Born in Richmond in 1874, Virginia Estelle Randolph grew up and was educated during the South's stormy Reconstruction period. The daughter of former slaves, she was a teacher by the time she was 16, and she became an internationally known authority on vocational education for black students.
Her first teaching job was in Goochland. Her second was at the one-room Mountain Road School in Henrico County in 1892.
Besides academics, Randolph taught her students such skills as gardening, woodworking and sewing. "There is no need for a mind if you can't use your hands," she said.
She once dismantled a neighbor's stove that was still warm and took it to school to teach a cooking class.
Her pioneering teaching methods at times brought opposition from parents who wanted their children to learn from books. Parents once circulated a petition to have her removed, but the county superintendent stood behind her.
In 1908, Randolph was appointed the first Jeanes Supervisor Industrial Teacher. In that capacity, she provided the first formal in-service teacher training anywhere for rural black teachers.
She was responsible for improving industrial skills, as well as education in general, in every one of the county's rural schools for blacks. With the freedom to design her own program, she shaped industrial work and community self-help programs to meet the needs of the specific schools.
The job had drawbacks. To reach the 23 schools she supervised, trips that took up to three hours one way on muddy country roads, Randolph had to hire a buggy and driver, an expense that consumed much of her salary. Later she bought her own horse.
She recorded the improvements made at each school under her program, which became known as "the Henrico Plan." Her report was reprinted and sent to county superintendents throughout the South. Randolph's teaching techniques and philosophy were later adopted in Britain's African colonies.
In 1915, the Virginia Randolph Training School was built next to Randolph's old school. It was Henrico's first step toward providing a high school for blacks. Students enrolled from throughout the county. But transportation was not provided, so Randolph often kept children in her Richmond home so they could attend. Over the years, 59 children boarded with her.
Randolph raised money to build a dormitory for girls and one for boys. Students came to her school from as far away as New York.
In 1929, fire destroyed the wooden Virginia Randolph Training School and the old one-room wooden schoolhouse next to it. For a week, the distraught Randolph was under a doctor's care. A bigger school, one made of brick, was built later that year and was named the Virginia Randolph High School. Today, several education programs are housed on the site, known as the Virginia Randolph Educational Center.
Randolph died March 16, 1958. Her accomplishments as an education pioneer are commemorated in a museum, founded in 1970 on the campus bearing her name. Her body was reinterred at the site in 1970.
In 1976, the museum was designated a National and Virginia Historic Landmark. In 1993, Virginia Estelle Randolph was inducted into the Virginia Women's Hall of Fame.
Source: Richmond-Times Dispatch, article by Robin Farmer published February 13, 2009 (republished from 1998).