of legal challenges against racial segregation in public schools and higher education, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas that school segregation was…

On May 17, 1954, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. Virginia's school system had been segregated since it was established in 1870, and…

Waterways provided the people of the Eastern Shore and Hampton Roads regions with access to food, supplies, and transport long before English colonists arrived in 1607. As English settlements displaced and removed Indigenous people from the land near…

Hopewell, Virginia, was like many small towns in the south that benefited financially from outside industrial development early in the 20th century. At the outbreak of World War I in 1914, the E.I. DuPont de Nemours Company began producing guncotton…

In 1896 the United States Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that racial segregation did not violate the "equal protection of the laws" clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Virginia and other southern states employed the doctrine of "separate…

On May 17, 1954, after nearly two decades of legal challenges against racial segregation in public schools and higher education, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka that school segregation was…

The Cuban Missile Crisis occurred during John F. Kennedy’s presidency. In October 1962 a United States spy plane captured evidence that the Soviet Union was moving nuclear missiles into Cuba. Located just 90 miles off the coast of Florida, Cuba had…

Danville does not commonly appear in the general narrative of civil rights protests and police brutality, but the city was the site of the most aggressive reaction to a peaceful civil rights protest in Virginia. In the 1960s, Danville was a small…

After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, Virginia resisted desegregating its schools for years. One tactic was the creation of a state Pupil Placement…

On May 17, 1954, after nearly two decades of legal challenges against racial segregation in public schools and higher education, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka that school segregation was…