#4. Gilded Age, New South & 20th Century, 1880 – Present

This page looks at the best of the American Gilded Age, New South and 20th century periods of history relating to Virginia, generally after the Reconstruction period.

Note: Wherever possible, reviews at The Virginia Historian.com use reference material from the Journal of American History, the Journal of Southern History, and the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, to address topics of Virginia history generally, and the William and Mary Quarterly for early American scholarship.

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Political and Economic Virginia, 1880 – Present

Virginia’s political history emphasizes decision making for the common life of the community, including legislative, executive, judicial, economic and military elements.

This section is under construction. For reviews currently available, see the webpage for this topic, or Survey Histories of Virginia for general, political and ethnic histories.

Gilded Age to Mid-20th Century Policy, 1880 – 1950

The New South, 1945-1980

Numan V. Bartley wrote The New South, 1945-1980 in 1996. It is available from LSU Press and available online used. This eleventh volume in the History of the South series begins with an introduction of the effects of the Great Depression, New Deal and WWII on the region, setting in motion the modern economic and social transformation of the South. The changes include integration of blacks into all facets of Southern life, the end of a caste-based society and one party rule, and the growth of a predominantly educated populace.

Post WWII demographic and economic developments along with middle class black attainments in business and politics signaled a greater change in the South than the period following the Civil War. Bartley takes pains to explain the changes in political alignments that resulted in voting more like national patterns. He not only describes the politics of the region, but attends to developments in institutions, religion, class and race.

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Race and Reunion

David W. Blight wrote Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory in 2001. It is now available on Kindle and new in paperback. Blight considers Civil War memories of southerners and northerners, white and black. The study spans recollections of emancipation in 1863 to the 1913 reunion of 50,000 Union and Confederate veterans in a tented camp at Gettysburg.

For blacks, memories began with the Emancipation Proclamation, recalled in black churches and at public ceremonies. African Americans initiated a Memorial Day in Charleston, but the imitations that followed, North and South, ignored emancipation. Gradually northern memories became of shared sectional suffering and loss in wartime experience and military sacrifice. Recollections divided among reconciliationists, white supremacists and emancipationists. The price of national reconciliation was slighting African Americans in slavery, freedom and in their participation in the war. Yankee-Rebel reunions led to whites abandoning the “southern question” of racial integration, whether civil or social.

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Promise of the New South

Edward Ayers wrote The Promise of theNew South: Life After Reconstruction in 1992 and reprinted in 2007. It is now available on Kindle and in paperback. Ayers offers “the other half” of the New South besides the powerful businessmen who prevailed in state politics. This book focuses on the economically and socially non-elite. Railroads brought competing and conflicting visions and versions of a New South. Class as much as race kept southerners apart, even as railroads through the diverse elements together in the newly emerging commercial terminals.

Lower-class whites, evangelicals, women and blacks all have their say here. And while black-white relations remained flexible over this period, including widespread black enfranchisement into the 1890s, the impulse towards a multi-racial Populism is sacrificed at the color line, and the promise of prosperous community on big business principles resulted in widespread anxiety, resentment and crisis.

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Paradox of Southern Progressivism

William A. Link wrote The Paradox of Southern Progressivism in 1992. It is available on Kindle and online new and used. Reformers sought to develop democratic movements, initiate legislation, and establish state bureaucracies for social control in the areas of temperance, race relations, education, public health, child labor and woman suffrage. They met resistance endemic in Southern rural culture that prized volunteer organizations and local political control of society, so they could not sustain enforcement, regardless of legislative successes.

Link uses many examples from the upper south to explain how urban middle-class advocates came to accept racial segregation to gain reform legislation and thereby weakened their own reforms. Millworkers opposed child labor reforms, farmers removed children from school to help with crops, mountaineers resisted school consolidation, voters denied women the franchise, and liquor was widely available during state prohibition before the national amendment.

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Lynching in the New South

Fitzhugh Brundage wrote Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930 in 1993. It is now available in paperback. He tracks the course of mob violence as the extreme form of racial control, although whites were also lynched. Lynchings as planned attacks against individuals were most often carried out against accused murderers, but sexual crimes or even verbal offences sometimes met with retribution for motives of chivalry and honor.

Over a fifty-year period, Brundage studies the 86 lychings in Virginia and the 460 in Georgia, describing the complex and contradictory character of the violence as it varied geographically within states and across time. Rarely occurring in towns or cities with rapid economic transformation, it flourished as a means of social control within the boundaries of the plantation South where there was sharecropping, mono-agriculture and strict segregation. Racial violence there was initially unopposed either by institutions or individuals.

One-third of the book is devoted to the opposition to lynching and its eventual disappearance. In Virginia, there was a strong conservative white opposition to lynching, perhaps more due to a concern for law and order than racial justice. In Georgia, Progressive reformers along with religious and civic organizations mobilized against it.

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Struggle for Mastery

Michael Perman wrote Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888-1908 in 2001. It is available on Kindle and online new. Perman explains how Southern states took the vote from the Afro-American in the name of white supremacy. Beginning in 1890, they effectively gutted the Fifteenth Amendment. The reasons differed from state to state. Perman logically treats each state independently, while also comparing various forces for disenfranchisement, the powerful enactors of each state, and the out-maneuvered dissidents.

The first phase of extra-constitutional means focused on the black man alone such as the poll tax and the whites-only primary. In a second phase, these were extended constitutionally to exclude half of the whites who were the poorer sorts. The “ignorant and vicious” of both races in the South had flirted with Populism and so threatened the newly established New South order. Only after the massive electoral exclusions could there be a “solid South” of one party rule.

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Managing White Supremacy

Douglas Smith wrote Managing White Supremacy: Race, Politics, and Citizenship in Jim Crow Virginia in 2002. It is available on Kindle and online in paperback. Smith examines race relations in Virginia over the first half of the 20^th century. In the early decades, there was a façade of good race relations among paternalistic whites and the “better class” of blacks. While Klu Klux Klan violence was anathema, overzealous white supremacists such as John Plecker turned to Anglo-Saxon Clubs to reinforce the color line. The 1924 Racial Integrity Act redefined race with a “one drop rule” and outlawed racial intermarriage.

Smith describes the challenges to the segregation system by both whites and blacks. Despite the protests of the black Virginia press led by the Richmond Planet and the Norfolk Journal and Guide, along with notable whites such as Louis Jaffe of the Norfolk Virginia-Pilot, the 1926 Public Assemblages Act mandated racial segregation in all public places.

By the late 1930s and early 1940s, there was more Virginian black initiative in bring about social change, using court cases to challenge Richmond’s racial segregation ordinances, library segregation in Alexandria, unequal teacher salaries in Norfolk and exclusion from the University of Virginia. Leaders such as Oliver W. Hill and Samuel W. Tucker demanded rights as citizens. Although white Virginians such as Virginius Dabney of the Richmond Times-Dispatch recognized the inequalities that had grown up under “separate but equal”, it took African-American leadership to attain an end a legal regime of second-class citizenship.

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Breaking the Land

Pete Daniel wrote Breaking the Land: The Transformation of Cotton, Tobacco, and Rice Cultures since 1880 in 1985. It is now available from the University of Illinois Press and available online new and used. Daniel describes the southern agricultural revolution in cotton, rice and tobacco from the 1880s into the 20^th century, especially accelerating after the 1920-21 agricultural depression preceding the stock market crash. The labor intensive one mule, one plow system was mechanized. New national merchandizing channels developed, banking practices changed, and the staple crop markets permanently weakened.

New Deal programs attempted to preserve the traditional while both seeking to control production and promote yield per acre. Daniel also investigates the social lives of farmers, their work habits, folk culture, as well as blatant racism and landlord selfishness.

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Southern Politics

V. O. Key Jr. with Alexander Heard wrote Southern Politics in State and Nation in 1949. It is now available online new and used. This classic description of eleven states of the South describes the political systems, their organization, financing, nominations, primaries and elections. While it concludes Virginia’s Byrd Organization was not corrupt at the end of the 1940s, it was a 1700s one party machine. Party subdivisions were not the same as a two-party system, as the whites of the “black-belt” counties dominated the state to ensure white supremacy. While poorer whites supported racial accommodation in some degree, most Virginians white and black had been deprived of political voice at the ballot box.

The primary tool of suffrage restriction was not the poll tax but the literacy test. However by 1950 the Supreme Court had begun to unravel the southern single party monopolies by outlawing the white only primary, creating a crisis among white supremacists.

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Harry Byrd of Virginia

Ronald L. Heinemann wrote Harry Byrd of Virginia in 1996. It is available online at the University of Virginia Press. In 1910 Harry Byrd Sr. entered politics while pursuing his role as publisher of the Winchester Star and tending to his expanding apple orchards. He belonged to the Democratic Party Organization, believing in government-sponsored farm to market roads and policies allowing private business initiative, with few regulations and low taxation. A restricted electorate of white males paying poll taxes or white males who had their poll taxes paid by the Byrd Organization sustained a pay-as-you-go philosophy with few public services, including limited educational services. Byrd’s dominance of Virginia politics, governors and state legislature, continued from 1925 to 1965.

Elected Governor in 1925 he got high marks for stressing honesty, economy and efficiency in state government and maintaining good state bond credit through the Depression. Elected U.S. Senator in 1933, he continued to run the state Democratic Organization, and made a career of opposing reform efforts by national Democratic presidents from FDR to LBJ. The Organization’s stranglehold on Virginia politics was broken with its miscalculated Massive Resistance to racially integrated schooling. “Harry Byrd is available online at University of Virginia Press and from booksellers new and used on Amazon.
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Roanoke Virginia

Rand Dotson wrote Roanoke, Virginia, 1882–1912: Magic City of the New South in 2007. It is available at the University of Tennessee Press and online new and used.

The town of Big Lick, Virginia in 1850 was a local center for tobacco warehousing, manufacture and transit. From 1882 until the turn of the twentieth century, Roanoke Virginia was transformed from a small town to a large industrial center and railroad hub. Though located in Appalachia, the “Magic City of the New South” became the headquarters to both the Norfolk & Western and the Shenandoah Valley railroads, with many skilled workers from the North. A “company town” for corporate railroading developed alongside many independent manufacturers with an independent municipal government.

Rapid economic development brought class and racial tensions that compromised the city’s progressive image. Roanoke’s middle class sought to exploit the region’s working class in a partnership with absentee owners bringing in the new industrialization. The transition of Roanoke into a boomtown like so many post-Civil War cities was a tale of internal strife, inadequate public services and poor infrastructure.

Following the race riot lynching of a black prisoner in 1893, the city fathers redoubled reform efforts at prohibition, urban planning and sanitation infrastructure along with marginalizing the black population. Business leaders failed to address divisions in the city and sanctioned hangings continued in the Jim Crow era. Nevertheless, Roanoke became the fourth-fastest growing city in the country.

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*Robert A. Hohner wrote Prohibition and Politics: The Life of Bishop James Cannon, Jr. in 1999. It is out of print, but available online new and used. To buy “Prohibition and Politics” on Amazon, click here.

The Weight of Their Votes

Lorraine Gates Schuyler wrote The Weight of Their Votes: Southern Women and Political Leverage in the 1920s in 2006. It is available at the University of North Carolina Press, on Kindle and online new and used.

Southern women used their newly acquired franchise to reform the electoral process, open up the restricted electorate and achieve some legislative victories related to maternal and infant health, and social welfare efforts. They organized voter registration drives, backed reform candidates regardless of party, sought an Australian secret ballot and advocated for an end to electorate restrictions by literacy tests and poll taxes.

Women’s votes were consequential in town, county and state elections. In an environment of low voter turnouts, women could serve as critical swing voters. They lobbied not to persuade, but to effect change by the weight of their voting turnout. Candidates of all persuasions participated in the League of Women Voters candidate circuits.

Women encouraged public debates, initiated the candidate questionnaire to southern politics, and moved party meetings to gender-neutral sites. While white women moved into party politics, black women were restricted to persuasion. Women suffrage changed how Jim Crow politics worked, but it did not overthrow white supremacy maintained in the all-white primary and the lily-white Republican Party.

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Mid-20th Century to Present Policy, 1950 – Present

The Dynamic Dominion

Frank B. Atkinson wrote The Dynamic Dominion: Realignment and the Rise of Two-Party Politics in Virginia, 1945–1980, 2d. ed., in 2006. It is now available on Kindle and online new. This book describes the collapse of the Harry Byrd Democratic Organization and the emergence of the Republican Party in a competitive two-party state system. The changes were gradual, first expressed in voter preference for Republican presidential candidates. Republicans benefited from increased suburbanization and non-unionized industrialization, and the Democratic Party tended more liberal after the death of Harry F. Byrd Sr., allowing Republicans to appeal to broad conservative values.

After substantial Republican success in the 1970s, the political pendulum swung back towards the Democrats. Atkinson describes political in-fighting within both parties, admiring of skilled political leadership in either party, and disapproving of the inept.

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Norfolk

Thomas C. Parramore, Peter C. Stewart and Tommy L. Bogger wrote Norfolk: The First Four Centuries in 1994, reprinted in 2000. It is available online at the University of Virginia Press. In a systematic effort to place race relations at the center of the Norfolk story, the authors begin with a section on the region’s before town settlement. The book is divided roughly from those beginnings to 1815, from the War of 1812 to 1914, and from World War I to the present (1990s).

With a focus on individuals and groups of people who have made up the city’s history, each of the short chapters begins with a vignette, then follows with a discussion of the period context of political, social, economic and military history. For each chapter, there is a summary of important additions to cultural institutions and local government activities. “Norfolk” is available online at the University of Virginia Press and from booksellers new and used at Amazon.

Separate and Unequal

Louis R. Harlan wrote Separate and Unequal: Public School Campaigns and Racism in the Southern Seaboard States, 1901-1915 in 1958; it was reprinted in 2011. It is available on Kindle and in paperback new and used. Harlan studies a public educational movement in Virginia and Georgia with annual school terms of four months, and the Carolinas that had much shorter terms. Virginia’s great “May Campaign” is featured that produced marked improvements for white elementary and high schools, along with critiques of Virginia’s Governor Andrew Jackson Montague and other state leaders.

Harlan studies the relationship between the state racism and white supremacy of the period effecting policy that left black schools behind, never adding to their development anywhere near their proportionate due. Northern reformers underwriting the educational campaign aligned with local leaders to short-change blacks educationally. Supposedly a better educated white population would be more racially tolerant, but Harlan found no evidence of that hope being realized.

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Depression and New Deal in Virginia

Ronald L. Heinemann wrote Depression and New Deal in Virginia: The Enduring Dominion in 1983. It is available at Barnes and Noble and online new and used. Heinemann’s book is a political, economic and social history of Virginia in the 1930s. While Virginia gave Franklin Roosevelt landslide victories, it re-elected the New Deal’s greatest critics in Harry Byrd and Carter Glass. The liberal anti-organization Lieutenant Governor James H. Price was elected Governor in 1937, but unable to build an opposing machine, he lost cooperation of the legislature before his term ended.

In 1929, Virginia ranked 19^th in total income and 39^th in per capita income. Most Virginians were used to hard times. Fiscal conservatism was elevated to a civil religion, pay as you go and don’t go very far. While Virginia was ranked fifth in CCC work, WPA funds were at the bottom because so few were on relief roles; only Delaware and Vermont had smaller percentages. There was substantial Virginian resistance to Social Security, only passing unemployment insurance in 1936 and old age pensions in 1938, the last state to do so.

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Segregated Origins of Social Security

Mary Poole wrote The Segregated Origins of Social Security: African Americans and the Welfare State in 2006. It is now available on Kindle and online in paperback. While there were substantial differences among administration and scholars regarding the scope of Social Security, the Act was made racially discriminatory by policymakers whose vision was clouded by racial privilege. This was less so for Old Age Assistance and Unemployment Insurance than it was for Old Age Benefits and Aid to Dependent Children.

Several southern senators broke ranks and sought to extend Old Age Assistance to farm workers which would have disproportionately benefited African Americans, but they were unsuccessful. The three major black and interracial organizations could not agree on Social Security Act provisions.

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This Business of Relief

Elna C. Green wrote This Business of Relief: Confronting Poverty in a Southern City, 1740-1940 [Richmond], in 2003. It is now available from the University of Georgia Press and online new and used. This study of social welfare history focuses on Richmond, Virginia and its efforts over two centuries to care for the indigent with a combination of private and public resources. Both city and state resisted welfare innovations if they were tainted as Yankee. But southerner social workers were welcome, recalibrated to a more restricted sphere, and Richmond developed the first southern school of social welfare to meet urban needs.

This book integrates the experience of Richmond as a southern city both into the broad welfare history of the United States and in the context of southern regionalism.

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The Supreme Court Reborn

William E. Leuchtenburg wrote The Supreme Court Reborn: The Constitutional Revolution in the Age of Roosevelt in 1995. It is now available on Kindle and online new and used. The pivotal event in modern U.S. political history was the development of the liberal state in the 1930s that also saw a substantial change of direction in the Supreme Court beginning in 1937. The Court withdrew from a judicial activism upholding laissez-faire economics and instead allowed federal regulatory activity. At the same time it initiated an activist role in the realm of civil liberties.

Leuchtenburg describes the early 1930s conservative constitutional culture of the Supreme Court, its denials of early New Deal policy, and Franklin Roosevelt’s court packing plan. He then investigates how the Court reverses itself, eventually codifying a kind of liberal constitutionalism including prioritizing human right above property rights by incorporating the Bill of Rights in decisions against abusive state practices.

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James J. Kilpatrick

William P. Hustwit wrote James J. Kilpatrick: Salesman for Segregation in 2013. It is now available on Kindle and online new and used. Hustwit analyzes how Oklahoman native Kilpatrick as the editor of the Richmond News Leader at first promoted Virginia’s massive resistance based on states’ rights rather than racial stereotypes, then repackaged his world view opposing “reverse racism” and trumpeting strict construction constitutionalism. While famously consorting with Harry F. Byrd at the initiation of massive resistance, Kilpatrick abandoned the policy after two months of closed schools.

Kilpatrick authored The Sovereign States avoiding blatant racism, and served as vice chairman of the Coordinating Committee for Fundamental American Freedoms that was established to defeat President Kennedy’s Civil Rights Bill. As a conservative columnist, Kilpatrick wrote for the National Review, Nation’s Business, and he was syndicated in 500 newspapers as a columnist for the Washington Star. A television career began with the talk show Agronski and Company that was extended with the “Point/Counterpoint” debates on CBS’s Sixty Minutes.

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Rise of Massive Resistance

Numan V. Bartley wrote The Rise of Massive Resistance: Race and Politics in the South during the 1950s in 1969, it was reprinted in 1999. It is now available from the LSU Press and available online used. This study looks at an early episode of “massive resistance” to public school racial desegregation. Bartley focuses on politics, yet also considers the movement’s social background, its ideology and the cultural organizations that the hard-line segregationists used to nullify the Brown decision. A series of federal court rulings from 1938 to 1950 had consistently undermined the rule of white supremacy in the South.

Even before the Supreme Court ruling in 1955, Dixiecrats in 1948 and neo-bourbon segregationist leaders in Georgia and South Carolina in 1950 vowed total resistance to school desegregation. Following the Brown decision, the most significant developments were in Virginia where the Byrd Organization led a failed effort to close schools, and in Arkansas where officials were bested in a showdown with federal authority at the direction of President Eisenhower.

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Moderates’ Dilemma

Matthew D. Lassiter and Andrew B. Lewis edited The Moderates’ Dilemma: Massive Resistance to School Desegregation in Virginia in 1998. It is now available at the UVA Press and online new and used. It discusses the moderate white role in the failure of Virginia’s massive resistance to desegregation of public schooling. Grassroots mobilization of ordinary white citizens in the Virginia Committee for Public Schools and other local associations were as important as court rulings, business leaders or politicians.

Politicians such as Armistead L. Boothe and journalist Benjamin Muse gave public voice to emphasizing the desegregation issue as one of public education. But James J. Kilpatrick supported massive resistance to desegregation as state interposition rather than racial bias. While segregationists in places like Prince Edward County had some success with establishing a viable alternative academy system of private schooling, moderate strategies for local option delayed Virginia’s effective desegregation into the late 1960s.

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Southern Stalemate

Christopher Bonastia wrote Southern Stalemate: Five Years without Public Education in Prince Edward County, Virginia in 2012. It is available on Kindle and online new and used. While losses in court and white parent determination for continued public education led to defeat of school segregationists in most of Virginia’s localities, in Prince Edward County public education was abandoned from 1959 to 1964 due to an all white private school system funded by public taxation. Litigation proved unsuccessful during these years, a black exodus gutted the protest organizational base, and the Byrd county organization demoralized moderate efforts to reconcile to racial integration in the face of social and economic sanctions by segregationists.

Without any violence against African-Americans, segregationists claimed the moral high ground arguing for “color blindness” based on appeals to local control, taxpayer rights and individual liberty. The implementation of one-man-one-vote state redistricting in 1964 forced an end to the rural domination of Virginia state politics, shifting the locus of power to cities and suburbs.

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Race, Gender and Film Censorship in Virginia

Melissa Ooten wrote Race, Gender, and Film Censorship in Virginia 1922–1965 in 2015. It is available at Lexington Books – Rowman & Littlefield, in eTextbook and online new and used.

State film censorship by the Board of Motion Picture Censorship was of a piece with the racialized and gendered social norms and legal codes that segregated theater spaces in the Virginia of the New South mid-twentieth century. It aligned with the political and economic regime of Jim Crow white supremacy.

The movies and their censorship were just one venue of a contested Progressive terrain made up of broader state regulatory power, and it was contested by various citizen and community groups including civil rights groups over the forty-three year period studied. The Supreme Court brought an end to the film board’s censorship power.

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Virginia in the Vanguard

Frank B.Atkinson wrote Virginia in the Vanguard: Political Leadership in the 400-Year-Old Cradle of American Democracy, 1981–2006 in 2006. It is now available online new and used. Atkinson views Virginia politics as transcending the mid-20^th century racial divides and emerging as politically relevant to the entire nation. In the 1980s, centrist Democratic governors proved a harbinger for the election of Bill Clinton in 1992. Republican Governor Allen’s welfare reform plan was adopted by the Republican Congress in 1996 and signed into law by President Clinton.

Major political trends in the commonwealth include the growing significance of suburban voters who favor fiscally conservative candidates, but not social conservatives such as the Christian Right. Factionalism in the Virginia Republican Party led to their loss of power in the 1980s, factionalism among the Democrats led to their loss of power in the 1990s. After Republican gained control of the General Assembly in 1999, their inability to govern led to Democratic gubernatorial victories in 2001 and 2005.

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The Silent Majority

Matthew D. Lassiter wrote The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South in 2006. It is now available on Kindle and online new in paperback. Lassiter analyses the intersection of southern race relations, metropolitan and suburban growth, and the region’s convergence with residential and voting patterns. Less than some “top-down” southern strategy, the voter changes in the South came more from grassroots, locally developed policy alternatives in the southern school integration and bussing battles.

In Richmond, Virginia a court order invalidated an earlier attempt to achieve racial integration by consolidating city and surrounding county schools. Lassiter gives equal weight to class and race in his exploration of school desegregation. While black voters became empowered and had electoral successes, and political power shifted from the rural to the suburban areas, residential segregation became more entrenched.

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Captives of the Cold War Economy

John J. Accordino wrote Captives of the Cold War Economy: The Struggle for Defense Conversion in American Communities in 1991 and it was reprinted in 2000. It is available on Kindle and new online. The Cold War of the second half of the 20^th century led to entire regions being developed to serve the interests of research and manufacturing of military technologies. These included many of Virginia’s prime contractors, subcontractors, suppliers, consultants, universities, technology workers and government installations.

In the drawdown of the 1990s, Virginia government and local growth coalitions sought to re-invigorate local economies. These included municipal governments, developers, chambers of commerce and other civic institutions. Accordino argues that could have been more successful with the development of stronger state and local government markets in environment technologies for example.

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The New Economy and the Modern South

Michael Dennis wrote The New Economy and the Modern South in 2009. It is now available online. Dennis argues that while Virginia’s economy became more global in a shift away from traditional manufacturing to information and technology and services, it created liabilities for most workers. The shortcomings of the “Silicon Dominion” included surplus workers in declining industries and economically troubled communities in Southside and southwestern Virginia.

While the state as a whole scored well on indicators such as job creation, per capital income growth, average wages and unemployment exceeding national averages, the “new economy” brought about greater economic inequality along with increasing numbers of people who find restrictions on their potential in the workplace.

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Crabgrass Frontier

Kenneth T. Jackson wrote Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States in 1985. It is now available on Kindle and new in paperback online. From the early 1800s to the 1980s, changing modes of transportation transform the city and create the suburbs. They change from the place of the poor within walking distance to the inner city, expanding to regions where the more wealthy could afford the transit fares of horse cars, trolleys and electric trains.

Jackson discusses the nineteenth century promoters of the suburban ideal and twentieth century developers. He analyzes the politics of municipal planning and annexation, along with changing construction methods and land prices. He points out federal government encouragement through policies of the Home Owners Loan Corporation and the Federal Housing Administration of the New Deal, and later the GI Bill home loans and Internal Revenue Service tax breaks.

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Fight for Fairfax

Russ Banham wrote The Fight for Fairfax, A Struggle for a Great American County in 2009. It is now available online new and used. This is a story from the developer’s point of view describing how Fairfax County developed from a rural county of 41,000 in 1940, doubling by 1950, growing to five times at 500,000 in the mid-70s to over 1,000,000 by 2000. The county experienced a dynamic growth driven by well-educated, affluent residents attracted to spacious and verdant DC suburbs.

Economically, Fairfax County is a major contributor to both the metro-Washington area and to Virginia as a whole as well. It is a major employment center in the region, a leader in technological research and development, sustaining George Mason University, and benefitting from a major international airport at Washington Dulles International.

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Divided Highways

Tom Lewis wrote Divided Highways: Building the Interstate Highways, Transforming American Life in 1997. It is available on Kindle and online in paperback. The 1956 legislation authorizing a 41,000-mile system of Interstate and Defense Highways assured the dominance of highways and automobiles to the neglect of railroads and urban mass transit. The “highway men” of automobile manufacturers, oil companies, auto-user associations and highway construction companies formed a nationwide interest group to promote the project.

While expanding interstate commerce, the system also brought the rise of a suburbia impacting central cities, geographic divides along racial, ethnic and class lines, and rising highway traffic congestion.

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Super-Scenic Motorway

Ann Mitchell Whisnant wrote Super-Scenic Motorway: A Blue Ridge Parkway History in 2006. It is now available on Kindle and online new and used. This is a story of the unique mountainous path from Virginia’s Shenandoah to Georgia’s Great Smoky Mountain National Parks. Whisnant begins with a concise history of the parks movement in the United States, and continues with her narrative of the Blue Ridge Parkway construction.

It is a story of conflicts between federal agencies and regional boosters and local residents, between state and local governments over routes and tourist dollars, between advocates of wilderness and a sculpted landscape. Players include poor mountaineers facing resettlement, the Eastern Band of Cherokees and the elite North Carolina resort of Little Switzerland. Virginia’s Peaks of Otter tourist development was erased after half a century to protect the isolated and remote image of Appalachia.

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*Harley E. Jolley wrote The Blue Ridge Parkway in 1969. It is out of print but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “Blue Ridge Parkway” at Amazon.com for your bookshelf.

Managing the Mountains

Sara M. Gregg wrote Managing the Mountains: Land Use Planning, the New Deal, and the Creation of a Federal Landscape in Appalachia in 2010. It is now available on Kindle and online new and used. This book of forest, farming and recreation analysis studies the first three decades of the twentieth century in Appalachia, and the federal government’s role in affairs. It centers on a comparative study between the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia and the Green Mountains of Vermont. In Virginia, the state advanced federal and state interest by exercising its eminent domain, while its local mountain farmers were generally left out of political discussions. In Vermont, the local farmers were engaged in town hall meetings and the state served as a check on federal initiatives.

Gregg highlights the contests between comprehensive planning in forest, farming and recreation versus local social, political and economic concerns. The federal government emerged from 1911 to the 1930s as a powerful land-use planner for both public and private lands by buying private property to place in the public domain. The region was transformed from primarily extraction industry related to lumber to an increasingly conservation and recreation minded focus.

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The Oyster Question

Christine Keiner wrote The Oyster Question: Scientists, Watermen, and the Maryland Chesapeake Bay Since 1880 in 2009. It is now available from the University of Georgia Press and online new and used. During the 1884-1885 oyster season, Maryland watermen harvested 15,000,000 bushels; in 2004-2005 it was 26,500. One narrative describes the “tragedy of the commons” brought on by industry self-interested over-harvesting. An alternative story depicts unrealistic scientific management ignoring traditional waterman lore that had restricted size and mechanization of the harvest.

Keiner emphasizes the importance of local government protection and promotion of the oyster beds and their use. Oysters have been reduced to a symbol of Chesapeake ecosystem health rather than the basis of a viable full time occupation.

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Social History in Virginia, 1880 – Present

The Southern Past

Fitzhugh Brundage wrote The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory in 2005. It is now available online new in paperback. Brundage writes a social history of how visions of history become a vehicle for political power. His central theme is the received white southern memory that endures in public places and black resistance to it. It began with commemoration and celebration of a past that asserted a fantasy of the Old South as a golden age of refinement and harmonious race relations. Then came the preservation of the past and promotion of historical tourism in a way that would legitimate the Jim Crow present.

The author alternates chapters of Confederate cemetery preservation and memorials with black efforts to fashion a vision of a redemptive past looking forward. A chapter on state funded efforts to preserve documents and relics supporting white supremacy is balanced with one examining efforts of Virginian African Americans Carter Woodson and Luther P. Jackson who offered accounts of black life and accomplishment. The final chapter surveys public memory in the south since the end of legal segregation.

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Cities of the Dead

William A. Blair wrote Cities of the Dead: Contesting the Memory of the Civil War in the South, 1865-1914 in 2004. It is now available on Kindle and online new and used. Blair centers his study of ceremonies memorializing the Civil War dead in Virginia. They were, for both blacks and whites, self-conscious attempts to create traditions and to make social and political statements as a community. During federal occupation in the early days of Reconstruction both were monitored, the former Confederates for signs of disloyalty, the African Americans for signs of disorderliness. The ceremonies determined who could express their view of history and who could march in public as full citizens.

African Americans began with the celebration of civil rights and political participation. The next phase focused on group self-help, political independence and promoting a national Emancipation Day in the 1880s. Finally in this pre-WWI period, memorialization of the Civil War focused on economic and educational development. Whites commemorating the Confederate dead began with establishing cemeteries for re-interments, Decoration Day ceremonies and then dedication of monuments, all aimed at creating a politically cohesive force to bring northerners to commemorate the Confederate dead, finally achieved at Woodrow Wilson’s dedication of the Confederate Memorial in Arlington Cemetery in 1913.

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Appalachia

*John Alexander Williams wrote Appalachia: A History in 2002. It is now available on Kindle and in paperback. It comprehensively surveys the place of Appalachia, populated by Virginians and Pennsylvanians in the 18^th and early 19^th centuries. The change from the log cabin to white houses of sawn lumber suggested the rising wealth as the lowland southern culture extended into the mountain frontier during the 19^th century, bringing rapid industrialization after the Civil War.

Following WWII, widespread deindustrialization and out migration occurred bringing a declining influence from railroads and coal mines, and increased roles for federal agencies such as the U.S. Forest Service and the National Park Service.

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Making Whiteness

Grace Elizabeth Hale wrote Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940. It is now available on Kindle and online new and used. Hale makes a cultural study of how white supremacy took hold in the South and then the United States between 1890 and 1940. The South was defined as “a white man’s country” and “whiteness came to stand for America. Earlier subordination of blacks in slavery was broken by economic and political advances during Reconstruction. The subsequent regime of segregation was not only a legal construct, it was a complete cultural system to subjugate blacks, especially among the rising black middle class and their potential for upward mobility in the South.

Blacks had to be made into a cultural “other” to answer white fears of black success. Modernization and mass consumer society only enabled black progress. The response of southern white leadership was to choose values of “whitenesss” over profit or efficiency. A ubiquitous narrative of the past that demonized black participation in the political and economic spheres was conjoined with dismissive marketing stereotypes of Aunt Jemima, black women domestics and misrepresentation extended to black disorderliness to justify lynching as a further definition of race and place.

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Talk About Trouble

Nancy J. Martin-Perdue and Charles L. Perdue, Jr. wrote Talk About Trouble: A New Deal Portrait of Virginians in the Great Depression in 1996. It is now available from the University of North Carolina Press and online new and used. This narrative is divided into nine sections related to categories such as age, gender, race and occupation, supported by illustrating photographs. Virginians in the 1930s emerge as conservative and traditional, complaining about a spoiled younger generation and lamenting lost traditions and mores.

The personal narratives range from displaced coal miner to CCC employee grateful for a job, from destitute farmer and well paid cigarette packer to wealthy cat lady. Men described their lives as a series of jobs held and lost, women as stories of births, deaths and marriage. Virginia was evolving from a traditional rural society to an urban industrial one. Virginians changed many aspects of life, retraining in their work from farms to mills, moving from town to town, hiring on job to job, renting places or living with relatives.

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Soldiers to Citizens

Suzanne Mettler wrote Soldiers to Citizens: The G.I. Bill and the Making of the Greatest Generation in 2005. It is now available on Kindle and online new and used. After interviewing over fifteen hundred of the WWII generation born in the 1910s and 1920s, Mettler determined that the G.I. Bill had a substantial effect on veteran’s civic involvement beyond educational attainments. The cash allowances were equivalent to 50-70 percent of gainful employment, in contrast to today’s social programs.

The American Legion was influential in securing the generous allowances and inclusiveness. The programs were well administered, giving the veterans a positive experience with government services. They were inclusive, embracing large numbers and a diversity of socio-economic groups. Black beneficiaries were more likely participants in civil rights protests, marches and demonstrations.

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The Brown Decision

James C. Cobb wrote The Brown Decision, Jim Crow and Southern Identity in 2005. It is now available at the University of Georgia Press, on Kindle and online new and used. Cobb argues against the counterfactual thesis that the Jim Crow South was on its way to racial accommodation. Racial oppression and economic development were mutually reinforcing. The Smith v. Allwight case overturning the white primary prefigured the white Southern reaction including threats of violence; it was not the Brown decision that initially coalesced racist resistance to integration by the Supreme Court.

Brown v. Board was important to African American identity because it was about belonging, and importantly, belonging to the South. By the turn of the 21^st century, more blacks in the South identified as Southerners than whites in the South. There was ironically also a loss of black community which had been imposed by the segregated system. But Brown made possible and legitimized much of subsequent black protest for racial equality.

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Segregation’s Science

Gregory Michael Dorr wrote Segregation’s Science: Eugenics and Society in Virginia in 2008. It is available online in hardcover new and used. Eugenics, the study of racial improvement largely shaped racial theory in the early twentieth century. It became a justification for racial purity and segregation of blacks from whites, sick from the healthy, able from the disabled, and fit from the unfit. These were codified in 1924 by the General Assembly in the Racial Integrity Act and the notorious sterilization law. Virginia physicians performed one-eighth of all American eugenic sterilizations from 1927 to 1980.

Eugenics developed into racist mainline thinking as promulgated by turn of the century University of Virginia professors interpreting Thomas Jefferson’s racial views and subsequently enforced in public health departments, state hospitals and courts. It then morphed into concerns of neo-Malthusian overpopulation and increasing costs of welfare programs. Old Stock Virginians were legislative insulated from the one-drop rule by a exception for descendants of Pocahontas and John Rolfe.

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Three Generations, No Imbeciles

Paul A. Lombardo wrote Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell in 2008. It is now available on Kindle and in paperback. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote for a unanimous Supreme Court, that in the Buck family case, “three generations of imbeciles are enough”. The grandmother, mother Carrie Buck and daughter were ruled to be a burden on society and dangers to themselves.

The superintendent of the state Eugenics Records Office coordinated with the head of the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-minded to bring a test case of his Model Sterilization Law passed by the Virginia Assembly. The defense lawyer who was on the board on the Virginia Colony arguably failed Carrie Buck “because he intended to fail” so as to justify his belief in sterilization of the socially inadequate.

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Virginia Hasn’t Always Been for Lovers

Phyl Newbeck wrote Virginia Hasn’t Always Been for Lovers: Interracial Bans and the Case of Richard and Mildred Loving in 2004. It is now available on Kindle and new in paperback. This book offers much fresh material from participants in the court challenges to miscegenation laws including Virginia’s Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving, as well as couples in Nevada, Arizona and Mississippi.

Richard and Mildred Loving married in 1958 and were convicted of their marriage in 1959. While accepting exile from Virginia for twenty-five years, they began court proceedings against the state of Virginia in 1963, which eventually led to a Supreme Court victory in 1967 overturning the anti-miscegenation law. Two years later, Virginia adopted the promotional slogan, “Virginia is for Lovers”.

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Gender in Virginia, 1880 – Present

Blood and Irony

Sarah E. Gardner wrote Blood and Irony: Southern White Women’s Narratives of the Civil War, 1861-1937 in 2004. It is now available on Kindle and online new in paperback. Southern white women writing after the Civil War were a central part of the booming literary market narrating stories of the conflict and its historical significance. They produced bitter portrayals of northern “sins” and offered a divine explanation for Confederate defeat. Unlike northern authors portraying successful intersectional post-war marriages, southern women depicted doomed love affairs between northern men and southern women. They cast the Confederacy in heroic terms without consideration of its slavery foundation.

The United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) helped the former Confederate narrative to gain national acceptance. The meta-narrative vindicated the Lost Cause as a reaction to northern violations of southern constitutional rights. The UDC not only encouraged its members to write novels to fit their model, they established guidelines for authors writing histories and condemned books that did not conform to them. The triumph of the genre was Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 Gone With the Wind, which successfully made the southern narrative of the Civil War into a national one.

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Burying the Dead

Caroline E. Janney wrote Burying the Dead but not the Past: Ladies’ Memorial Associations and the Lost Cause in 2008. It is now available on Kindle and online new and used. Janney shows how the Ladies’ Memorial Associations (LMAs) deserve the credit for honoring the Confederate dead, caring for aging veterans and redefining military defeat as a political, social and cultural victory for the white South. Though made up of elites who had not lost a family member in the conflict, they extended their public sphere due to their devotion to the Confederate cause. They both broadened white women’s citizenship and first voiced the ideals of the Lost Cause.

The LMAs were 19^th century pioneers who laid the groundwork for the explosion of club organization among younger white women in the 20^th century’s Progressive Era. Most of the younger generation flocked to new groups with broader appeal such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy. While the LMAs were able to found the Confederate Museum in the former White House of the Confederacy at the turn of the century, their statewide influence soon declined.

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Southern Strategies

Elna C. Green wrote Southern Strategies: Southern Women and the Woman Suffrage Question in 1997. It is available on Kindle and online new and used. Green examined the anti-suffrage and suffrage movement among women in the Southern states. Only four initially ratified the Nineteenth Amendment, Virginia did so in 1952. Women were divided into three contending forces: the suffragists working for either or national or state constitutional amendments, states’ rights suffragists for state constitutional amendments only, and the anti-suffragists. Most in the South eschewed militancy with some exceptions, and occasionally states’ rights suffragists allied with anti-suffragists about proposed legislation.

Southern suffragists tended to be more urban-oriented and middle class, while Anti-suffragists were of the planter class and industrial interests that had combined to disenfranchise blacks constitutionally throughout the South. Most middle class black women were suffragists and loyal to the Republican Party.

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Sexuality, Politics and Social Control

Pippa Holloway wrote Sexuality, Politics, and Social Control in Virginia, 1920–1945 in 2006. It is now available on Kindle and in paperback. Amidst changes in public sexual behavior, the Virginia Assembly sought to regulate public forms of deviant behavior and deviant behavior with public consequences. Unlike proposals for state interference in the personal lives of elites, those to regulate African Americans and lower class whites succeeded.

Measures included film censorship, birth control availability, control of venereal disease, eugenic sterilization and restrictions on interracial marriage. With World War II, both Richmond and Norfolk saw an influx of newcomers, but they managed the challenges differently. Richmond’s efforts to maintain public decency were generally applauded, while Norfolk gained a national reputation for a failure to control vice.

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White Women

Lisa Lindquist Dorr wrote White Women, Rape, and the Power of Race in Virginia, 1900–1960 in 2004. It is available on Kindle and online new and used. Virginia’s Jim Crow era judicial system traded in violence and brutality, sentencing black men to death on thin or tainted evidence. But paradoxically, although 22% of this study were executed, most accused were convicted of lesser offenses, received disparate sentences and obtained pardons before serving their entire terms.

While elite white women more frequently found revenge in court, character of the accuser mattered, and children victims were not as valued as the mature. Black communities refused to accept kangaroo courts. They hid the accused, raised money for defense funds, testified as character witnesses, and engaged the NAACP.

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Sterilization of Carrie Buck

David Smith and K. Ray Nelson wrote The Sterilization of Carrie Buck in 1989. It is available in eTextbook and online used. Virginia’s 1924 sterilization law was a statute designed by leading eugenicists to provide for the sterilization of “mental defectives” under certain conditions while residents of state institutions. The test case that went before the Supreme Court rested on factual error; Carrie Buck was not an imbecile, she was not even feeble-minded, as judged by her activities after leaving the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-minded in Lynchburg, Virginia.

The flawed “science” of eugenics was used by advocates to reason from preconceived conclusions in her case back to the misrepresented facts, ignoring contrary evidence.

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LGBT Hampton Roads

Ford, Charles, and Jeffrey L. Littlejohn wrote LGBT Hampton Roads in 2016. It is now available on Kindle and online new and used. Virginia’s Hampton Roads has attracted a diverse and mobile population, especially after World War II. By mid-20^th century, the Hampton Roads led the state of Virginia in LGBT institutions and infrastructure.

In the late 1980s into the 1990s, the HIV/AIDS epidemic compounded by military crackdowns devastated LGBT leadership. By the 21^st century, there was a renewal of networking and an annual Pride Festival centered at Town Point Park in Norfolk.

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Religion in Virginia, 1880 – Present

The Desegregated Heart

Sarah Patton Boyle wrote The Desegregated Heart: A Virginian’s Stand in Time of Transition in 1962. It is now available on Kindle. Mrs. Boyle was the daughter of a First Family of Virginia whose faith led her to believe that Virginia aristocracy would embrace racial equality on the basis of basic Christian tenets. She began her journey into desegregation as the wife of a UVA professor by advocating for the admission of Gregory Swanson into the Law School there in 1950.

The result was social ostracism, threats and cross burnings on her lawn. Though publishing an article in the Saturday Evening Post titled “Southerners will Like Integration”, and mentoring from the black newspaper editor Thomas J. Sellers, she found no emotional support in the African American community. She retreated into a religious mysticism, appalled at a constitutional referendum to circumvent Supreme Court rulings for school integration passed by a two-thirds majority.

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Avenues of Faith

Samuel C. Shepherd, Jr. wrote Avenues of Faith: Shaping the Urban Religious Culture of Richmond, Virginia, 1900–1929 in 2001. It is available on Kindle and online used. Shepherd in this intellectual, religious and social history, discovered seven adaptations among mainline Protestant churches 1900 to 1929 in response to modernization and urbanization in Richmond.

The Episcopal, Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Southern Baptists and Disciples of Christ all adapted national movements from the Sunday School movement to the Social gospel. While individual conversion remained the primary business of churches, they embraced a larger religious diversity, interdenominational cooperation, professionalized leadership, expanded leadership roles for women, expanded church activities, evangelism at home and abroad, and Christian social ministries.

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African American Virginia, 1880 – Present

Jim Crow Virginia, 1880 – 1950

Race Relations in Virginia

Charles E. Wynes wrote Race Relations in Virginia, 1870-1902 in 1961. It was reprinted in 2012 and is now available in paperback. Complete ostracism, segregation and disenfranchisement for the African American did not come to Virginia until the 20^th century, after the 1900 segregating railroad act and the 1902 Virginia Constitution. Virginia treated blacks better on the whole that any other southern state except perhaps South Carolina and Mississippi. However there was no “Negro rule” under the Readjuster Party of William Mahone even though legislative protections, public education and political participation were extended to blacks.

The racism of segregation and disenfranchisement was not immutably a feature of southern society. White supremacy was not generally demanded in the public sphere, and there was no popular demand for black disenfranchisement; the conservative Democrats of the disenfranchising 1902 Constitution welched on their promise to submit it to a ratification vote, and it would have failed.

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*Howard N. Rabinowitz wrote Race Relations in the Urban South, 1865-1890 in 1978. It is out of print but available online used in paperback. Learn more to buy “Race Relations” for your bookshelf.

*Jane Dailey wrote Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia in 2000. It is available on Kindle and online used. Learn more to buy “Before Jim Crow” for your bookshelf.

A Nation Under Our Feet

Steven Hahn wrote A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration in 1993 and reprinted in 2005. It is now available on Kindle and in paperback. Hahn links the slave era with the 20^th century’s Great Migration through his analysis of rural grassroots immigration patterns. Emigration, separatism, self-help and racial solidarity formed the bedrock for social organization and political activities. By 1900, one fifth of the rural black population were property owners who formed the backbone of the Colored Farmers Alliance during the late 1880s.

The purchase of family land holding was a result of relationships based on family, neighbors and community institutions. The emphasis on rural blacks who were most of the African-American population replaces earlier historian emphasis on urban related emphasis on “liberal” political analysis related to American, French and Haitian ideals of civil and political equality and interracial democracy.

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Freedpeople in the Tobacco South

Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie wrote Freedpeople in the Tobacco South: Virginia, 1860-1900 in 1999. It is now available in paperback. He examines the postwar political economy of Virginia’s emancipated tobacco workers, from their interactions with former masters to define free labor to larger market forces of the global capitalization of the tobacco industry.

Even though confronted with political and workplace, Conservative victory at the polls, and the decline of the Freedman’s Bureau, African-American tobacco workers in Virginia maintained a certain economic independence. The 1873 Panic and its extended depression, competition from western and international tobacco producers, and loss of demand for dark tobacco with the rise of the cigarette industry, all led to a manufacturing monopoly seizing control of tobacco.

Both the collapse of legal protections to sharecroppers afforded by crop lien laws and the emergence of the monopolistic American Tobacco Company led to a temporary rise in farmers’ alliances and elected representatives. Though these faltered in the long run, younger African-Americans migrated to urban Virginia, West Virginia mines and Northeast cities and sent home money. Falling prices in the 1890s forced many white planters to sell off parcels of their acreage, and older black generations were able to gain a plot of land so that by 1900, more than a quarter of African-Americans in the dark tobacco belt were independent farmers.

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*Crandall A. Shifflett wrote Patronage and Poverty in the Tobacco South: Louisa County, 1860-1900 in 1982. It is out of print but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “Patronage and Poverty” for your bookshelf.

*Samuel N. Pincus wrote The Virginia Supreme Court, Blacks and the Law, 1870-1902 in 1990. It is out of print but may be available in your central library or by interlibrary loan.

A Murder in Virginia

Suzanne Lebsock wrote A murder in Virginia: Southern Justice on Trial in 2003. It is now available in paperback. The 1895 murder of a white farm woman in rural Lunenburg County, Virginia brought about the accusation and trial of one black man and three black women implicated by the black man, William Henry (Solomon) Marable, a sawmill worker from North Carolina. At first Governor Charles T. O’Ferrall, former U.S. Representative and Colonel of Confederate Cavalry, feared a lynching, and dispatched a regiment of Richmond militia to guard the jail.

The racially integrated jury convicted all four defendants, but crusader John Mitchell of the black Richmond Planet assembled a white defense team supported by the black Richmond Women’s League. The appeals mistrials and trials before all white juries led to the acquittal of the three women and the conviction of Marable to hanging. Marable implicated a white man as an accomplice just before his execution. The remarkable of Gilded Age cooperation between whites and blacks was suppressed in Jim Crow Virginian histories.

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Blue Laws and Black Codes

Peter Wallenstein wrote Blue Laws and Black Codes: Conflict, Courts, and Change in Twentieth-Century Virginia in 2004. It is available on Kindle and online in paperback. It examines the law as a link between social and racial conflict and change from 1890 to 1970. The first three essays relate the social changes upheld by the Virginia State Courts involving the unpaid labor for road construction, Sunday closing laws and women choosing legal careers.

The next three essays focus on legal challenges to Virginia’s system of white supremacy. For these, Virginia courts upheld segregation into the 1960s, requiring plaintiffs to turn to the federal courts for relief. NAACP lawyers Oliver Hill and Samuel W. Tucker committed decades to challenging every aspect of Jim Crow discrimination. The Richmond sit-in movement contributed to integrating public places. Richard and Mildred Loving successfully challenged Virginia’s anti-miscegenation statute.

The last chapter looks at the ways political power is wielded and public policy effected. These related to the one-man-one-vote apportionment in state and local elections and abolition of the poll tax.

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Race Man

Ann Field Alexander wrote Race Man: the Rise and Fall of the “Fighting Editor,” John Mitchell Jr. in 2002. It is available on Kindle and online new and used. Even as Reconstruction began to fade with Virginia “Redeemed” by white Conservatives in 1883, the former school teacher John Mitchell Jr. was named editor of the newly established black newspaper Richmond Planet in 1884, a post he would retain until his death in 1929. From 1888 to 1896 he was elected to the Richmond City Council from the gerrymandered Jackson Ward.

Mitchel became know as the “Fighting Editor” for his resolute opposition to lynching and unfair court practices, being credited with Governor Fitzhugh Lee’s commuting the death sentence of a fifteen year old black accused of raping a white woman. Nevertheless, he did not cross the line that led crusader Ida B. Wells to be exiled to Chicago.

With black disenfranchisement from the 1902 Virginia Constitution, Mitchell turned to promote black economic independence, founding the Mechanic’s Savings Bank in 1902. Although he advocated for an unsuccessful Richmond trolley boycott for equal rights in 1904, Mitchell ran for governor in 1921 on the “Lily Black” Republican ticket.

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Mr. Bojangles

Jim Haskins and N.R. Mitgang wrote Mr. Bojangles: the Biography of Bill Robinson in 1988, and reprinted in 2013. It is available on Kindle and online new and used. Haskins and Mitgang place Bill Robinson as exemplar of the African American tap dance. From the 1920s to the 1940s at the height of his popularity, he was the most powerful and highly paid black performer. His life held many contradictions.

While he was able to make an impression in both white and black worlds, he was a resentful, angry man. A gambler who was known to flash the gun he always carried, he was also by turns generous, optimistic and charming. He famously directly confronted racial insults and pushed for actor’s rights against racial prejudice, but he also repeatedly took roles of a stereotyped self-demeaning black man.

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Perils and Prospects of Southern Black Leadership

Raymond Gavins wrote The Perils and Prospects of Southern Black Leadership: Gordon Blaine Hancock, 1884–1970 in 1977. It is now available on Kindle and online new in paperback. Gavins incorporates biography, along with intellectual and social history to write about Gordon Blain Hancock and his place in black and southern history. Most of Hancock’s life was spent teaching at the Virginia Union University and pastoring at the Moore Street Baptist Church in Richmond. He studied at Seneca Institute, Colgate University and Harvard.

A race man, Hancock believed in self-help and racial solidarity. At the same time in the segregated 1940s he promoted cooperation with whites to end compulsory racial division. Committed to full citizen rights, along with Luther Porter Jackson and Plummer Bernard Young, he was an author of the Durham Manifesto on race relations. At the same time opposed white leadership in predominantly black institutions, he also had reservations about mixed racial marriage. Like many revolutionaries, he was overtaken by more militant leaders in the 1960s, but he had been one who set in motion the changes in attitudes and expectations leading to a more equitable future.

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Civil Rights Virginia, 1950 – Present

Song in A Weary Throat

Pauli Murray wrote Song in a Weary Throat: An American Pilgrimage in 1987, reprinted as Pauli Murray in 1989. It is now available on Kindle and online in paperback. This is an autobiography of an early activist for equal black and women’s rights, but more history than literature, with vignettes of personal insights into the Roosevelts, Thurgood Marshall, Stephen Vincent Benet and Lloyd K. Garrison.

In the early 1940s Pauli Murray was jailed in Petersburg for refusing to move to the back of the bus and “sat in” in Washington DC diners, long before Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. adopted those non-violent tactics confronting segregation. As a lawyer, she played an important role in the adoption of Title VII, banning sexual discrimination in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In her later years she became one of the first women Episcopalian priests.

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Parting the Waters

Taylor Branch wrote Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63 in 1988. It is now available on Kindle and online new and used. In the first of a two volume biographical study, this book celebrates Martin Luther King Jr.’s contributions to the modern black freedom movement in the watershed post-WWII years. It begins with the pioneering role of a group of pioneering black preachers and academic theologians. Branch acknowledges the courage of outspoken black dissenters during the Cold War era. King was drawn to both movement “martyrs” and aspiring black “rulers”.

The black Baptist churches had developed an independent tradition of Christian social criticism which was bitterly opposed by fundamentalist leaders of the National Baptist Convention who opposed merging Christian and political goals. White liberal leaders on the national scene consistently misunderstood the political implications of mass black activism, and Branch is critical of the Kennedy Administration and its judicial appointments in the South.

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*Michael Dennis wrote Luther P. Jackson and a Life for Civil Rights in 2004. It is out of print but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “Luther P. Jackson” on Amazon.com for your bookshelf.

*Earl Lewis wrote In Their Own Interests: Race, Class, and Power in Twentieth-Century Norfolk, Virginia in 1991. It is out of print but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “In Their Own Interests” on Amazon.com for your bookshelf.

*Bruce Adelson wrote Brushing Back Jim Crow: The Integration of Minor-League Baseball in the American South in 1999 and reprinted in 2007. It is out of print but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “Brushing Back Jim Crow” on Amazon.com for your bookshelf.

*Doug Smith wrote Whirlwind: The Godfather of Black Tennis – the Life and Times of Dr. Robert Walter Johnson in 2004. It is now available online. Learn more to buy “Whirlwind” on Amazon.com for your bookshelf.

*Steve Sullivan wrote Remember This Titan: The Bill Yoast Story, Lessons Learned from a Celebrated Coach’s Journey in 2005. It is now available on Kindle and online new and used. Learn more to buy “Remember This Titan” on Amazon.com for your bookshelf.

Making Civil Rights Law

Mark V. Tushnet wrote Making Civil Rights Law: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court, 1936-1961 in 1994. It is now available online in paperback. Tushnet writes a history of legal strategies, ideas and arguments. He offers important insights into the dynamics of deliberation and the personal politics of the court. The case law involves challenges to race-based restrictive housing covenants, voting rights violations and educational segregation, beginning with applicants to graduates schools in 1936.

Charles Huston, a visionary law professor at Howard University and the first black member of the Harvard Law Review, founded the NAACPs Legal Defense Fund in the late 1920s. Thurgood Marshall took over in 1936 and continued to serve for twenty-five years. The key insight of the LDF strategy was that segregation as practiced under the Supreme Court’s Separate But Equal doctrine violated the Fourteenth Amendment.

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From Jim Crow to Civil Rights

Michael J. Klarman wrote From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality in 2004. It is now available as an eTextbook and online new in paperback. This legal history traces Supreme Court cases related to racial discrimination from Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 to Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. The dramatic shift in racial attitudes from 1900 to 1950 sets the stage for the ruling against public school segregation. Extra legal forces including public opinion determines equitable procedure and ultimately enforcement of the law.

Klarman can be critical of lawyers participating in social movements, believing members of the NAACP to be too focused on the black middle class condition, and that national and state legislation are key to accomplishing what jurisprudence alone cannot.

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Simple Justice

Richard Kluger wrote Simple Justice: the History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Racial Equality in 1976. It is now available on Kindle and online in paperback. This history of the Brown Decision weaves a complex tapestry of anecdotes, vignettes and personal sketches to reveal the personal dimension of this struggle for equal access to education.

Kluger also makes an analysis of the Brown rulings and the legal and historical issues involved in the cases that brought about the overturning of the 1896 Plessy v. Fergusson “separate but equal” ruling.

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*Robert A. Pratt wrote The Color of Their Skin: Education and Race in Richmond, Virginia, 1954–89 in 1992. It is out of print but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “Color of Their Skin” on Amazon.com for your bookshelf.

We Face the Dawn

Margaret Edds wrote We Face the Dawn: Oliver Hill, Spottswood Robinson, and the Legal Team that Dismantled Jim Crow in 2018. It is now available from the University of Virginia Press and online on Kindle and new and used. The Civil Rights Movement in Virginia began not in the 1960s, but in the 1940s and 1950s, built on foundations laid by Richmond natives Oliver Hill and Spottswood Robinson. They were a part of a legal team led by the social justice pioneer Thurgood Marshall attacking segregation in education, transportation, housing and voting.

When students at the all-black R. R. Moton High School walked out in protest of the poor conditions, Hill and Robinson sued the Prince Edward County School Board. This grassroots effort was incorporated in the NAACP suit which became Brown v. Board of Education. When the Virginia General Assembly sought to disbar Hill and Robinson they successfully defended their legal practice on appeal to the Supreme Court.

Learn more to buy “We Face the Dawn” on Amazon.com for your bookshelf.

Grassroots to the Supreme Court

Peter Lau edited From the Grassroots to the Supreme Court: Brown v. Board of Education and American Democracy in 2004. It is available on Kindle and online in paperback. These essays connect “bottom-up” grassroots social activism both black and white, with the “top-down” court jurisprudence and subsequent school desegregation of the 1950-60s. Although integration was not universally and uniformly achieved, the Brown case was of “seminal importance and revolutionary in nature.” Local chapters include Prince Edward County, Virginia, along with localities in South Carolina, New Orleans, Atlanta, Memphis and New York City.

Local activists not only sought courtroom victories in public school desegregation, they also engaged in larger and more comprehensive campaigns for equality in voting rights and economic justice. But Brown-related jurisprudence on schools and busing led to substantial institutional and ideological changes in black schooling opportunity. While racial integration did not overcome deeper problems of economic inequalities, the Brown case forced a social and cultural confrontation with the nation’s history of racial segregation.

Learn more to buy “Grassroots to the Supreme Court” on Amazon.com for your bookshelf.

 

*George Lewis wrote The White South and the Red Menace: Segregation, Anti-Communism, and Massive Resistance, 1945-1965 in 2004. It is out of print but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “White South and Red Menace” on Amazon.com for your bookshelf.

Keep on Keeping on

Brian J. Daugherity wrote Keep on Keeping on: The NAACP and the Implementation of Brown v. Board of Education in Virginia in 2016. It is available on Kindle and online new and used. It offers a comprehensive view of the African American efforts to gain equal educational opportunity at mid-20^th century focused on the contributions of the NAACP, nationally, in Virginia, and locally, across state and local political organizations and allied civil rights organizations, white moderates and liberals.

Implementation of Brown v. Board of Education in Virginia was initiated by several state and local African American organizations. But they were fiercely opposed by segregationists in a “massive resistance” led by Virginia’s U.S. Senator Harry F. Byrd Sr. along with his Democratic Organization.

Learn more to buy “Keep on Keeping on” on Amazon.com for your bookshelf.

Brown’s Battleground

Jill Ogline Titus wrote Brown’s Battleground: Students, Segregationists, and the Struggle for Justice in Prince Edward County, Virginia in 2011. It is now available at the UNC Press, on Kindle, and online new and used. The focus of this book is Prince Edward County and its public school closing for five years. The student strike of 1951, the Brown case of 1954, school closings in 1959 and the follow-on Supreme Court case mandating public school reopening in 1964 are all recounted. But the story of the African American community to educate their children is also told. Some families sent their children away to find schooling in adjacent counties or to relatives as far away as Massachusetts and Michigan.

The American Friends Service Committee sought to provide education services for 1,700 students in the Free School. White allies were found in the two local colleges, the Department of Justice, the Ford Foundation and the Field Foundation. Titus explains the pervasiveness of racial separation and miscommunications that led to interracial misunderstandings, even between white and black proponents of public schooling.

Learn more to buy “Brown’s Battleground” on Amazon.com for your bookshelf.

Wars in Virginia, 1880 – Present

Virginia’s history of wars includes not only chronologies of campaigns and their battles, but also the cultural contexts of soldiering and the impact of war on Virginian society.

This section is under construction. For reviews currently available, see the webpage for this topic, or Survey Histories of Virginia for general, political and ethnic histories.

Spanish American War

World War I

World War II

Cold War

*James W. Ely Jr. wrote The Crisis of Conservative Virginia: The Byrd Organization and the Politics of Massive Resistance in 1976. It is out of print but available online. Learn more to buy “Crisis of Conservative Virginia” on Amazon.com for your bookshelf.

*Richard B. Sherman wrote The Case of Odell Waller and Virginia Justice, 1940-1942 in 1992. It is out of print but available online used. Learn more to buy “Odell Waller and Virginia Justice” at Amazon.com for your bookshelf.

*John A. Salmond wrote Miss Lucy of the CIO: The Life and Times of Lucy Randolph Mason, 1882-1958 in 1988. It is out of print but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “Miss Lucy” at Amazon.com for your bookshelf.

*Michael R. Gardner wrote Harry Truman and Civil Rights: Moral Courage and Political Risks in 2002. It is out of print but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “Harry Truman and Civil Rights” on Amazon.com for your bookshelf.

*Robert Mann wrote The Walls of Jericho: Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Richard Russell, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in 1996. It is out of print but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “Walls of Jericho” on Amazon.com for your bookshelf.

*J. Harvie Wilkinson III wrote Harry Byrd and the Changing Face of Virginia Politics, 1945-1966 in 1968. It is out of print but available online used. Learn more to buy “Harry Byrd and the Changing Face of Virginia Politics” on Amazon.com for your bookshelf.

*William B. Crawley Jr. wrote Bill Tuck: A Political Life in Harry Byrd’s Virginia in 1978. It is out of print but available online used. Learn more to buy “Bill Tuck” on Amazon.com for your bookshelf.

*Ben Beagle and Ozzie Osbourne wrote J. Lindsay Almond: Virginia’s Reluctant Rebel in 1984. It is out of print but available online used. Learn more to buy “J. Lindsay Almond” on Amazon.com for your bookshelf.

*Robbins L. Gates wrote The Making of Massive Resistance: Virginia’s Politics of Public School Desegregation, 1954-1956 in 1964. It is out of print but available online used. Learn more to buy “Making of Massive Resistance” on Amazon.com for your bookshelf.

*Larry J. Sabato wrote The Democratic Party Primary in Virginia: Tantamount to Election no Longer in 1977. It not in print but is available online new and used. Learn more to buy “Democratic Primary in Virginia” on Amazon.com for your bookshelf.

*Thomas R. Morris and Larry J. Sabato edited Virginia Government and Politics: Readings and Comments, 4th ed., in 1998. It is out of print but available online used. Learn more to buy “Virginia Government and Politics” on Amazon.com for your bookshelf.

*Julian Maxwell Hayter wrote The Dream Is Lost: Voting Rights and the Politics of Race in Richmond, Virginia in 2017. It is now available on Kindle and online used. Learn more to buy “The Dream is Lost” on Amazon.com for your bookshelf.

*Margaret Edds wrote Claiming the Dream: The Victorious Campaign of Douglas Wilder of Virginia in1990. It is not in print but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “Claiming the Dream” on Amazon.com for your bookshelf.

*Christopher Silver wrote Twentieth-Century Richmond: Planning, Politics, and Race in 1984. It is out of print but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “Twentieth Century Richmond” at Amazon.com for your bookshelf.

*Christopher Silver and John V. Moeser wrote The Separate City: Black Communities in the Urban South, 1940–1968 in 1995. It is out of print but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “The Separate City” at Amazon.com for your bookshelf.

*Richard A. Brisbin wrote A Strike Like No Other Strike: Law and Resistance during the Pittston Coal Strike of 1889–1990 in 2002. It is now available at the West Virginia University Press and online new and used. Learn more to buy “A Strike Like No Other Strike” at Amazon.com for your bookshelf.

*Steven G. Davison et al. wrote Chesapeake Waters: Four Centuries of Controversy, Concern, and Legislation, 2d ed., rev. in 1997. It is out of print but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “Chesapeake Waters” at Amazon.com for your bookshelf.

*Margaret T. Peters wrote Conserving the Commonwealth: The Early Years of the Environmental Movement in Virginia in 2008. It is out of print but available online. Learn more to buy “Conserving the Commonwealth” at Amazon.com for your bookshelf.

*Will Sarvis wrote The Jefferson National Forest: An Appalachian Environmental History in 2011. It is available from the University of Tennessee Press and online new and used. Learn more to buy “Jefferson National Forest” at Amazon.com for your bookshelf.

*August Meier and Elliott Rudwick wrote Black History and the Historical Profession, 1915-1980 in 1986. It is out of print but available online used. Learn more to buy “Black History” at Amazon.com for your bookshelf.

*David E. Johnson wrote Douglas Southall Freeman in 2002. It is out of print but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “Douglas Southall Freeman” at Amazon.com for your bookshelf.

*Charles C. Osborne wrote Jubal: The Life and Times of General Jubal C. Early, CSA, Defender of the Lost Cause in 1992. It is out of print but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “Jubal” at Amazon.com for your bookshelf.

*Jacqueline Goggin wrote Carter G. Woodson: A Life in Black History in 1993. It is out of print but available on line new and used. Learn more to buy “Carter G. Woodson” at Amazon.com for your bookshelf.

*Susan Goodman wrote Glasgow: A Biography in 1998. It is out of print but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “Glasgow” at Amazon.com for your bookshelf.

*James M. Lindgren wrote Preserving the Old Dominion: Historic Preservation and Virginia Traditionalism in 1993. It is out of print but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “Preserving the Old Dominion” at Amazon.com for your bookshelf.

*Cynthia Mills and Pamela H. Simpson edited Monuments to the Lost Cause: Women, Art, and the Landscapes of Southern Memory in 2003. It is out of print but available online used. Learn more to buy “Monuments ” at Amazon.com for your bookshelf.

*Edward D. C. Campbell Jr. and Kym S. Rice edited A Woman’s War: Southern Women, Civil War, and the Confederate Legacy in 1996. It is out of print but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “A Woman’s War” at Amazon.com  for your bookshelf.

*Karen L. Cox wrote Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture in 2003. It is out of print but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “Dixie’s Daughters” at Amazon.com for your bookshelf.

*Mark Zwonitzer and Charles Hirshberg wrote Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone? The Carter Family and Their Legacy in American Music in 2002. It is available on Kindle and online new and used. Learn more to buy “Will You Miss Me” at Amazon.com for your bookshelf.

*Edward L. Ayers and John C. Willis edited The Edge of the South: Life in Nineteenth Century Virginia in 1991. It is out of print but available online new and used in paperback. Learn more to buy “Edge of the South” for your bookshelf.

*Michael B. Chesson wrote Richmond after the War in 1981. It is out of print but available online used in paperback. Learn more to buy “Richmond After the War” for your bookshelf.

*Jack P. Maddex Jr. wrote The Virginia Conservatives, 1867-1879: A Study in Reconstruction Politics in 1970. It is out of print but available online used. Learn more to buy “Virginia Conservatives” for your bookshelf.

*Alan W. Moger wrote Virginia: Bourbonism to Byrd, 1870-1925 in 1968. It is out of print but available online used. Learn more to buy “Virginia: Bourbonism to Byrd” for your bookshelf.

*James M. Lindgren wrote Preserving the Old Dominion: Historic Preservation and Virginia Traditionalism in 1993. It is out of print but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “Preserving the Old Dominion” for your bookshelf.

*Henry C. Ferrell wrote Claude A. Swanson of Virginia in 1985. It is out of print but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “Claude A. Swanson” for your bookshelf.

*C.C. Pearson and J. Edwin Hendricks wrote Liquor and Anti-Liquor in Virginia 1619-1919 in 1967. It is out of print but available online used. Learn more to buy “Liquor and Anti-Liquor” for your bookshelf.

*Ronald D. Eller wrote Millers, Millhands and Mountaineers: Industrialization of the Appalachian South, 1880-1930 in 1982. It is out of print but available online used. Learn more to buy “Millers, Millhands and Moutaineers” for your bookshelf.

*Crandall A. Shifflett wrote Coal Towns: Life, Work, and Culture in Company Towns of Southern Appalachia, 1880-1960 in 1991. It is out of print but available online in paperback new and used. Learn more to buy “Coal Towns” for your bookshelf.

*William A. Link wrote A Hard Country and a Lonely Place: Schooling, Society and Reform in Rural Virginia, 1870-1920 in 1986. It is out of print but available online used. Learn more to buy “Hard Country and a Lonely Place” for your bookshelf.

*G. Terry Sharrer wrote A Kind of Fate: Agricultural Change in Virginia, 1861-1920 in 2000. It is out of print but available online used. Learn more to buy “A Kind of Fate” for your bookshelf.

*Edgar Toppin wrote Loyal Sons and Daughters: Virginia State University, 1882-1992 in 1992. It is out of print but may be available in your central library or by interlibrary loan.

*Wythe Holt wrote Virginia’s Constitutional Convention of 1901-1902 in 1990. It is out of print but may be available in your central library and by interlibrary loan.

*Raymond H. Pulley wrote Old Virginia Restored: An Interpretation of the Progressive Impulse, 1870-1930 in 1968. It is out of print, but may be found in your central library or by interlibrary loan.

*William Larsen wrote Montague of Virginia: The Making of a Southern Progressive in 1965. It is out of print but available online used. Learn more to buy “Montague of Virginia” on Amazon for your bookshelf.

*J. Morgan Kousser wrote The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910 in 1974. It is out of print but may be available in your central library and by interlibrary loan.

*William G. Thomas wrote Lawyering for the Railroad: Business, Law, and Power in the New South in 1999. It is out of print but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “Lawyering for the Railroad” on Amazon for your bookshelf.

*Jack Temple Curtis wrote Westmoreland Davis: Virginia Planter Politician, 1859-1942. It is out of print but available online used. Learn more to buy “Westmoreland Davis” on Amazon for your bookshelf.

*Allen W. Moger wrote Virginia: Bourbonism to Byrd, 1870-1925 in 1968. It is out of print but available online used. Learn more to buy “Virginia: Bourbonism to Byrd” on Amazon for your bookshelf.

*Robert A. Hohner wrote Prohibition and Politics: The Life of Bishop James Cannon, Jr. in 1999. It is out of print but available online used. Learn more to buy “Prohibition and Politics” on Amazon for your bookshelf.

*Marie Tyler-McGraw wrote At the Falls: Richmond, Virginia and Its People in 1994. It is out of print but available online used. Learn more to buy “At the Falls” at Amazon for your bookshelf.

*Andrew Buni wrote The Negro in Virginia Politics, 1902-1965 in 1967. It is out of print but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “The Negro in Virginia Politics” at Amazon for your bookshelf.

*Earl Lewis wrote In Their Own Interest: Race, Class and Power in Twentieth Century Norfolk, Virginia in 1991. It is out of print but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “In Their Own Interest” at Amazon for your bookshelf.

*Walter Russell Bowie wrote Sunrise in the South: The Life of Mary-Cooke Branch Munford in 1942. It is out of print but may be available at your central library or by interlibrary loan.

*Suzanne Lebsock wrote “A Share of Honor”: Virginia Women, 1600-1945 in 1984. It is out of print but available online used. Learn more to buy “A Share of Honor” at Amazon for your bookshelf.

*Amy Thompson McCandless wrote The Past in the Present: Women’s Higher Education in the Twentieth-Century American South in 1999. It is out of print but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “Past in the Present” at Amazon for your bookshelf.

*Edward Alvey Jr. wrote History of Mary Washington College, 1908-1972 in 1974. It is out of print but available online used. Learn more to buy “Mary Washington College” at Amazon for your bookshelf.

*Raymond C. Dingledine Jr. wrote Madison College: The First Fifty Years, 1908-1958 in 1959. It is out of print but available online used. Learn more to buy “Madison College” at Amazon for your bookshelf.

*Susan H. Goodson, et al wrote The College of William and Mary: A History in 1993. It is out of print but is available online used. Learn more to buy “William and Mary” at Amazon for your bookshelf.

*Edgar Toppin wrote Loyal Sons and Daughters: Virginia State University, 1882-1992 in 1992. It is out of print but may be available in your central library or by interlibrary loan.

*William A. Link wrote A Hard Country and a Lonely Place: Schooling, Society, and Reform in Rural Virginia, 1870-1920 in 1986. It is out of print but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “A Hard Country” at Amazon.com for your bookshelf.

*Gertrude Woodruff Marlow wrote A Right Worthy Grand Mission: Maggie Lena Walker and the Quest for Black Economic Empowerment in 2003. It is out of print but available online used. Learn more to buy “A Right Worthy Grand Mission” at Amazon.com for your bookshelf.

*Brooks Johnson and Peter Stewart compiled Mountaineers to Main Streets: The Old Dominion as Seen through the Farm Security Administration Photographs in 1985. It is out of print but available online used. Learn more to buy “book” at Amazon.com http://amzn.to/2BN9vx9 for your bookshelf.