Brown Teacher Fellowship

2025 Anne & Ryland Brown Teacher Fellowship

Open to Virginia 4th–12th Grade History and Social Science Educators.

This summer, the Library of Virginia will host a teacher institute in four of the eight superintendent’s regions, and will select four Brown Fellows (one from each region) to present their research during a session at their region’s teacher institute. For the 16th Annual Brown Teacher Institute (summer 2025), the Library seeks fellows from regions two, three, five and seven.

In 2025 the Brown Fellowship will focus on research and projects that explore the history of Black Virginians in Richmond’s Jackson Ward district in support of the Library’s forthcoming exhibition, “House to Highway: Reclaiming a Community History” (July 14, 2025–Feb. 28, 2026). “House to Highway” uses the story of Abraham Peyton Skipwith, the first Black homeowner in the area that would be known as Jackson Ward after the Civil War, and the subsequent removal of his house in advance of the construction of the Richmond–Petersburg Turnpike, to anchor a larger national story of the Black American experience and the founding of the nation through the Jim Crow era. Moreover, the exhibition illuminates the present-day restorative justice movement in Jackson Ward and how the community’s story and legacy can be found in other Black American communities across the nation.

Jackson Ward, often dubbed “Black Wall Street,” was named a National Historic Landmark in 1978. In 2020, Richmond natives and sisters Sesha Joi and Enjoli Moon began exploring the question of how it acquired the name Jackson Ward, and their research brought them to the Library of Virginia. They discovered instead the compelling story of Abraham Peyton Skipwith, a skilled Black businessman, early Richmond homeowner, and emancipator of the Revolutionary Era. The sisters followed the fate of his house — one of the first built by a Black person in Richmond — and his remarkable descendants, mapping out a narrative of Black Richmond that touched on key themes in American history: slavery and emancipation, Black wealth creation and political activism, and the role that racism and segregation played in defining and destroying Black neighborhoods in the 20th century. Thus, was born The JXN Project, a reparative historic preservation project that recently celebrated Jackson Ward’s 150th anniversary through restorative truth-telling and redemptive storytelling. As the country approaches the 250th anniversary of the establishment of the United States of America, the project, in partnership with the Library, endeavors to propose a more complete narrative of the American origin story by focusing on the life, legacy and lineage of Abraham Peyton Skipwith, who in his own right should be acknowledged as a “Founding Father” of the Black American experience.

The exhibition at the Library will be the first venue for “House to Highway,” which will also be a key component of the visitor experience at the Skipwith–Roper Complex. Because the site of Skipwith’s house was razed during construction of the Richmond–Petersburg Turnpike (now I-95/I-64), The JXN Project is reconstructing the house with an interpretive center on Bates Street. The Skipwith-Roper Complex is within the Jackson Ward National Historic District. In what is likely to be the first time the history of Jackson Ward and its community members have been explored using a timeline of more than 230 years (1793–2026), “House to Highway” will use a combination of archival records, maps and photographs from the Library’s collection. Although the Library’s collection numbers more than 130 million items, the archival records pertaining to Skipwith and his descendants are sparse, a phenomenon that characterizes much of Black history. Nevertheless, the records that are available are powerful and document the extraordinary achievements of the Skipwith and Roper families.

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Ellen and Orran Brown endowed the Anne & Ryland Brown Teacher Enrichment Fund in 2009 in honor of his parents as a legacy to their lifelong belief in the power of education to improve an individual’s well being and that of his or her family. The Fund supports the Brown Teacher Institute and the Brown Teacher Fellowship programs.