Other collections at the VHS

Manuscripts form only one portion of the Society's study collections. The library also holds a comprehensive collection of published material documenting Virginia's history and culture. Researchers from around the country come to examine books, pamphlets, periodicals, and broadsides that span all periods of Virginia's past. The complex history of African Americans, however, has often been omitted from traditional texts. The library has an extensive collection of published state and local histories, directories, genealogies, and other studies that only occasionally include the contributions of African Americans. These sources may include information on slave-owning families and plantations. To this store has been added the small but rapidly developing collection of more recent publications pertaining to black family life. This would include published record sources such as registers of free Negroes, church histories, and special community and family studies. Standard reference works are supplemented by more specialized works relating to African Americans, such as works documenting black soldiers, fugitive slaves, and landmarks associated with black history and achievement. In addition, scholars in the field of African American studies have produced numerous books and journal articles examining various aspects of the black experience in the United States, ranging from the transatlantic slave trade to black women reformers. [Search the VHS online catalog]

The Society receives more than 300 periodicals, many of them with a genealogical or local history emphasis. Specific references in these journals to people, places, and events in Virginia are indexed by the staff and added to the online catalog. This additional indexing can lead a researcher to such diverse topics as slave women in King William Parish, early black schools in Cumberland County, or the Louisa County heritage of Langston Hughes. The detailed cataloging can likewise assist researchers in locating information on prominent Virginians, including Maggie Walker, Booker T. Washington, John Mercer Langston, Carter G. Woodson, and Arthur Ashe. The library also collects information on African American authors, businesses, and educational and charitable organizations. Certain types of collections, such as broadsides and sheet music, have special finding aids to identify materials pertaining to African Americans.

The Society's museum collections contain a growing number of artifacts created by or concerning African Americans. Several paintings feature African Americans, including John W. Hill's 1847 landscape panorama of Richmond; Slave Hunt in the Dismal Swamp by Thomas Moran, 1864; A Negro Funeral in Virginia by A. B. Frost, engraved and published in Harper's Weekly in 1880; The Scarecrow by Allen C. Redwood, c. 1870s; two wash drawings by William L. Sheppard of chasing and catching a rabbit; an oil of Slave Auction Virginia done by English artist Lefevre Cranstone in 1860, and a watercolor by him, Negro Shanty, Virginia, also done at that time. Three pencil sketches of African Americans by David Hunter Strother ("Porte Crayon") date from the 1850s. The collection also contains many engravings from late nineteenth century publications, such as Harper's Weekly and Leslie's Illustrated Magazine.

The Society owns two plaster busts of Maggie Walker by P. Beneduce, executed in 1934, as well as a marble bust of John Young Mason, the only extant work of the expatriate African American sculptor Eugene Warburg of New Orleans, done in Paris in 1855. A cigarstore figure c. 1870 is dressed as an Indian but has strong African American features. The Society also owns the full-size plaster model for the statue of Arthur Ashe erected on Richmond's Monument Avenue in 1996.

The museum department maintains extensive files of photographic prints, organized alphabetically by subject, and these include many individual, family, and institutional group portraits of African Americans. Portraits of African Americans are frequently found among the Foster Studio Collection of glass plate negatives, which is indexed by name. The museum also has a file of miscellaneous photographs of African Americans engaged in various occupations. Among recent photographic accessions are stereograph slides of Hampton Institute in the 1870s and of Booker T. Washington, and cartes-de-visite of "A Colored Church in Petersburg," 1868, and "Virginia Slave Children Rescued by Colored Troops" in 1864. A number of images document the career of entertainer Bill "Bojangles" Robinson.

Among three-dimensional objects are the only surviving Virginia slave whipping post, taken from Portsmouth by a Union soldier; a doormat made by slaves of Robert E. Lee at Arlington; a rag doll c. 1810 dressed as a black man; a banjo from an African American family in Smyth County; a medal awarded by the Virginia State Agricultural Society for a carpet made by slaves to the design of their mistress; and a pewter pass for a slave woman near Warrenton, c. 1830.

The Society's ephemera collections, organized by type of material in more than one hundred boxes, include such items as a program for Booker T. Washington's speech in Richmond in 1915; a program from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference Mass Meeting in Petersburg in March 1962, autographed by Martin Luther King, Jr., and other civil rights leaders; programs for performances of the Tuskegee and Fisk Jubilee Singers; a publisher's circular for Mongrel Virginians (a polemic about miscegenation); funeral parlor and church fans with African American themes; a poster for "Negro History Week" in 1958; several games documenting rising black consciousness in the 1960s; and an original cartoon by Joe Cannaday for the Richmond Times-Dispatch concerning Arthur Ashe's death. A large collection of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century advertisements, especially for tobacco, feature African Americans, usually portrayed stereotypically.