John Rollison
John Rollison negotiated the legal and social restrictions of men of color in colonial Virginia to become a well-respected, wealthy man in York…
Annie Belle Daniels
Annie Belle Daniels, the founder of the Madam Daniels School of Beauty Culture, is an influential civil rights and political activist in Newport News.
John Arthur Stokes
As a student at Robert Russa Moton High School, John Stokes helped lead a strike by pupils to gain better education facilities, an act of defiance…
Wendell Scott
Wendell Scott endured racism on and off the track to become the first African American to win at the highest level of stock car racing.
Henrietta Lacks
Henrietta Lacks's cells, known in the medical world as HeLa cells, were the first human cells to be grown successfully outside the body for more than…
Robert Walter Johnson
Robert Walter Johnson was a driving force behind the integration of the sport of tennis.
Lucy Francis Simms
Born into slavery, Lucy Francis Simms was a highly respected elementary school teacher in Harrisonburg for more then fifty years.
Henry "Box" Brown
After his family was suddenly sold out of the state in 1848, he shipped himself in a wooden crate to freedom in 1849.