Browse Items (23 total)
- Collection: Postwar United States
Segregation in Public Transportation, Broadside, No date
The 1896 US Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson that established the so-called "separate but equal" doctrine gave rise to segregation laws throughout the southern United States. Often called Jim Crow laws, these laws mandated the separation…
Harry F. Byrd, Painting on Canvas, 1947
Harry Flood Byrd (1887–1966) served as state senator from 1915 to 1926, governor from 1926 to 1930, and as a United States Senator from 1933 to 1965. Byrd hailed from Winchester, Virginia, and came from a prominent and politically connected family.…
Citizenship Through Voting, Portsmouth, VA, circa 1950’s
Black men gained the right to vote when the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified in 1870. Later in the 19th century, white men in Virginia passed laws requiring the payment of poll taxes. A new state constitution in 1902…
Lesson Plan – Urban Renewal in Virginia
In the second half of the twentieth century, many U.S. cities undertook a series of “urban redevelopment” projects with federal funds that leaders claimed would modernize and upgrade their cities’ infrastructure. These urban renewal projects often…
Letter from Carl E. Auvil to Governor Thomas B. Stanley, November 15, 1954
After the United States Supreme Court ruled in 1954 that school segregation was unconstitutional in the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education, Virginia's white political leaders at the state and local levels led a Massive Resistance movement,…
Letter from Eliza E. Fitch of Charlottesville to Governor Thomas B. Stanley, June 26, 1954
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…
Governor Stanley's Address to Virginians after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education Decision, May 17, 1954
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…
Two Virginia Newspapers Respond to the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education Decision, May 1954
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…
Virginia Ferry Company, Travel Brochure, circa 1955
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…
Local 12103 on Strike in Hopewell, Photograph, 1956
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…