RICHMOND
Later this year, if all goes according to plan, two plaques will be erected in the Capitol commemorating a little-remembered chapter of Virginia history. 
The intent is to shed overdue light on a pivotal era in the Old Dominion's tortured dealings with the legacy of slavery. 

TO THE UNTRAINED eye, trampled grasses around pools of water in the marsh at Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge look sort of normal.
To David Bishop, an invasive species biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, those areas are anything but normal. All signs point to feral pigs, one of Bishop's nemeses.

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Read The Pilot’s 2008 series “When The Wall Came Tumbling Down” about the Norfolk 17.

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By Jacqueline Trescott WASHINGTON For a century, the descendants of one of Virginia's oldest families have kept a Bible that connected them to Nat Turner, who led the bloodiest slave revolt in American history.

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The upcoming Second Tuesday Forum will be more of a show-and-tell than its usual lecture style format. That’s because collector Therbia Parker Sr. will display Jim Crow era antiques during his presentation on “Black Memorabilia and the Black Experience in America.”
The event, sponsored by the Portsmouth Public Library, will be noon at the Commodore Theatre on High Street.

NORFOLK The little girl in the picture is now grown up, with a poignant story to tell. Ruby Bridges, whose image was captured in a Norman Rockwell painting about the hate surrounding school integration, told an Old Dominion University audience Monday night that racism will stop only when adults stop teaching it.

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In recognition of Black History Month, Portsmouth museums recently hosted programs honoring black heritage in the city.

Part of that history includes Portsmouth’s role in the Underground Railroad, a network of safe places from the South to the North that runaway slaves used to escape to freedom.

HAMPTON

Little England Chapel

It is little. And nowhere near England. But the Little England Chapel in Hampton stands as a testament to African American life in post-Civil War America. It is the state's only known African American missionary chapel.