Founders and Freedom: A Charlottesville History Walking Tour

Charlottesville, Virginia helped write the founding promises of American democracy, then spent more than two centuries confronting how the nation lived up to these aspirations. On this walking tour, you'll see how a city that produced three U.S. presidents also built, and later demolished, one of its most thriving Black neighborhoods.

The tour starts at the Ting Pavilion on the Downtown Mall, beside City Hall's inset statues of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe. You'll walk the historic Three Notched Road, once a Monacan footpath, past ghost signs for nickel Coca-Colas and the tobacco-brick Jefferson Theater. At the Paramount Theater, you'll find the entrance African American patrons were required to use until 1964, preserved deliberately rather than restored away.

You'll follow the boundary of Vinegar Hill, a Black neighborhood razed in 1965 under federal urban renewal, passing Mount Zion Baptist Church and the former site of Inge's Store, once the community's commercial heart. You'll stand where a Confederate statue's empty park space became its own kind of monument, and where enslaved people were once sold on the courthouse square. The tour ends at the Freedom of Speech Wall, a few blocks from where Heather Heyer was killed in 2017.

On this 75-minute walking tour, you'll have a chance to:

• Hear how Nancy West and David Isaacs defied Virginia's marriage laws to build a life together for over forty years
• See the pedestal where a Lewis and Clark statue once showed Sacagawea crouched at their feet, removed in 2021
• Stand outside Congregation Beth Israel, where armed neo-Nazis gathered during Shabbat services in 2017
• Learn how Jack Jouett's midnight ride saved the Virginia legislature from British capture in 1781
• Visit the marker for Swanson v. University of Virginia, decided four years before Brown v. Board of Education
• Walk through Court Square, once home to taverns and the courthouse steps where enslaved people were sold

By the time you reach the Freedom of Speech Wall, you'll understand why Charlottesville keeps asking, in public, how a nation lives up to its own founding words.