In 144 moldy boxes, a treasure trove of civil rights records

Work on an old house in Richmond led to the papers of groundbreaking attorney ‘Duke’ Ealey

RICHMOND — Five years into the renovation of a 143-year-old brick house on East Clay Street in Jackson Ward, James Vigeant stopped his work.

To his surprise and amazement, he had found an unexpected treasure — 144 moldy boxes filled with the decaying legal papers of one of Richmond’s legal giants, Roland J. “Duke” Ealey.

Some of the finds that Vigeant uncovered with the help of neighbor and historical photographer Theodore Holmes included:

Poll tax litigations and campaign information

Richmond Crusade For Voters literature and training materials

Prince Hall Fraternal Order of Black Freemasonry documents

Documents about Massive Resistance and the Byrd Machine

Records about families displaced by the Interstate Highway System

Paperwork for the Brown v. Board of Education case

“It was breathtaking,” Vigeant said.

When he discovered the files in January 2019, he knew nothing about Ealey and thought the boxes were old accounting files.

He planned to send them to the city dump.

“Many of the files that I opened dated back to the 1940s and they were all connected to Mr. Ealey,” he recalled. “I wanted to know who Mr. Ealey was, so I Googled him.”

One of the boxes included a 1992 article from The Washington Post noting that then-Virginia Gov. L. Douglas Wilder had ordered the U.S. flag at the state Capitol to be flown at half staff in honor of Ealey, who had been a childhood friend.

Vigeant is an acquaintance of the former governor and contacted him. He received an immediate and terse message.

“Don’t trash it,” Wilder said. “We’ll talk.”

Wilder later told him that the materials would bring firsthand clarity to much of the African-American historical story, the civil rights movement, Richmond and Jackson Ward.

As someone who has been restoring old homes for more than 30 years, Vigeant has a history of protecting things of significance and looked at how to protect Ealey’s story.

Who was Roland J. ‘Duke’ Ealey?

Ealey was born June 20, 1914, in Kershaw, South Carolina, and was raised in Richmond. He was a 1936 graduate of Virginia Union University and a 1939 graduate of

FILE Roland “Duke” Ealey, a state delegate and civil rights attorney from Richmond, died in 1992. Renovation of his former home led to boxes of historical documents in its basement.