Browse Items (217 total)

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…

After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, Virginia resisted desegregating its schools for years. One tactic was the creation of a state Pupil Placement…

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 that school segregation was…

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…

The Ku Klux Klan (KKK), or the Klan, is an extremist organization that promotes white supremacy and “100 percent Americanism.” The Klan experienced three distinct periods of power in the United States: during Reconstruction (1865–1870s), between the…

The Loving v. Virginia case ended a long history of banning marriage between white and Black Virginians dating back to the 17th century. In 1878 the General Assembly enacted a law punishing both parties in an interracial marriage with prison…

Arthur Robert Ashe was one of the greatest tennis players in American history and a noted human rights activist. He was the first and to date is the only Black man to win the singles title in three Grand Slam tennis events--the U.S. Open (1968), the…

The Vietnam War was a 40-year conflict between the communist regime of North Vietnam and its southern allies, known as the Viet Cong, and South Vietnam whose principal ally was the United States. This war stemmed from a war of independence from…

Despite the ratification of both the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments that granted all adult citizens in the United States the right to vote, many eligible Black voters in southern states were systematically blocked from participating in the…

In January 1975, President Gerald Ford established the National Commission on the Observance of International Women's Year. The purpose of the commission was to work in conjunction with the International Women’s Year proposed by the United Nations in…