Where Africans first came ashore in 1619, the Attucks Theatre, Norfolk State and the Norfolk 17.
1619 And Freedom's Fortress
Across the water from Norfolk, at Point Comfort, the privateer White Lion arrived in August 1619 with Africans taken from a Portuguese slave ship, the first Africans to come ashore in what became the Thirteen Colonies. In May 1861, at the same spot, Fort Monroe, Union General Benjamin Butler ruled that enslaved people who reached his lines would not be sent back, and the fort became known as Freedom's Fortress. In 2011 parts of it became a national monument.
The Attucks Theatre
In 1919 Black entrepreneurs financed, designed and built the Attucks Theatre at Church Street and Virginia Beach Boulevard, with the African American architect Harvey Johnson. When it opened it was called the Apollo of the South, and over the decades it hosted stars from Duke Ellington to Cab Calloway. It joined the National Register of Historic Places on September 16, 1982.
Norfolk State
On September 18, 1935, the Norfolk Unit of Virginia Union University opened. It became independent in 1942 as Norfolk Polytechnic College, took the name Norfolk State College in 1969 and became Norfolk State University in 1979, a public historically Black university.
The Norfolk 17
Under Virginia's Massive Resistance policy, any school ordered to integrate would close, and Norfolk was one of six communities hit, with 10,000 students shut out in the largest school closing in the state. When Judge Hoffman ruled that Black students must be admitted, seventeen of them, the Norfolk 17, entered the city's white schools on February 2, 1959.
Black Norfolk Today
In the 1950s a young Gary U.S. Bonds was singing in Norfolk before Quarter to Three topped the charts. From Church Street to Norfolk State, Black-owned restaurants, salons, shops and brands are part of everyday Norfolk.
Shop Black-owned businesses in Norfolk on CashBlack.
Photo Credits
Fort Monroe at Old Point Comfort. Photo: NPS, Public domain, Wikimedia Commons The Attucks Theatre on Church Street. Photo: Cathy1763, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons The Lyman Beecher Brooks Library at Norfolk State University. Photo: Norfolk State University Communications and Marketing, CC0, Wikimedia Commons