In 1619, the first enslaved Africans made their way to English North America in Virginia and much of the nation’s black history was created here. Here are the sites that tell it. No state holds more of this history. The first recorded Africans were brought to Point Comfort in 1619; Richmond, the largest slave-trading market outside New Orleans, and a Virginia schoolyard, where slavery’s struggle for Brown v. Board of Education, began. The sites below are spread across the state and reward a proper trip.
Fort Monroe, Hampton
Three men escaped to Union lines in 1861, were declared contraband of war, and not returned; this is where the fort became a refuge for thousands and became known as Freedom’s Fortress. It has been made a National Monument by the waterside.
The Emancipation Oak
This massive live oak was the site of the reading of the Emancipation Proclamation to the community on Hampton University grounds and the location of classes for freed people under the tree. It was not a constructed monument, but a living one.
Black History Museum, Richmond
Founded in 1981, the Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia is located in the Leigh Street Armory in historic Jackson Ward, the neighborhood that was the Harlem of Virginia and the Black Wall Street of its time.
Maggie Walker House
Maggie Lena Walker, the first African-American to charter a bank in the United States, has a Richmond home that’s been preserved as a National Historic Site. Touring it covers both her extraordinary business career and her private family life.
The Civil Rights Memorial
Outside the State Capitol, a bronze and marble monument to Barbara Johns and the students who walked out of their segregated Prince Edward County school in 1951. Their strike became one of the cases folded into Brown v. Board of Education.
Robert Russa Moton Museum
In Farmville, the former school where sixteen-year-old Barbara Johns led that 1951 walkout. It is now a museum telling the story of the student strike and the county’s later decision to close its schools entirely rather than integrate.
Pocahontas Island, Petersburg
Pocahontas Island’s Black History Museum and collection of artifacts collected by a long-time resident, one of the oldest free Black communities in the country and a stop on the Underground Railroad.
Colonial Williamsburg
The living-history site has broadened its narration of the enslaved majority that constructed and maintained colonial capital, with new programs, reconstructed sites and interpreters centered on the Black experience as well as the narratives of the founders.
First Baptist Church, Williamsburg
It was one of the earliest black congregations in the United States, organized by free and enslaved blacks late in the 1700s. It originally came to be built in the latter part of the 17th century, as revealed by recent archaeology, and it is now a part of the Williamsburg story.
Booker T. Washington Monument
The national monument at the tobacco farm he was born at in Hardy is a reconstructed farm that interprets his early life before he rose to become the founder of Tuskegee.
Check Before You Go
There are hours and some smaller sites, especially the community museums, have limited or appointment only hours. It is a simple phone call before a visit that makes the difference between a visit and a locked door, particularly outside the summer season.
