Jackson P. Burley HS on National Register of Historic Places

VIA Member School Jackson P. Burley High (Charlottesville, Virginia) is now listed on both the Virginia Landmarks Register and the National Register of Historic Places.

The school is named after Jackson P. Burley, a local teacher, church worker, and leader in the African American community whose family sold the land for the school to the city of Charlottesville.

It was built in an attempt to prop up segregation in Virginia schools. African American students in Virginia were attending "seriously insufficient facilities," and this inequality was a crucial argument in multiple court challenges of the "separate but equal" rule in the state.

Threatened by questions raised in these court cases, Charlottesville and Albemarle counties jointly constructed Jackson P. Burley High, designed to be a better-equipped school for the African American students. The school opened in 1951 and was integrated in 1967, more than a decade after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling.

Learn more

• Jackson P. Burley High School listing at Virginia Landmarks Register

• Josette Walker’s keynote address to the VIAHA on the importance of Black high schools becoming Virginia historical landmarks

• Washington Post article, "We refuse to let people forget:" In Virginia, a push to remember historically black high schools before they disappear