Encyclopedia

This interactive encyclopedia offers teachers and students access to terms, people, and events related to the history of Jim Crow. Many entries include reference material and some of the biographies on prominent figures contain suggestions for teaching as well as links to related sections of this site. The encyclopedia will continue to grow throughout the course of this project.

Vaughan, Sarah: (1924-1990) Sarah Vaughan began singing early in life at Mount Zion Baptist Church in Newark. In 1942, she won an amateur contest at the Apollo Theatre and shortly thereafter joined Billy Earl Hines' big band as second pianist and singer. In 1944 she became Billy Erstine's lead singer and made her first recording. A year later she went out on her own as a soloist. Known as "The Divine One" during her career in singing, she became an international star and one of the jewels in the triple crown of modern jazz vocalists, with Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald. She died in 1990 in Los Angeles.

Villard, Oswald Garrison: (1872-1949) Born in Germany to a journalist and successful businessman Henry Villard and Helen Francis Garrison, the daughter William Lloyd Garrison. Villard was educated at Harvard taking two history degrees by 1896. He took over the family's New York Evening Post and The Nation upon his father's death in 1900, turning the papers into leading muckraking voices of progressive reform. He and his mother helped found the National Association for he Advancement of Colored People, and worked to focus on lynching and civil rights, helping make the NAACP the most significant civil rights organization in the nation. He left the organization after confrontations with W.E.B. Du Bois, the black editor of The Crisis. His opposition to WWI, and his editorials against U. S. invasion of Siberia, aroused an uproar of protest, forcing him to sell the family newspapers.

Virginia State University: In 1882, the Commonwealth of Virginia passed a bill sponsored by a black lawyer and Howard University graduate from Petersburg, Alfred W. Harris. As an elected state representative from Dinwiddie County, Harris proposed that the state charter a normal college for the purpose of educating its black citizens. Although a lengthy lawsuit against the school delayed its opening as opponents of black education in the state tried to block its establishment, the Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute welcomed 126 students to classes in October 1883. Black statesman and lawyer, John Mercer Langston, became its first president. The school was housed in an enormous single multi-story, multi-sectional building designed by Harrison Wait, which became a Petersburg landmark. In 1902, the state legislature voted to curtail the collegiate program and accordingly renamed the school to Virginia Normal and Industrial Institute. The land grant program originally housed at Hampton Institute, relocated to Virginia Normal in 1920, which helped to reinstate the collegiate program in 1923. In 1930 the school's named changed to Virginia State College for Negroes, then in 1946 to Virginia State College, and finally Virginia State University in 1979. From the 1920s onward, the school rejected the Tuskegee model of industrial education, which denigrated academic excellence and strove instead for quality education in the liberal arts and sciences. The school currently enrolls over 4,300 students.

Virginia Union University: In 1867, the National Theological Institute of Washington, D.C., established the first school for former slaves in Richmond, Virginia, with an abolitionist Baptist minister from Boston, Reverend Nathaniel Colver, as its first president. Colver approached a former slave, Mary Ann Lumpkin, to donate a building owned by her late husband, Robert, to house the new school. Lumpkin had been a slave dealer and the buildings Colver sought had once been used to house newly arrived Africans before they were sold into bondage. After the abolition of the international slave trade in 1808, the property continued to function as a slave jail for runaway slaves and as a slave market in the domestic slave trade. Mrs. Lumpkin leased the building to Colver, and a school was born. In 1868, the school was named the Colver Institute and moved in 1870 with assistance from the Freedmen's Bureau, from its original site. By 1886, it had become the Richmond Theological Seminary until it merged with Wayland Seminary in 1899 to form Virginia Union University. Wayland Seminary (founded 1865) had been a seminary and normal school. Although the champion of industrial education, Booker T. Washington, had studied there in 1878, the school purposely rejected the industrial education model for blacks. In later years, Virginia Union absorbed two more schools. Hartshorn Memorial College, chartered 1884 "to train colored women for practical work in the broad harvest of the world," joined VUU in 1932; and Storer College in Harper's Ferry, West Virginia, merged with it in 1964. Storer College (opened 1867) had been the first African-American college in that state as well as the site of Frederick Douglass's 1881 speech on John Brown. Among the other historic events at Virginia Union was the second annual meeting in 1906 of the Niagara Movement (headed by W.E.B. Du Bois) from which sprang the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Storer closed in 1955 and its endowment and alumni files went to Virginia Union University. The National Park Service now maintains its buildings. The school is ranked among the fifteen largest black colleges in the United States with over 1,100 students. It presently confers bachelor's degrees in liberal arts and sciences and graduate degrees in theology.

Voorhees College: Elizabeth Evelyn Wright, a disciple of Booker T. Washington and a graduate of Tuskegee Institute, established the Denmark Industrial School in South Carolina in 1897 in hopes of imitating the Tuskegee industrial education model at the elementary level. Frail and slight, at age 23, Wright carried through on her mission "to try to help my fellow man to help themselves, and if a way was not opened to me, I must open it myself." Her fourteen students learned reading, writing, arithmetic, and etiquette as well as brick masonry, carpentry, and agricultural science. When a wealthy New Jersey industrialist, Ralph Voorhees donated 380 acres to the school in 1902, the school's name changed to reflect their benefactor's generosity and became the Voorhees Industrial School. As a small private school it was heavily dependent on northern philanthropy and benefited directly from Washington's fund-raising efforts. In 1915, it enrolled nearly 300 students, with all but 34 at the elementary level. All of the school's 22 teachers that year were black, half male and half female. The school's curriculum continued to evolve and by 1922, it offered a broader liberal arts education. In 1924, it became affiliated with the Episcopal Church, a tie that remains today. The school expanded to become a four-year degree-granting school in 1962 and accordingly adopted its current name, Voorhees College. Today it enrolls approximately 700 undergraduate students and offers eleven different fields of study.