As the nation was forming, Virginians owned more than 40 percent of enslaved people. Four of the first five presidents were from Virginia and were all slaveholders. Most of the tobacco, the most valuable crop in early America, came from Virginia. Virginia's history is situated in places such as Jamestown, where English men and women first settled and decided to grow tobacco with labor impressed upon others; and Monticello, where Thomas Jefferson, over his lifetime, enslaved up to 400 laborers, 130 at any given time.

The African American story in Charlottesville reveals the work of enslaved, free, and emancipated Black women and men. In 1817, after the laying of the cornerstone for the first building at the University of Virginia, the construction of the buildings on Grounds relied on the labor of enslaved and free African Americans. For more than four decades, the university was a site of enslavement in which enslaved men, women, and children built and maintained the university.

Jefferson designed the Grounds to be similar to a plantation. The architecture and topography created separate spaces for the free and enslaved, students and faculty. The pavilions, basements, and gardens where enslaved laborers worked and lived were hidden from students and faculty who lived in the Academical Village. Enslaved laborers worked in basement kitchens, for example, and harvested food fed to students from the gardens. Hotels were built separately to house the enslaved. Tall fences and the famous serpentine walls also hid the work of the enslaved from the students and faculty.

The Grounds were originally built to obscure the role of slavery by placing the workspace of enslaved laborers into the basements of pavilions and hotels. As Louis P. Nelson and Maurie D. McInnis write, this was "a conscious attempt to visually minimize the physical presence of the laboring black body in his idealized landscape of the university." (p. 76)

The legacy of hiding the "other," persisted beyond enslavement and through the era of segregation. In 1896, for example, the Board of Visitors decided to build Old Cabell Hall so as to separate the Academical Village from the area immediately to the south, which since the 1830s had been home to growing numbers of free Black people. By the 1860s, this area was increasingly referred to as "Canada," and its proximity to the university was a frequent source of tension for the university's Board of Visitors.

Following the end of the Civil War and Reconstruction, so-called Jim Crow laws were enacted throughout the South, limiting the political, social, and economic rights of Black Americans. In Virginia and throughout the South, Jim Crow laws mandated the separation of white people from "persons of color" in public schools, transportation, parks, cemeteries, theaters, restaurant, and other public facilities, including hospitals. Racial segregation was maintained – and separate and unequal systems of education and health care, persisted – until the formal dismantling of legal segregation by the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. Throughout these decades in Charlottesville and Albemarle County, Black children attended separate and unequal schools, including Albemarle Training School, Jefferson School, Esmont High School, and Jackson P. Burley High School. UVA racially discriminated against Black students, and UVA Hospital was a segregated institution with separate and unequal wards for Black patients and which racially discriminated against Black patients, physicians, nurses, and employees.

In 1964, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, which prohibited segregation in public accommodations and racial discrimination in employment. This effectively ended Jim Crow laws. And yet even as the civil rights legislation made racial discrimination in education and employment illegal, practices of racial discrimination in education, housing, nursing, and health care continued. Even after official desegregation of schools, railroad tracks in Charlottesville continue to divide the city into predominantly white elementary school zones to the north and primarily Black schools to the south. In the 1960s, in the name of "urban renewal," the city razed the predominantly Black neighborhood of Vinegar Hill, displacing families and businesses. A more recent displacement occurred in the 1970s and 1980s when the University of Virginia acquired homes and businesses in Gospel Hill and constructed McLeod Hall (site of the School of Nursing), the Claude Moore Health Sciences Library, parking garages, and a new hospital building. An enduring African American neighborhood is Starr Hill, where African American physicians, journalists, a legendary professional football player, entrepreneurs, ministers, and educational leaders have lived since the early 1900s.

The Jefferson and Burley schools, Vinegar Hill, Starr Hill, and Gospel Hill have become sites of historical memory for the African American community. Even today, the displacement of residents and university-wide expansion taking over land once owned by African Americans have left distrust among the Charlottesville African American community.

Memorial to Enslaved Laborers, President's Commission on Slavery and the University, visit:
https://slavery.virginia.edu/memorial-for-enslaved-laborers/

Louis P. Nelson and Maurie D. McInnis, "Landscape of Slavery," read:
https://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/5103

Guian McKee, "Race, Place, and the Social Responsibilities of UVA in the Aftermath of August 11 and 12," read:
https://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/5326