The 49th Annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Program honors the life and legacy of Dr. King in reverence to the King Center’s 2022 theme, It Starts With Me: Shifting Priorities to Build the Beloved Community. 

Join us for a free, virtual lecture on Saturday February 12, 2002, 11 a.m., sponsored by the Alexandria Community Remembrance Project. (Register in advance). Violent clashes between large crowds of different races have disturbed the social order in the United States since long before the Civil War. Susan Strasser investigates the term, and a history of racially charged violence that has framed American discussions of race throughout the nation’s history.

Volunteers are needed for the Tour d’ Alexandria bike ride in April 2022. The theme for this ride is “resilience” and will feature points of interest that reflect the resilience of Alexandria communities past and present, the growth of diverse neighborhoods, and to include the commemoration of the lynching of Joseph McCoy.

The Alexandria Black History Museum is currently closed for renovation. This page has admission information and directions to assist in planning your visit once the museum reopens. 

Tour the Museum and related historic sites virtually on Google 360.. 

• Black History Museum
• African American Heritage Park
• Contrabands and Freedmen Cemetery Memorial 

Alexandria’s African American history is told through an online StoryMap and can be experienced in-home on your computer or on your smartphone as you walk the trail along the Potomac River. The walking trail lasts about 45 minutes at a leisurely pace. The webpage presents more in-depth information about the stops highlighted in the StoryMap.

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama includes over 800 steel monuments, one for each county in the United States where a racial terror lynching took place. Their Community Remembrance Project invites jurisdictions to claim and install a copy of their monument. The City of Alexandria is committed to claiming Alexandria’s monument in partnership with EJI.

Preserving Their Names is the new online exhibition showing objects and digital photographs from the Black Lives Remembered Collection. Illustrated with material donated via The Legacy of George Floyd Collecting Initiative, the exhibition documents some of the ways the local community responded to the tragic murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020. New submissions to the collecting initiative are still received here. Read a statement on the anniversary of the murder of George Floyd.

The Alexandria Black History Museum’s The Moss Kendrix Collection was a 2020 honoree in the Virginia Association of Museums’ Top 10 Endangered Artifacts.

The Parker-Gray School provided African American children with comprehensive education at a time when segregation and lack of resources, teachers, and facilities threatened what is now understood as a fundamental right of every child. On the 100th anniversary of Alexandria’s Parker-Gray High School, the City of Alexandria joined the Alexandria African-American Hall of Fame and Parker-Gray Alumni in commemorating this historical legacy. 

Peaceful vigils, protests and other events took place in Alexandria during the first week in June, following the May 25, 2020 death of George Floyd. Recognizing the importance of this moment in history, the Office of Historic Alexandria invites the community to share signs, t-shirts, flyers, photographs, journals, personal stories, and artifacts that document local vigils and protests. 

Over the past year, OHA has recorded our community's response to the pandemic by collecting objects, images and stories from citizens across the City. See a sampling of this public history collecting effort, and learn more about contributing to this on-going project. 

Alexandria Black History Museum incorporates the Robert H. Robinson Library as one of two exhibition galleries. The Robinson Library was originally constructed in 1940 following a sit-in at the segregated Alexandria Library. Learn more about the Sit-Down Strike, the Parker-Gray School and the Alexandria Black History Research Center.

Watson Reading Room, established in 1995, provides an environment for learning about the diversity of African American cultural traditions. Located next door to the Alexandria Black History Museum, the Watson Reading Room is a non-circulating research repository focusing on issues of African-American history and culture.

This nine-acre green space and wetland includes a 19th century African American cemetery. The focal point of the park is a sculpture group of bronze trees called "Truths That Rise From the Roots Remembered." The Park, located at 500 Holland Lane just south of Duke Street, offers a place for celebration, commemoration and quiet reflection.

The Memorial, at 1001 S. Washington Street, served as the burial place for about 1,800 African Americans who fled to Alexandria to escape from bondage during the Civil War. The Memorial opened in 2014 to honor the memory of the Freedmen, the hardships they faced, and their contributions to the City.

The Museum at 1315 Duke Street was once the headquarters and holding pen for the largest domestic slave trading firm in the United States. We invite you to visit the museum in this historic reminder of slavery. 

Visit Fort Ward Park to see historic signage highlighting the post-Civil War African American community known as The Fort. The Fort is the focus of an effort by the Office of Historic Alexandria to study and preserve the post-Civil War historic resources of Fort Ward Park. 

While the Alexandria Black History Museum is closed, you can still engage with paintings from Sherry Z. Sanabria featured in our exhibition "Before the Spirits are Swept Away.." Through Sanabria's artistic lens, explore the vanishing landscape of slave housing in America. In these paintings, she seeks to capture the spirt of the place and the people who inhabited these spaces. The paintings are available to view through our Online Collections.

Miss visiting your favorite Historic Alexandria sites? Looking for some fun historic activities to share with your kids at home? Let our staff bring history virtually to you!