Black History

The Story of Virginia tells a fascinating story, sharing more than four hundred evocative objects from the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.  The Commonwealth is not merely a chapter of U.S. history; it is at the epicenter of its most pivotal moments.

Looking beyond the national leadership of the suffrage movement, an acclaimed historian gives voice to the thousands of women from different backgrounds, races, and religions whose local passion and protest resounded throughout the land.

Soon to be a major television event, the nail-biting climax of one of the greatest political battles in American history: the ratification of the constitutional amendment that granted women the right to vote.

By Raymond Arsenault,  this is the first comprehensive, authoritative biography of American icon Arthur Ashe -the Jackie Robinson of men's tennis -a pioneering athlete who, after breaking the color barrier, went on to become an influential civil rights activist and public intellectual.

The Road to Healing: A Civil Rights Reparations Story in Prince Edward County, Virginia by Ken Woodley is his first-person account of the steps taken in the 18-month fight to create what legendary civil rights activist Julian Bond told the author would become the first civil rights-era reparation in United States history.

Long before it became the slogan of the presidential campaign for Barack Obama, Dorothy Ferebee (1898–1980) lived by the motto YES, WE CAN.  In She Can Bring Us Home, Diane Kiesel tells Ferebee’s extraordinary story of struggle and personal sacrifice to a new generation.

Stephanie Deutsch offers a fascinating glimpse into the partnership that would bring thousands of modern schoolhouses to African American communities in the rural South in the era leading up to the civil rights movement.

In We Face the Dawn, Margaret Edds tells the gripping story of how the South's most significant grassroots legal team challenged the barriers of racial segregation in mid-century America. 

Historian Ric Murphy documents a fascinating story of colonialism, treason, piracy, kidnapping, enslavement and British law, in his book about the kidnapping of 32 African men, women and children from Kabasa, Angola and their arrival in Jamestown. 

This book addresses the urgent need for a greater understanding of systemic racism in America through a concise and accessible survey of Black history in Virginia, from the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in 1619 to the groundswell of racial justice protests in 2020.