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Early Years and Ministry Davis was born about November 1839 into slavery in Christiansville (later Chase City), in Mecklenburg County. He was the son of Cephas Davis and Annie (sometimes noted as Frances) Davis. Most likely he gained his freedom at the end of the Civil War. His contemporaries’ comments and recollections suggest that Davis may have attended Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute (later Hampton University) or the Richmond Theological School for Freedmen (later Virginia Union University), but his name does not appear in the records of either school. In 1869 and 1870 he taug...

Early Years Jabez Lamar Monroe Curry was born on June 5, 1825, in Lincoln County, Georgia. He was the son of William Curry, a merchant and member of the state legislature, and his first wife, Susan Winn Curry. As a young man he changed his middle name from Lafayette to Lamar. His mother died in 1827, and two years later his father married a widow with one son. Curry was educated in the local schools and for one year at Willington Academy, a school in Abbeville County, South Carolina, established by the noted educator Moses Waddel. In 1838 Curry’s family moved to Talladega County, Alabama.

Cook was born on the Pamunkey Reservation in King William County on October 23, 1860. His father, Major Cook, died in 1861, and his mother, Caroline Bradby Cook, raised him with the help of her father and brother. Members of the Colosse Baptist Church before the American Civil War (1861–1865), the Bradby and Cook families numbered among the many Pamunkey who formed Pamunkey Indian Baptist Church after the war. Cook’s mother brought him up as a member of the church, and, like most Pamunkey, the Cooks remained a devoutly religious family. In 1901 he was the first delegate from the church to...

Office of the Principal of Armstrong High SchoolBrown’s two children who reached adulthood, Bessie Gwendola Brown and George Willis Brown, joined the family business. The Browns, whose slogan was “Makers of Portraits That Please,” became the most important visual chroniclers of Richmond’s African American population, producing thousands of studio portraits and documenting community life at schools, sporting events, and fraternal meetings. The studio produced pictures for schools and institutions throughout the state, including Virginia Union University, Virginia Normal and Industrial ...

He was born in a slave hut but, after emancipation, moved with his family to Malden, West Virginia. Dire poverty ruled out regular schooling; at age nine he began working, first in a salt furnace and later in a coal mine. Determined to get an education, he enrolled at the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute (now Hampton University) in Virginia (1872), working as a janitor to help pay expenses. He graduated in 1875 and returned to Malden, where for two years he taught children in a day school and adults at night. Following studies at Wayland Seminary, Washington, D.C. (1878–79), he joi...