Holiday Hours:

The Gallery will be closed December 21st – January 2nd

The Museum Shop + Cafe will be closed December 20th – January 2nd

Happy Holidays! We look forward to seeing you again in the new year!

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About Exhibition

Learn about the elements that make up our permanent exhibitions including our Pride Overcomes Prejudice exhibition.
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About The Exhibition

Pride Overcomes Prejudice considers the history of peoples of African descent in Charlottesville. Beginning with an examination of enslavement in Albemarle County, it suggests the importance of chattel labor by considering the conditions that allowed the area to become the 4^th richest slave holding region in the Commonwealth. It continues into the 19^th century by drawing on the oral and written histories of African Americans who participated in local, regional, and national struggles for racial equality as students, teachers, and alumni of Jefferson School, ca. 1865-1965 and beyond. Their memories, painstakingly recorded for each period of the school’s history, infuse the historic Jefferson School campus and surrounding cultural landscape with meaning and significance and provide a unique, intergenerational perspective that is largely missing from other Civil Rights/School Desegregation historic sites. The permanent exhibit.

Imbedded in Pride Overcomes Prejudice is Vinegar Hill 1963: A Day in the Neighborhood, an exhibition of photographs by Gundars Osvald of Vinegar Hill, the Black economic center that began in 1870 and continued until it was raised in 1964. Osvald’s images are bracketed by images of pre and post demolition of the 20 acres of property that included 129 homes and 29 black owned businesses.

Toward a Lineage of Self, the next installment of its Pride Overcomes Prejudice permanent exhibition, is a map-based exhibition that explores how this rich residential life blossomed into extensive community organizing and mutual-aid networks that grew Black economic and political power in ways never before seen.

It tells the origin stories of historically Black neighborhoods, using the JSAAHC’s extensive property and oral history archive to paint a vivid picture of the first families to settle in Vinegar Hill, Garrett Street, Kellytown, 10th & Page, Fifeville, Ridge Street, Pearl Street, Gospel Hill, Starr Hill, 12th & Rosser, Rose Hill, Lincoln Heights, and McKee Row.