This #BlackHistoryMonth, I will be honoring some notable Black Americans and their contributions, which have helped shape Virginia's culture and history.
Join me in lifting up their stories.
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After being denied entry because of segregation laws, Gregory Hayes Swanson led a legal fight to integrate ’s law school. He succeeded, becoming the first black legal student at UVA in 1950.
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After decades of civil rights activism that led to confrontations with the KKK and 13 arrests, Rev. Curtis W. Harris broke barriers in 1998 when he became Hopewell’s first black mayor. He was also a former Baptist minister and native of Surry County. #BlackHistoryMonth
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Born into slavery, Lucy F. Simms was a pioneering Black educator in the Shenandoah Valley, where she is estimated to have taught more than 1,800 students over a 56-year career. Shortly after her death, a new African-American school in Harrisonburg was named in her honor.
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Evelyn Thomas Butts, in 1963, filed the first federal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Virginia’s $1.50 poll tax, a tool to discourage Black Americans from voting. Her case was combined with others to bring about a 1966 SCOTUS ruling that eliminated the poll tax.
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Peter Jacob Carter escaped slavery and served in the Union army before being elected to the House of Delegates four times, making him one of the longest-serving Black politicians in Virginia during the Reconstruction era.
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Jennie Serepta Dean founded the Manassas Industrial School for Colored Youth, one of the only Black high schools in Virginia during Reconstruction. Dean’s school trained thousands of young people to become teachers, blacksmiths, cobblers & cooks, among a variety of other trades.
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Dred Scott was a Virginia-born slave who sued for his freedom. Scott’s lawsuit would lead to the most infamous SCOTUS decision in history. In 1857, the justices ruled 7-2 that, as a Black man, Scott was not a citizen and had no legal claim to freedom.
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An educator, Virgie Binford spoke at schools and churches, stressing hard work, focus, and positivity as the formula for overcoming the steep odds of poverty and low self-esteem. That outlook took her from Mississippi's cotton fields to a long career with Richmond Public Schools.
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An educator who founded Richmond's Mount Olivet Baptist Church, Rev. J. Andrew Bowler, in 1882, helped organize the first school for Black students in Church Hill.
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A crusading newspaper editor, John Mitchell Jr. fought racial injustice with words, using the pages of his Richmond Planet to organize a boycott of the city’s segregated streetcar system and rail against racist lynch mobs.
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Born a slave, the self-educated Rev. John Jasper became famous for his celebrated sermon “De Sun Do Move,” which he delivered more than 250 times, including once before the Virginia General Assembly. In 1867, Rev. Jasper will go on and found the Sixth Mount Zion Baptist Church.
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Dorothy Irene Height was a Richmond native who fought for racial and gender equality as the National Council of Negro Women's longtime head. In 1994, President Bill Clinton awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.
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A member of the “Norfolk 17” who first integrated the city’s public schools, Andrew I. Heidelberg became one of the first Black students to play varsity football at a formerly all-white school during Virginia’s Massive Resistance period.
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A pioneering sociologist, Charles Spurgeon Johnson wrote a definitive study on the Chicago race riot of 1919, contributed to the Harlem Renaissance movement as research director for the National Urban League, and served as the first black president of Fisk University.
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Marrying a white man set Mildred Loving on the path to making history. After she and her husband were prosecuted under Virginia’s law banning interracial marriages, the couple mounted a legal challenge that led to the 1976 SCOTUS ruling that abolished anti-miscegenation laws.
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Mary Richards Bowser worked as a pro-Union spy from inside the Confederate White House, where she worked as a maid. After the war, she gave a series of talks in New York about her wartime espionage & worked with the Freedmen’s Bureau as a teacher in Virginia and then in Florida.
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An inventor and electrical engineer born in Farmville, James Edward Maceo West helped revolutionize microphone technology in 1962 while working at Bell Laboratories. A holder of more than 250 patents, he became a professor at Johns Hopkins University after he retired from Bell.
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A Reconstruction-era politician who opposed stripping ex-Confederates of their right to vote in the name of racial conciliation, James Wesley Douglas Bland sponsored a bill establishing what would later become .
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Barbara Johns was a leader in the civil rights movement. In 1951, at the age of 16, she led a student strike for equal education at R.R. Moton High School in Farmville, Virginia. She'll be memorialized at the U.S. Capitol, replacing a statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee.
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