House to Highway: Reclaiming a Community History (July 17, 2025 – February 28, 2026) highlights the history of Richmond’s Jackson Ward neighborhood and explores the historic district that was once the center of Richmond’s Black community through the lens of the Skipwith-Roper family. This exhibition is an ongoing partnership between the Library of Virginia and the JXN Project, a historic preservation organization whose mission focuses on illustrating the pivotal role of Richmond’s Jackson Ward in the formation of “the Black American experience.”
When the Right Worthy Grand Council of the Independent Order of Saint Luke met in August 1917, L. Clarence Miller, business manager of the order’s print shop, urged Richmond members to use his shop rather than pay white printers for producing necessary work for their fraternal orders, churches, and schools. He advised African Americans to patronize Black-owned businesses. “We cannot build up our plant to compete with that of the white man’s in a day, a week or a year,” Miller explained, “but, thanks to the opposition, the oppression and the discrimination of the other races against us, we are being gradually cemented together in thought and action, and what may seem to be persecution may be a blessing in disguise, and may be the way Providence has willed it that we are to be a united race and to take our place in the business world now occupied by other races.” Reflecting these challenges, however, Miller’s print shop lacked the means to print the order’s annual report that contained his recommendation.
The Emerging Business World
While the latter nineteenth century produced much hardship for Black Virginians, especially fortifying racial segregation, this same racial segregation created opportunities that enabled some African Americans to succeed in businesses that provided necessary goods and services in their communities. Each city in Virginia and many smaller towns had a professional class of educators, clergy, physicians, insurance agents, grocers, bankers, and others parallel to the social, cultural, and business institutions that existed in the white communities. Driving the growth of cities and towns were thousands of rural Black Virginians who left the farm for urban areas to take advantage of new and expanding opportunities.
The largest and most prosperous and successful Black business district in Virginia was Jackson Ward in Richmond. The city government created it in 1871 by a gerrymander that placed most of the city’s Black voters within one ward that allowed white voters from the other wards to elect a majority of white city councilmen. In the decades after the Civil War, residents developed the necessary institutions, businesses, and professions not only to function in an economy separate from whites, but to prosper. Centered in Jackson Ward, hospitals, drug stores, physicians, nurses, and dentists fulfilled the medical needs of the community, while attorneys and notaries public represented African Americans in legal matters. Black entrepreneurs established banks, newspapers, steam laundries, livery stables, funeral homes, and boarding houses, while the skilled trades included dozens of blacksmiths, wheelwrights, carpenters, contractors, cabinet makers, watchmakers, jewelers, and butchers.
By the early twentieth century, North Second Street had become the hub of Richmond's Black business community and housed the headquarters of several fraternal associations and insurance companies.
Souvenir Views: Negro Enterprises & Residences, Richmond, Va. (1907), Library of Congress
George O. Brown’s Old Dominion Gallery, located on North Second Street in the heart of Jackson Ward, chronicled Richmond’s Black population, producing thousands of studio portraits and documenting community life at schools, sporting events, and fraternal meetings. With a “Makers of Portraits That Please” slogan, the studio produced pictures of such notables as dancer and film star Bill “Bojangles” Robinson but predominantly documented the everyday experience of African Americans, capturing weddings, funerals, country church congregations, colleges, and other typical scenes.
Like Brown’s studio, scores of smaller merchants throughout the city flourished, including poultry, meat, fish, and confectionery shopkeepers; coal and wood dealers; booksellers, florists, and music teachers; and an impressive fifty dressmakers. At least one woman’s exchange operated in Richmond, which provided a storefront where women could sell their homemade goods and foodstuffs on consignment. Several dozen restaurants, saloons, and caterers served Richmond’s African American population, and more than a dozen Black-operated public halls throughout the city could accommodate groups ranging from 200 to 1,200 people. Predominantly in Jackson Ward, the city’s Black residents owned real estate and personal property worth a total of $2,574,071, and tax-exempt church property, orphan asylums, and other charitable institutions were worth $3,264,646.
Photograph of Southern Aid Society staff by the George O. Brown Photography Studio taken during the 1920s. Chartered in 1893 as the Southern Aid and Insurance Company, it was the nation's first black-owned and operated insurance company.
Special Collections, Library of Virginia.
Some Black-owned businesses that grew large and established regional or national markets often were extensions of the small post-Civil War burial societies and cooperative organizations that provided rudimentary life- and burial-insurance services for members. Jackson Ward headquartered a number of these organizations, including the Southern Aid Insurance Company, the American Beneficial Insurance Company, the Richmond Beneficial Insurance Company, and the United Aid Insurance Company.
The first one of those enterprises to succeed on a large scale was the Grand Fountain of the United Order of True Reformers. Founded by William Washington Browne, the True Reformers became the largest Black fraternal order in the country during the 1890s. True Reformers’ Hall in Jackson Ward was one of the largest commercial/fraternal buildings in the city.
The organization acquired a hotel, owned a general store, operated a home for aged members, and opened a savings bank, the first owned and operated by Black men in the nation. It also published the weekly Reformer, which boasted a circulation of 5,800 in 1898. Its editor Edward W. Brown boosted the order’s various enterprises while condemning the new segregation laws and prejudice against African Americans. Early in the twentieth century, the True Reformers, which numbered more than 200,000 members nationwide, owned $700,000 worth of real estate in Jackson Ward and True Reformers’ Hall was valued at more than $75,000. Its bank, valued at $50,000, did more than $1,000,000 in business annually, while the order’s insurance agency employed more than three hundred clerks, agents, and messengers.
An even more successful business was the Independent Order of Saint Luke, which had been founded in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1867 as a mutual self-help organization that later became headquartered in Jackson Ward. With Maggie Lena Walker as its guiding leader for nearly four decades, the organization created the Saint Luke’s Penny Savings Bank in 1903, making Walker the first Black woman in the United States to be president of a bank, and one of the first women of any race. In contrast to white-owned banks, Walker hired women and insisted that Saint Luke’s treat women depositors and borrowers the same as men, with the result that women were among the majority of its first account holders. Walker sought to provide professional employment opportunities for women and the order also operated a department store on Broad Street.
Located at the corner of Sixth and Clay Streets, the True Reformers' first general store opened in 1900.
Twenty-Five Years History of the Grand Fountain of the United Order True Reformers, 1881–1905, W.E. Burrell and D.E. Johnson, eds. (1909).
The St. Luke Emporium employed a majority-female staff while operating on East Broad Street between 1905 and 1911.
Historical Report of the R.W.G. Council, I.O. St. Luke, 1867–1917 (1917), Special Collections, Library of Virginia.
Advocating the patronage of Black-owned business, Walker pointedly asked a group of African American men in 1906, “Is there one single colored man in here that will now deliberately go and carry his dollars to the white merchant so that he can fight us? Are you really going to feed the lion of prejudice and make him stronger and stronger so that he can all the more easily devour us?”
Civic and Community Organizations
Similar to the segregated economy, Black Richmonders—largely in Jackson Ward— were also compelled to establish their own social clubs or other organizations to engage in civic betterment projects, to improve public schools, and expand resources for African Americans. Churches played an important role not only in the spiritual life of their congregations but also in political organization and mobilization. This was especially true in cities and towns. Their pastors became leaders in the community, while the churches themselves became influential centers of community life, sources of religious instruction and comfort, places to congregate, and in effect community centers that could provide valuable assistance in times of need. Sixth Mount Zion Baptist Church, led by John Jasper who was nationally recognized for his famous sermon “The Sun Do Move,” established one of the earliest homes for senior citizens in the Richmond area and also employed a social worker to aid indigent residents.
A leader at Ebenezer Baptist Church, John Henry Adams was a plasterer by trade and, as a city alderman representing Jackson Ward, won improvements in neighborhood schools, streets, and lighting. Emmett Carroll Burke, who worked as a teller at the True Reformers’ Bank and later cashier at Saint Luke Penny Savings Bank during his long career, also served as Ebenezer Baptist Church’s treasurer for more than forty years.
Adams was among the thirty-three African Americans who represented Jackson Ward on the Richmond City Council between 1871 and 1898. Even during the growing racial hostility of the 1880s and 1890s, these council members established a night school for adults and children who worked during the day, provided fuel for poor residents, made improvements to streets and installed better lighting, and ended the practice of grave-robbing, by which medical schools obtained African American cadavers for anatomy lab dissections.
The blocks around Second and Leigh Streets were the heart of Richmond's Black business district for decades and home to fraternal orders, insurance companies, banks, grocers, theaters, and hotels.
Cropped map from G. William Baist's Atlas of the City of Richmond, Virginia and Vicinity, from Actual Surveys, Official Records & Private Plans (1889), Library of Virginia.
Council member Edinboro Archer, who had worked as a carpenter and operated a liquor store before becoming a wheelwright for Reliance Wagon Works, fought to gain needed improvements in Jackson Ward, such as a city park and an expanded marketplace, the latter being important because many of his constituents were hucksters.
William M. T. Forrester, whose father Richard Gustavus Forrester was among the first Black members of city council representing Jackson Ward, was a national leader in several important fraternal orders, including the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows and Prince Hall Masons. These organizations were very popular for their community support and civic functions, notably grand parades with rich pageantry and colorful regalia. Recognizing a business opportunity, Forrester established his own regalia manufacturing business about 1877, creating and selling emblems, paraphernalia, and ritual attire to African American secret societies and ultimately building an international enterprise
In 1897 the Richmond Planet moved its printing office to North Fourth Street, where John Mitchell Jr. proudly displayed the newspaper's dramatic masthead of a flexed bicep radiating lightning bolts from a clenched fist.
Photograph courtesy Library of Congress.
Jackson Ward dentist David Arthur Ferguson, who was the first African American applicant to pass the written examination of the Virginia State Board of Dental Examiners, launched his practice out of his house on East Leigh Street, but soon opened an expanded office on North Second Street. He helped establish the Medical and Chirurgical Society of Richmond and what became the National Dental Association. Physician Sarah Garland Boyd Jones helped organize the Richmond Hospital Association in 1902, which opened a hospital for Black patients in February 1903 and a school to train nurses. The hospital had rooms for twenty-five patients and a charity ward with sixteen beds.
John Mitchell Jr. used his weekly Richmond Planet newspaper to promote civil rights and racial justice between 1884 and his death in 1929. Known as “the Fighting Editor,” he became a strong voice in the antilynching movement and played an instrumental role in organizing the Richmond streetcar boycott of 1904. Other newspapers flourished in Jackson Ward, including the St. Luke Herald, which had a particular mission of improving opportunities for women under the management of Lillian H. Payne.
Miller’s Hotel opened at the corner of Second and Leigh Streets in 1904 as one of the few places that welcomed Black visitors to Richmond. Its amenities included a restaurant, bar, and card room and the hotel was often used as an event space. Later renamed Hotel Eggleston, it served Black servicemen that flooded the city during World War II, and because of segregation was patronized by many prominent African Americans traveling through the city. The list included entertainers such as Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Nat King Cole, and Redd Foxx; athletes that included Jackie Robinson, Satchel Paige, Hank Aaron, and Joe Louis; and civil rights attorney Thurgood Marshall.
Miller's Hotel was one of three located on Second Street that catered to Black performers according to Billboard in December 1921.
Richmond News Leader, October 27, 1910.
By the early decades of the twentieth century, African Americans in Jackson Ward and in cities and towns throughout Virginia took their places in the business world and helped create a thriving—though separate—economy and society with its own educators, business and professional class, religious leaders, and community organizations. These leaders, institutions, and organizations would continue to serve African Americans and be the catalyst for change in the decades to come.
Learn more about Black Virginians who sought to create a new world for themselves in the decades after the Civil War in Justice for Ourselves: Black Virginians Claim Their Freedom by John G. Deal, Marianne E. Julienne, and Brent Tarter, published in 2024 by the University of Virginia Press in association with the Library of Virginia. Drawing on the life stories of men and women from across the state—political leaders, teachers, ministers, journalists, and entrepreneurs—Justice for Ourselves recounts their quests to attain full American citizenship and economic independence before the onset of Jim Crow repression.
—John Deal and Mari Julienne, editors of the Dictionary of Virginia Biography and coauthors of Justice for Ourselves.
