Introduction to African American manuscripts

As Great Britain's largest and wealthiest North American colony, and later as the state with the largest slave and free black population before the Civil War, Virginia long occupied center stage in America's turbulent history of bondage, freedom, and the quest for racial equality. For four centuries the lives and careers of African Americans in the Old Dominion have figured intimately in the shaping of state, regional, and national history. The full assessment and acknowledgment of that participation, however, have only recently begun to take place. Increased accessibility to various records of African American life that survive in archival repositories has proven essential in fostering this modern historical reevaluation.

The Virginia Historical Society began collecting manuscript records of the commonwealth's past at the institution's founding in 1831. Over the years, a major collection of documentary materials has been compiled, the great bulk of which is concentrated on the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The vast majority of the material acquired focuses on the lives and careers of Virginia's gentry families—especially the male principals of those families—with a collateral focus on businesses, institutions, and organizations in the Old Dominion. Within these records, however, much evidence of the lives and contributions of other groups of persons, including women, African Americans, and American Indians, may be found.

Not surprisingly, because of the nature of its past collecting policies, the Society's holdings of African American materials consist largely of the records of slaves and slavery in the Old Dominion. Other materials concern the African colonization movement, freedmen and women in the immediate post-Civil War era, black educators in the early and middle twentieth century, and desegregation in modern Virginia. The collection entries that make up this guide reveal the broad range and scope of materials that touch on many aspects of African American life in Virginia and in the United States over the past four centuries.

E. Lee Shepard
Project Director