A compendium of information about the state and a commentary on natural history, society, politics, education, religion, slavery, liberty and law. It is a foundational text on racism; in Notes, Jefferson defines African Americans as inferior to whites.

See: https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/notes-on-the-state-of-virginia-1785

Entire document: https://www.loc.gov/resource/lhbcb.04902/?st=gallery

A building where enslaved people worked and lived. It was constructed sometime between 1831 and 1856, and is only one of two such buildings that remains intact on Grounds.

See: http://juel.iath.virginia.edu/node/1583

The Crackerbox was a kitchen with dwelling on the second floor where enslaved people worked and lived. It may date from 1826. It is only one of two such buildings that remains intact on Grounds.

See: http://juel.iath.virginia.edu/node/1403

In 1879, Mary Eliza Mahoney becomes the first trained African American nurse in the United States, graduating from the New England Hospital for Women and Children.

Jim Crow laws are upheld with the Supreme Court decision, Plessy v Ferguson, which legalizes segregation in public places by establishing the “separate but equal” ruling. This lasted for more than fifty years.

The first building of the University of Virginia Hospital opened on April 13, 1901. The designs for the 150-bed hospital were developed by the architect Paul J. Pelz. The hospital is under the direction of Dr. Paul Barringer, a leader of the eugenics movement and the hospital becomes an academic center of eugenics. To ensure adequate staffing of the hospital, the University of Virginia opened a trained school for nurses in the same year. Student nurses learned on the job working ten to twelve hours a day for two years before obtaining their degree. Both the hospital and the School of Nursing were established as segregated institutions. Until the 1960s, the hospital racially discriminated against African American patients and physicians, denying Black physicians hospital privileges and serving Black patients in segregated wards located in the hospital's basement level. Black women (and all men, regardless of race), were denied admission to the School of Nursing. Until the 1960s, the School of Nursing remains segregated with an all-white student body and faculty.

In the 1890s, white nurses had organized two professional associations, what would become the National League for Nursing Education and the American Nurses Association. These organizations, however, discriminated against Black nurses. In the South, for example, state nursing associations excluded Black nurses from membership. In response, Black nurses organized their own professional nursing organizations, establishing the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses (NACGN)in 1908. The goals of this new organization were to achieve higher professional standards, to break down discriminatory practices facing black nurses, and to develop leadership among black nurses. Throughout the early- and mid-twentieth century, Black nurses and their leaders in the NACGN engaged in a "relentless" struggle to constantly push for recognition, and later, integration into the white body of American nursing.

Eugenicists were interested in regulating prostitution, treating venereal disease, and taking measures to prevent inherited problems. Lavinia Dock was a nursing leader who graduated from New York's Bellevue Training School and was instrumental in enhancing nursing educational standards. She helped form the International Council of Nurses and wrote an early history of nursing with fellow nursing leader Adelaide Nutting. While endorsing eugenics as a movement, Dock's feminist ideals led her to resist regulation of prostitution by laws, however, and instead to call for education to promote changes in society that would prevent women from the necessity of prostitution.

Until the 1960s, the hospital racially discriminated against African American patients and physicians, denying Black physicians hospital privileges and serving Black patients in segregated wards located in the hospital’s basement level.

The sterilization act allowed for the legal sterilization of people deemed to have undesirable traits, this included people with epilepsy, mental illness, and cognitive disabilities. The Racial Integrity Act prohibited interracial marriage and defined as white a person “who has no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian.” These laws were shaped by the race science of eugenics.

Eugenics, the study of the inheritance of physical, intellectual, and emotional characteristics, brought together many disciplines with the goal of advancing society and health. Eugenics became part of the program to combat venereal disease and other infections, thereby easily overlapping with public health measures. At the same time, these measures contributed to exclusionary policies that stigmatized certain groups. Termed “scientific racism,” these policies were part of overarching health campaigns that included a variety of people and groups – nurses, physicians, public health workers, eugenic societies, and governments.

Eugenics flourished at UVA under the leadership of President Edwin Alderman, who recruited several leaders of the eugenics movement to teach at UVA. These included Harvey Jordan, Robert Bean and Lawrence Royster in the medical school, and Ivey Lewis in biology. Nursing students at UVA learned about eugenics in their curricula, from UVA physicians (including Jordan), and the 1917 the National League for Nursing Education’s Standard Curriculum for Schools of Nursing. Its recommendation of guidelines for all basic nurse training programs included a course in eugenics. Eugenics profoundly affected social science, nursing, and public health in the early twentieth century. The legacy of eugenics in health care was prejudice and structural racism.

Second row: William Hall Goodwin (3rd from left), Edwin A. Alderman (University President) (7th from left), Josephine McLeod (8th from left), James Carroll Flippin (8th from right), J. Edwin Wood (3rd from right), Lawrence T. Royster (far right). Third row: William E. Bray (far left), Harvey E. Jordan (3rd from left), Edwin P. Lehman (6th from left), Henry B. Mulholland (9th from right), Halsted Hedges (2nd from right). Fourth row: Dudley C. Smith (8th from left), John H. Neff (7th from right), Vincent W. Archer (2nd from right), Robert B. Bean (far right).

Graduation class of 1930. This photograph is significant because it is typical of most nursing programs that feature their graduating classes in full uniform. The specific UVA nursing uniform became an honorable distinction for graduates. The photograph also shows the segregated nature of nursing schools with an all-white student body and faculty. The men in the photograph are all UVA faculty members (such as Harvey Jordan) who either are on the advisory board of the School of Nursing (link to 1939 Plan of Instruction) or who are lecturers to nursing students. As faculty leaders, these men became experts in eugenics and led the University of Virginia to become a center of eugenics teaching.

Eugenics, the study of the inheritance of physical, intellectual, and emotional characteristics, brought together many disciplines with the goal of advancing society and health. Eugenics became part of the program to combat venereal disease and other infections, thereby easily overlapping with public health measures. At the same time, these measures contributed to exclusionary policies that stigmatized certain groups. Termed "scientific racism," these polices were part of overarching health campaigns that included a variety of people and groups – nurses, physicians, public health workers, eugenic societies, and governments. Reformers, including nurses, argued for eugenic improvement while also enhancing environmental changes. Significantly, public health and nursing's role in it came of age when biological approaches to social problems were near their height. The legacy of eugenics in health care was prejudice and structural racism.

In 1937, the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses (NACGN) held their Northeastern Regional Conference at St. Philips School of Nursing in Richmond, VA. This newspaper account provides details about the conference. NACGN conferences were important venues where Black nurses discuss issues of professional concern and enhance their work to eliminate segregation in nursing. The St. Philip School of Nursing was established in 1920 in Richmond; was associated with St. Philip Hospital, a Black hospital. The school offered two nursing programs: a diploma program and, eventually, course work that led to a baccalaureate degree within the Medical College of Virginia (MCV).

First African American student, Gregory Swanson, is admitted to the University of Virginia's Law School after the U.S. Supreme Court passes Sweatt v Painter, which banned racial segregation in professional and graduate schools. That law, however, did not apply to undergraduate or K-12 schools.

Charlottesville Tribune article by TJ Sellers describing the unequal conditions of the Black public wards at UVA Hospital, noting that Black patients are still required to pay the same rates as white patients. Sellers writes that any Charlottesville resident could "walk through the various wards of the University Hospital and note the glaring differences in the physical condition" of the Black and white public and private wards. He also explains that Black patients do not "receive the same professional courtesy accorded to white patients," with hospital staff addressing Black patients only by their first names, rather than using the "courtesy title" used for white patients.

Letter from UVA President Colgate Darden to R. J. Ackart, Director of UVA Hospital acknowledging that Black patients were given "inferior accommodations" at UVA Hospital. Darden refers to a recent series of articles in the Charlottesville Tribune by T.J. Sellers that criticized the hospital for its discriminatory treatment of Black patients.

Hospital leadership agrees to plan for better accommodations for Black patients and affirm that they will not be swayed by "pressure groups."

UVA Hospital director, R.J. Ackart reports discussion with civil rights leaders and proposes new policy requiring courtesy titles for Black patients. Dr. Ackart suggested that a formal policy in this regard be promulgated by memorandum from the Director's Office. After discussion it was decided that, because of difficulties in policing and enforcing such a policy a directive should not be issued. Also included are the related hospital policy documents.

Letter from Ronald B. Almack, director of the Bureau of Hospital Survey and Construction, Dept. of Health, Commonwealth of Virginia to Colgate W. Darden, President of UVA, dated November 23, 1951, reporting that Part 1 UVA Hospital's application for Hill-Burton funds has been approved. The Hill-Burton Act of 1946 gave hospitals, nursing homes, and other health care facilities federal grants to construct new hospitals and to modernize existing ones, in return for the promise of provision of health services to communities regardless of ability to pay. The act did not, however, mandate desegregation of hospitals and other health care facilities as a prerequisite for obtaining federal funding. Thus, federal money was used to build racially-exclusive hospitals. Even though the Hill-Burton Act provided federal funding to some white hospitals such as UVA to expand segregated wards to African Americans, many of these wards were in basements with separate entry areas for African Americans. Thus, while access to white hospitals was expanded to African Americans, this did not mean equal treatment.

Charlottesville Tribune article by T.J. Sellers describing UVA Hospital's hiring of its first Black registered nurses in September 1951, followed by four more Black nurses the following year. The article names the nurses who were hired as Weda Gilmore, Honor Mobley, Annie White, Grace White, Fanny Randolph, and Belle Henry. And the article explains that the Black nurses received the same salary and other privileges that the white nurses receive. The article also explains that UVA Hospital hired two Black licensed practical nurses, Lucy Johnson and Emma Bryson.

Newspaper article announcing the establishment, in 1952, of the Jackson P. Burley High School Licensed Practical Nurses Program, in collaboration with the University of Virginia Hospital. Although Black women were racially excluded from the UVA School of Nursing, this new LPN program was open to Black women, who completed their studies at Jackson P. Burley School and practiced at the University of Virginia Hospital. Because of the segregationist and exclusionary practices in nursing education and health care, Black women who wanted to pursue careers in nursing in the early 1950s had, in general, three options available to them: apply to a licensed practice nursing program, a historically Black professional nursing program, or apply to a nursing school that accepted Black students under the restriction of quotas. The Burley-UVA Hospital LPN program was thus an important way for Black women in Charlottesville and Albemarle County to enter the field of nursing.

Graduation photograph of the class of 1953; the first class to graduate from the Jackson P. Burley High School-University of Virginia Hospital Licensed Practical Nursing Program. The photograph also includes the superintendents of the city and county schools, the UVA Hospital director, and the dean of UVA medical school.

Supreme Court decision, Brown v Board of Education, bans racial segregation in public schools, affirming that separate but equal schools are not, in fact, equal. Virginia is connected because it was one of five legal cases (e.g., Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, Virginia) involved in the decision. Include in narrative discussion (not as separate entries) the following:

In response to the Brown decision, Senator Harry F. Byrd, Jr., and other Virginia lawmakers promote the “Southern Manifesto,” which opposes school integration. 1955 – Brown II. Supreme Court rules that school desegregation must take place with "all deliberate speed.”

1956 – To protest the Brown decision, Senator Byrd and other southern lawmakers call upon the state to carry out acts of “massive resistance.”

1958 – Governor J. Lindsay Almond closes schools in Charlottesville, Norfolk, and Alexandria. Black students are severely affected, while many White students get access to private White-only facilities. Because Albemarle Training School and Jefferson School in Charlottesville were segregated schools for African American students, however, they did not close.

1959 – Virginia Supreme Court overturns school closings.

The Brown decision set a precedent, which led civil rights activists to legally target segregated hospitals. They first aimed at the Veterans Administration, and in 1954 it officially ended segregation in its hospitals. This was significant in many ways. Through the Veterans Administration hospitals, for example, many Black nurses such as UVA graduate Mavis Claytor had greater opportunities to work in desegregated facilities.

Black activists were then successful in desegregating hospitals via the landmark 1962 Supreme Court ruling, Simkins v Cone, which mandated that private hospitals receiving federal funding under the Hill-Burton Act could not discriminate based on race, as protected by the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment. Simkins v Cone also outlawed sections in the original Hill-Burton Act that provided for separate-but-equal hospital access and services. Although African American nurses had been employed in some white hospitals, until Simkins, almost no hospitals permitted African American physicians to obtain staff privileges.

Newspaper article describing the establishment of a new civil rights group in Norfolk, VA. The Committee Undoing Racial Evils (CURE), was founded and led by Floretta Sears Thomas, a Black nurse. CURE was founded to address what the group sees as "the underlying problem of race relations," sex relations and particularly, "the dominance of the white man in the field of sex relations." According to Sears, this issue was not being addressed by any other civil rights organization.

After the NAACP and the National Medical Association pushed for hospital integration, arguing that segregated hospitals led to inferior care for Black Americans, most Black hospitals closed. In 1962, St. Philip’s School of Nursing closed, reflecting the widespread closing of Black hospitals.

Through the early 1960s, the Charlottesville neighborhood of Vinegar Hill was a center of Black property ownership, business, and culture for African American residents that had been built by formerly enslaved men and men. However, in 1960, the Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority authorized the redevelopment of Vinegar Hill, with the support of federal urban renewal funds, destroying this important community.

See: https://www.fieldstudiofilms.com/that-world-is-gone/

Two stories and photographs from UVA Hospital's Draw Sheet about internationally educated nurses from the Philippines and Thailand who work at UVA Hospital. The nurses work at the hospital under the auspices of the U.S. State Department's Exchange Visitor Program (EVP). Congress established the EVP in 1948. Participants of the EVP came to the U.S. for up to two years to work and study in sponsoring institutions, which provided them with a monthly stipend. The ANA and individual hospitals, including UVA Hospital and other Virginia hospitals, were among the several thousand sponsoring U.S. agencies and institutions. By the late 1960s, Filipino nurses constituted the overwhelming majority of internationally-educated nurses who entered the U.S.

Passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 prohibited segregation in public accommodations and racial discrimination in employment. This was the beginning of the end of racial segregation in hospitals that received federal funding.

On April 30, 1965, the NAACP filed a complaint with the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare to investigate violations of the Civil Rights Act and discrimination by the University of Virginia Hospital.

Mavis Claytor was the first Black woman to graduate from the University of Virginia School of Nursing, earning her BSN in 1970. Claytor entered the BSN program in 1968, after graduating first from the Lucy Addison High School of Practical Nursing in Roanoke in 1963, and the Helene Fuld Provident Hospital's Registered Nursing Program in Baltimore in 1967. After earning her BSN, Claytor returned to the historically Black Burrell Memorial Hospital in Roanoke, where she worked as an RN on the general medical-surgical floor. She also worked as a public health nurse, and in 1976, joined the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Salem, Virginia, where she worked as a mental health nurse. In 1983, Claytor returned to the UVA School of Nursing to complete a master's program in mental health, earning her MSN in 1985. Claytor continued working at Salem's Veterans Affairs Medical Center, retiring after 30 years of service. On April 7, 2017, School of Nursing Dean Dorrie Fontaine offered a formal apology to Claytor, acknowledging the discriminatory practices that excluded Black students from attending or fully engaging in University enrollment, matriculation, traditions, and student activities.

News article describing the ongoing problem of racial discrimination at Medical Center Hospitals (MCH) in Norfolk, VA, where there are "widespread patterns of discrimination in hiring into certain departments, in promotions, in disciplinary actions, and in the area of corporate control, responsibility, and power." The article describes options available to employees who experience discrimination, which includes filing a lawsuit. President of the Norfolk chapter of the NAACP is quoted as saying "We'd be happy to talk to anyone at MCH who feels they've been discriminated against." The article describes "One promising development at MCH" to confront the problem of discrimination, and that are an effort led by registered nurses to organize a union at MCH: "Besides the obvious advantages of higher wages, better benefits, job security, and a real grievance procedure," a union contract could "help employees fight against discrimination at MCH." The drive had already succeeded in "involving growing numbers of MCH employees: men and women, black, white, and Filipino."

Report of task force established by University president Robert O'Neil to investigate the state of race relations on UVA Grounds. The report examined the past, present, and future of race relations at UVA. It found that while some progress had been made in terms of race relations, the "self-transformation of the University of Virginia into a genuinely integrated institution equally receptive to people of all races is far from complete.

Report by the Office of Equal Opportunity Programs, "An Examination of the University's Minority Classified Staff (The Muddy Floor Report)," published in June 1996. The report highlighted "glaring disparities" in employment opportunities, performance evaluations, and disciplinary sanctions between white and Black employees.

It found that African Americans were overrepresented in unskilled positions in the University, and virtually nonexistent in high-salaried, managerial positions.

IDEA (Inclusion, Diversity, Excellence, Achievement) is initiated at UVA School of Nursing. The overarching goal of IDEA is to improve respect, inclusion, and engagement in the school’s community of students, staff, and faculty.

Black Americans are systematically underrated for pain relative to white Americans. This article reports on the results of a study conducted at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, which examined whether racial bias in pain assessment and treatment is related to false beliefs about biological differences between Blacks and whites.

The findings suggest that individuals with at least some medical training hold and may use false beliefs about biological differences between Blacks and whites to inform medical judgments, which may contribute to racial disparities in pain assessment and treatment.

See: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1516047113

The Charlottesville City Council creates the Blue-Ribbon Commission on Race, Memorials, and Public Spaces.

In 2017, the Charlottesville City Council votes to remove the Robert E. Lee statue and rename Lee Park to Emancipation Park.

Jordan Hall is renamed Pinn Hall, for Dr. Vivian Pinn (Med ‘67), the only woman and only African American student in her class at the UVA School of Medicine.

After Donald Trump elected President of the U.S., there is an uptick in racist acts in the UVA Hospital from patients and their families. This precipitated the establishment of “Stepping In” training, in which the School of Nursing is involved(for example, nursing students testifying about their experiences in the hospital).

All 3rd and 4th year BSN students, BSN faculty and clinical instructors, and CNL students, participate in the training, Stepping In: Responding to Disrespectful and Biased Behavior in Health Care.

Unite the Right protesters, led by UVA alumni, march on the Grounds of the University of Virginia in protest of the city’s plan to remove the Lee statue. One white supremacist drives his car into a group of counter protesters that results in the death of Heather Heyer. Two others perish as well: police officers Trooper-Pilot Berke M. Bates and Pilot Lt. H. Jay Cullen, who die from a helicopter crash as they covered the incident.

Nurses working in triage tents and in local emergency departments take care of people injured during the protests.

The activism of Filipino nurses in Virginia leads to the overturning Virginia Board of Nursing law, which had required internationally educated nurses to list “foreign graduate nurse” on their hospital name tags. This designation is replaced with “RN Applicant.”

The murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer on May 25, 2020, prompted a reckoning at the UVA School of Nursing, making clear that the School of Nursing were not making the deep substantive changes necessary to truly become an antiracist school. During summer 2020, an Antiracism Working Group comprised of students, faculty and staff in the School of Nursing mobilized and met weekly throughout the summer and into the fall to develop further concrete actions to address racism and other bias in the hospital. The goal of this student-led group aimed to prepare students and faculty to address racism and other forms of bias, as a target of, witness to, or perpetrator of this behavior in clinical settings. The group felt it to be essential for nursing students and other stakeholders to have a background understanding of the history of race and racism in our local context before engaging in clinical practice.

Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and George Rogers Clark statues in Charlottesville come down.

Karin Skeen and Barbra Mann Wall, Nursing and Eugenics in the early 20th Century United States, Nursing Outlook 71 (2023): 102018, DOI: 10.1016/j.outlook.2023.102018.

Lundy Braun, Breathing Race into the Machine: The Surprising Career of the Spirometer from Planation to Genetics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).

A syllabus developed by three historians of medicine that illustrates that questions of race and racism should be central to studying the histories of medicine and science. The syllabus offers insight into the historical legacies of racism in medicine and health care that has contributed to America's long disparate treatment of Black people and centuries-long neglect of Black health concerns.

See: https://www.aaihs.org/syllabus-a-history-of-anti-black-racism-in-medicine/

Raised/Razed dives deep into Charlottesville, VA’s oldest African American neighborhood, charting the lives of residents as they faced racially discriminatory policies and a city government that saw them as the only thing between it and progress. Learn the hard truths of the federal Urban Renewal program, and the broader history of its effect in Durham, NC and other communities across America.