Browse Items (23 total)
- Collection: Postwar United States
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…
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…
Civil Rights Protests, Danville, 1963
Danville does not commonly appear in the general narrative of civil rights protests and police brutality, but the city was the site of the most aggressive reaction to a peaceful civil rights protest in Virginia. In the 1960s, Danville was a small…
Cuban Missile Crisis—Strategic Consideration, October 1962
The Cuban Missile Crisis occurred during John F. Kennedy’s presidency. In October 1962 a United States spy plane captured evidence that the Soviet Union was moving nuclear missiles into Cuba. Located just 90 miles off the coast of Florida, Cuba had…
Evelyn Butts Challenged the Poll Tax, Virginian-Pilot (Norfolk), 1966
From late in the 19th century until the middle of the 1960s, Virginia's white authorities tried to keep Black citizens from full participation in government and society. The Virginia state constitution adopted in 1902 reinstituted a poll tax as a…
Governor Stanley's Address to the General Assembly, August 27, 1956, and the Voices Not Heard
In 1896 the United States Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that racial segregation did not violate the "equal protection of the laws" clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Virginia and other southern states employed the doctrine of "separate…
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…
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.…
Interposition and Massive Resistance, 1955
When the United States Supreme Court issued its ruling on May 17, 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, it declared that racial segregation in schools was unconstitutional. The ruling overturned the “separate but equal” doctrine…
J. Lindsay Almond School Integration Speech, January 20, 1959
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…