For African Americans, the history of Virginia has always been replete with paradox and irony. Virginia, the place where Africans first landed as slaves, was also the place where George Washington and Thomas Jefferson dreamed a nation into being around the ideal of human freedom, even though they owed their own wealth to the appropriated labor, skills, and expertise of Africans and their descendants. African Americans availed themselves of opportunities that followed upon the bloody Civil War. But after a brief period of promised prosperity came the introduction of Jim Crow laws that denied them voting rights and access to education. At the dawn of the Civil Rights era, one Virginia county closed the doors of public schools to African American students for five years. Yet, fifty years earlier, Virginia-born African American educational pioneer Booker T. Washington helped establish some of the first African American schools and colleges.