{"id":372,"date":"2025-06-25T16:41:14","date_gmt":"2025-06-25T16:41:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/teachinghrt.vt.domains\/?p=372"},"modified":"2026-03-17T00:03:53","modified_gmt":"2026-03-17T00:03:53","slug":"teaching-about-racial-violence-in-virginia-strategies-for-addressing-difficult-histories-in-the-classroom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/teachinghrt.vt.domains\/index.php\/teaching-about-racial-violence-in-virginia-strategies-for-addressing-difficult-histories-in-the-classroom\/","title":{"rendered":"Teaching about Racial Violence in Virginia: Strategies for Addressing Difficult Histories in the Classroom\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

https:\/\/doi.org\/10.21061\/TeachingRacialViolenceVirginia<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gianluca De Fazio, Mary Beth Cancienne, Ashley Taylor Jaffee, Elaine Kaye, Nicole Wilson, & Ryland Jones<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Introduction <\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Teaching the difficult history of lynching requires a sensitive and informed approach, particularly when dealing with local incidents that may still resonate within a community. This essay provides pedagogical strategies for integrating the history of lynching in Virginia into classroom instruction. By drawing on specific case studies and contextualizing them within broader national trends, educators can help students understand the complexities of racial violence and the importance of historical memory in addressing contemporary issues of racial justice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2019, the Virginia General Assembly voted unanimously for a joint resolution<\/a>, \u201cAcknowledging with profound regret the existence and acceptance of lynching within the Commonwealth,\u201d in which it condemned its past of racial terror. This resolution, the first of this kind in the United States, also called for the development of programming \u201cto bring awareness and recognition of this history to communities across the state,\u201d thus recognizing the historical erasure of lynching in Virginia and the need to redress it. The collective amnesia about our past of racialized terror \u201cnot only erases the stories and humanity of the people who were killed by lynching mobs; it also provides an implicit absolution of the system of connivence that made mob violence possible\u201d (De Fazio, 2024). Until recently, lynchings were removed not only from Virginia\u2019s collective and institutional memory, but also rarely addressed in classrooms across the Commonwealth. In this essay, we discuss the history of lynching in Virginia and present the Teaching Hard History for Racial Healing Curriculum <\/em>project to partially address the historical erasure of lynching in Virginia K-12 education. The overarching goal of this project is to challenge conventional narratives that tend to minimize the role of racial violence in propping up white supremacy in Virginia after the end of the Civil War. By centering Black perspectives in the curriculum, this project invites both teachers and students to engage critically with the issues of systemic racism and resistance, as well as its legacy today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Teaching Hard History for Racial Healing Curriculum <\/em>project comprises a set of open-access lesson plans that high school teachers can adopt and adapt to discuss the difficult history of lynching in Virginia with their students. Using the College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework and the Inquiry Design Model (IDM) (NCSS, 2013), our interdisciplinary research team developed five high school Social Studies lesson plans and four English lesson plans. These plans align with the 2023 Virginia Standards of Learning<\/a> (VSOLs) and are openly licensed and available<\/a> online. As a group of critically minded, justice-oriented white scholars\/educators and racially diverse graduate students situated in a Predominantly White Institution (PWI), we continue to refine the lessons and focus on how to share these resources across Virginia. In 2022, we developed and implemented a hybrid Professional Learning (PL) experience for current high school teachers in Virginia. As part of the program, facilitators incorporated necessary historical context, a curricular framework, shared resources, and allowed time for reflection and opportunities to practice pedagogical strategies that work toward healing and centering Black joy (Love, 2019). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this essay, we discuss how developing curricular strategies for educators is a crucial, yet often overlooked, aspect of creating tools to understand and teach difficult local histories, such as lynching in Virginia. We contend that using an interdisciplinary and inquiry-based curricular framework, educators can effectively confront and contextualize racial trauma in the classroom and explore the implications for racial justice and education when teaching about lynching in Virginia. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lynching in Virginia<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Since the end of the Civil War, mob violence against perceived threats to the community became increasingly racialized. By the time federal troops left the South at the end of Reconstruction, lynching evolved into a tool of violent control against African Americans in the Deep South, killing more than 4,400 people between 1878 and 1930 (EJI, 2018). Lynching is here understood as an extra-legal killing by a group of at least three people who acted under the pretext of service to justice, honor, or tradition (Bailey and Tolnay, 2015). Lynching in the Jim Crow South embodied a form of racial terrorism that often occurred with the collusion of state and local authorities. These murders were not simply an extra-legal punishment against alleged criminals: they were meant to send a \u201cterrible warning\u201d to Black communities, an instrument to terrorize Black people into submission. For lynching to become an effective method of racial control, it also needed some level of implicit or explicit complicity by public officials, including law enforcement, coroners, and courts, as well as (white) newspapers. As these institutions often failed to try to prevent lynchings, investigate and punish mobs, and more generally condemn these murders, racial terror killings spread throughout the South, including Virginia (Brundage, 1993; De Fazio, 2024).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Notwithstanding the fact that the terms \u2018lynching,\u2019 \u2018lynch law,\u2019 and \u2018Judge Lynch\u2019 originated in Revolutionary Virginia (Waldrep, 2002), the Commonwealth is rarely associated with the violent imagery of lynching. Today, the term lynching evokes grisly images like the charred body of Sam Hose, brutally murdered and tortured in 1899 in Georgia, or the story of the 1893 spectacle lynching of Henry Smith in Paris, Texas, before a crowd of several thousand people. However, lynchings and the threats of lynch mobs were also part and parcel of the system of white supremacy in Virginia. Between 1866 and 1932, at least 115 people were lynched in Virginia, of which ninety-three were Black men, often accused of violent or sexual crimes against white people (De Fazio, 2024). In addition to these alleged crimes, Black men could be murdered for violating informal racial codes. In 1880, a white mob in Fauquier County kidnapped, jailed, and then lynched Arthur Jordan<\/a>, a Black man who had eloped with a white woman; in 1905, a white crowd chased George Henderson<\/a> into a dam in Page County, where he drowned, because of \u201can unwritten law that no colored man shall be permitted to stop over or pass through that neighborhood\u201d (Richmond Planet<\/em>, March 4, 1905<\/a>). Lynchers in Virginia enjoyed near-total impunity for their actions, as very few members of lynch mobs were ever tried for their actions, and only in two cases, lynchers were punished with light sentences. It is telling that almost all lynching victims in Virginia were already in custody waiting for trial when mobs took them and murdered them; this confirms the role of authorities in letting mobs commit violence with little to no legal consequences for their actions. In Virginia, however, officials often did<\/em> put an effort in protecting Black prisoners from would-be lynchers, much more so than in other Deep South states (Brundage, 1993). Virginian elites\u2019 efforts to curb mob violence, motivated more by their desire to protect its reputation rather than Black lives, made them an outlier in the South, with a comparatively small number of lynchings. For instance, the Tolnay-Beck inventory of Southern lynchings indicates that at least 458 lynchings took place in Georgia and 538 in Mississippi between 1882 and 1930 (Tolnay and Beck, 2007). In contrast to other Deep South states, spectacle lynchings involving a planned execution before very large crowds, the torture of the victim, and body desecrations occurred only rarely in Virginia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But vicious and cruel attacks against Black men did take place in Virginia too. In 1893, a frenzy mob in Tazewell County lynched at least six Black men accused of participating in the murder of two white men. A few months later, a white mob attacked the local militia in Roanoke in their attempt to capture and lynch Thomas Smith<\/a>, a Black man accused of robbing a white woman. The clash provoked the Roanoke Riot, one of the bloodiest episodes in Jim Crow Virginia, during which at least nine people died; ultimately, the mob was able to take Thomas Smith from the jail, hang him, riddle his body with bullets, and then burn it. In 1927, the spectacle lynching of Leonard Woods<\/a> in Wise County caused such widespread revulsion that the next year Virginia passed a sweeping anti-lynching legislation. After the law went into effect, no more lynchings were officially reported<\/em> in Virginia. Nonetheless, in 1932 a white mob in Fauquier County chased and then hanged Shedrick Thompson<\/a>, a Black man accused of robbing and assaulting a wealthy white couple; when the body was found a few months later, a white crowd burned Thompson\u2019s dangling body. However, local and state authorities denied that a lynching had taken place and instead ruled it a suicide to avoid prosecution and preserve Virginia\u2019s reputation (Hall, 2016). While lynching had thus become an unacceptable form of racial control, legal and extra-legal anti-Black violence continued to haunt Virginia in many forms for the next several decades. The legacy of racial terror and its ramifications in Virginia\u2019s political, social, and criminal justice system is still an open wound today that needs reckoning in our public discourse as well as in our education system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Teaching Hard History for Racial Healing Curriculum <\/em>project aims to present and discuss the difficult history of lynching in Virginia to high school students. In doing so, we created a curriculum using the College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework and the Inquiry Design Model (IDM) (NCSS, 2013) through the lens of teaching hard history (Jeffries, 2018) and Black historical consciousness (King, 2020). After discussing the teaching hard history framework, we describe the development of our curriculum project, an example of a high school English lesson plan, and the Professional Learning model implemented by our interdisciplinary team.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Teaching Hard History<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Why is this history hard? Referring to slavery, Jeffries (2018) notes:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt is hard to comprehend the inhumanity that defined it. It is hard to discuss the violence that sustained it. It is hard to teach the ideology of white supremacy that justified it. And it is hard to learn about those who abided it.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jeffries adds that Americans have a \u201cdeep-seated aversion to hard history.\u201d This aversion has led teachers to not deal with contemporary issues involving racial injustice or inequitable public schooling, and instead teach about issues like American slavery by explaining that it happened without providing much depth, context, or discussion of its legacy. Learning, confronting, and teaching hard history has promises and possibilities to tell a more accurate and complex story of what actually happened in America. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Teaching about lynchings in Virginia is truly hard history, and one that has been effectively erased from our collective memory, due to our aversion to dealing with \u201chistorical acts of racial violence directed toward African Americans\u201d (Brown & Brown, 2010, p. 34). Teaching about the history of lynching in Virginia also requires us to talk about the resistance that took place within African American communities across the Commonwealth, including how Black folks fought back, left Virginia and the South, and came together to fight against racialized violence and state-sanctioned terrorism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stories of resistance, migration, and grass-roots community organizing are all key parts of LaGarrett King\u2019s (2020) Black historical consciousness framework. By using this framework, we seek to center Black perspectives, experiences, and narratives in our work. Black people are obviously not monolithic.  As such, this chapter forefronts the diversity of Black experiences in Virginia, the US, and the world. As King argues, \u201cBlack historical consciousness is an effort to understand, develop, and teach Black histories that recognize Black people\u2019s humanity\u201d and \u201cexplore Black identity through complex and nuanced narratives that attempt to get at the full humanity of Black people\u201d (p. 337). This framework is guided by six principles for curriculum and pedagogy: (1) systemic power, oppression, and racism; (2) agency, resistance, and perseverance; (3) Africa and the African Diaspora; (4) Black joy and love; (5) Black identities; and (6) Black historical contention. The Teaching Hard History for Racial Healing Curriculum<\/em> project is particularly situated within the following three principles: systemic power, oppression, and racism; Black agency, resistance, and perseverance; and Black historical contention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Amid present-day racial violence and oppression, it is even more important to teach about race, racism, and other historical acts of racial violence and resistance in the United States (Brown & Brown, 2010). In the next section, we discuss the development of our curriculum, followed by an example of a high school English lesson plan. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Curriculum Development: The Inquiry Design Model<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Teachers and scholars have found that textbook accounts of history are often inaccurate, only share one perspective, and skim the surface of historical traumatic events without details (Gibbs, 2021; Brown & Brown, 2010). Scholars and archivists have been digitizing documented accounts of historical racial violence and trauma and placing them online to increase access to this critical information (De Fazio et al., 2021; De Fazio, 2023). With the increase of information available online, teachers now have more access to primary and secondary sources that can be used to create accurate, engaging, student-centered, and inquiry-oriented lesson plans. Given the digitization of documents accessed for this project using the Racial Terror: Lynching in Virginia<\/em><\/a> website, we created several inquiry-based lesson plans to support teachers to teach hard history and move toward a framework for Black historical consciousness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our pedagogical approach included an inquiry-based model alongside teaching for liberation (hooks, 1994; Love, 2019) and trauma-informed pedagogy (O\u2019Brien & Nygreen, 2020). We began our curriculum development project with our graduate students in education at James Madison University in 2020, by first engaging in class discussions about how to teach the topic of lynching in Virginia and in the US. We emphasized to our students how critically important it was to tell narratives that have largely been erased from US collective memory and, at that time, left out of the US History Virginia Standards of Learning (VSOLs). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We examined the scholarship on racial terror and lynching, discussed how to teach this history in English and social studies classrooms, and connected the material to contemporary issues in culturally responsive ways (Ladson-Billings, 1994). After we engaged in reading, discussing, and reflecting on the concepts of teaching hard history (Jeffries, 2018), we further deepened our understanding of lynching by watching and discussing the documentary An Outrage<\/em><\/a> (2017), and engaging with materials from the Equal Justice Initiative<\/a> and the <\/em>Racial Terror<\/em><\/a> <\/em>website. Then, we began the curriculum and lesson plan development process by introducing the College, Career, and Civic Life (C3 Framework) and Inquiry Design Model (IDM) (NCSS, 2013). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Through the Inquiry Design Model (IDM)<\/a>, we engaged in discussion with the research team on this topic, developed a workflow for ongoing curriculum work with the JMU Libraries team, and created curricular materials for the Racial Terror<\/em> website. The IDM centers on the C3 \u201cinquiry-arc,\u201d which includes four dimensions: (1) developing questions and planning inquiries, (2) applying disciplinary tools and concepts, (3) evaluating sources and using evidence, and (4) communicating conclusions and taking informed action. Overall, the project outcomes for our students included the following:<\/p>\n\n\n\n