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At 2 pm on Saturday September 9, Dr. Cassandra Newby-Alexander will present on “Race and Religion in Early Virginia.’

“Race and Religion in Early Virginia:
Religion for Africans in America was the vehicle by which they individually and collectively expressed their “voice”  in a land that disfranchised them from the beginning.  Beginning in the colonial period in early Virginia, many sought to retain elements of their African customs and manners, to the frustration of whites who regarded their refusal to assimilate as indicators of their heathenism and inferiority. Yet, it was through their religious and cultural voice that these early colonial Africans survived their experiences from freedom, to capture, to enslavement in a foreign land beginning at Old Point Comfort in 1619.

CASSANDRA L. NEWBY-ALEXANDER is the Endowed Professor of Virginia Black History and Culture at Norfolk State University in Virginia.  She is the author of numerous articles including “Dr. Sarah Garland Jones:  Beyond Race and Gender in late 19^th Virginia” that won the William M. E. Rachal Award for Outstanding Article in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography in 2019.  Newby-Alexander is the author of Virginia Waterways and the Underground Railroad (2017), An African American History of the Civil War in Hampton Roads (2010), co-author of Black America Series: Portsmouth (2003) and Hampton Roads: Remembering Our Schools (2009).  Newby-Alexander co-edited Voices from within the Veil: African Americans and the Experience of Democracy (2008). Dr. Newby-Alexander has appeared on numerous national programs and documentaries including PBS’s Many Rivers to Cross, the History Channel’s Race, Slavery and the Civil War, and C-SPAN’s broadcasts on history, including the American History Lecture series.