The research I did for Condemned for Love in Old Virginia took me to some of the darkest corners of our state’s history, places I had heard about but never explored.

When a student at Germanna Community College asked me recently what surprised me most about this journey, I answered with two words, “the evil.”

I told her that I am a lifelong resident of Virginia, reared in Falls Church, but that I was surprised to learn of the extent of the hostility, discrimination and violence directed at Black residents by their white neighbors. This oppression was practiced by successive generations with devilish ingenuity. To me, it was 350 years of unrelenting evil.

Where to start?

How about slavery, or, as some have called it, America’s “time on the cross.” Introduced at Jamestown soon after its founding, slavery continued in the state uninterrupted for more than 200 years. Virginia kept Black people in bondage longer than it has recognized them as citizens.

The end of the Civil War brought defeat and occupation for the white South and emancipation and reconstruction for Black residents. But the federal government eventually tired of protecting its new citizens. As one white resident said at the time, “They are going to let us alone, and we’re going to fix things to suit ourselves.”

And they did. They chose mob rule—lynching—to maintain their political and economic dominance. Their terror lasted more than 50 years, with thousands of Black people killed, including more than 80 in Virginia.

The ruling class eventually recognized violence as counter productive, so they devised a new strategy, more subtle but just as effective in erasing Black participation. One historian has referred to what happened as “a ruthless act of political surgery.”

First white elites tried gerrymandering and stuffing the ballot box to curb the Black vote. But restrictions were not enough; they wanted elimination. So they rewrote the state constitution at the start of the 20^th century to disfranchise Black residents of voting age.

“The plan set up certain barriers such as property or literacy qualifications, and then cut certain loopholes in the barrier through which only white men could squeeze,” wrote historian C. Vann Woodward. By 1905, these changes had eliminated thousands of eligible Black residents from the voting lists.

State-sanctioned segregation followed. White residents devised a Jim Crow system that thoroughly separated the races. It applied to churches and schools, housing and jobs, eating and drinking places, public transportation, sports and recreation venues, hospitals, orphanages, prisons, asylums and finally funeral homes, morgues and cemeteries.

Is it any surprise that there were also Byzantine rules to classify people by how many drops of Black blood they had? Or, in my lifetime, that state officials insisted on “massive resistance” and closed some public schools rather than integrate them?

At this point in the narrative, I’m supposed to offer a word of encouragement, to say that things have changed in Virginia since these dark days, that better days are upon us. Sorry, I just don’t feel it.

I am grateful to historians J. Douglas Smith (Managing White Supremacy, 2002) and C. Vann Woodward (The Strange Career of Jim Crow, 1966) for the work they did in documenting Virginia’s racial history.