• (Alex Haley's connection to Fredericksburg) Haley, the author of Roots, traced the story of his ancestor, Kunte Kinte, who was brought as a slave to nearby Spotsylvania County.
• (Fredericksburg's 1st black church): Shiloh Old Site Baptist Church, 801 Sophia Street. This was the first black church in the area. On this site was the original Fredericksburg Baptist Church, a white church with slave and free black members. When the white Baptists built elsewhere in 1854, their old church was sold to the black Baptists who renamed it the African Baptist Church.  George Rowe, a white man, was the minister before the Civil War. During the Civil War, it was used as a hospital. Repaired, it became known as the Shiloh Baptist Church and prospered until the 1880's. The church is within a flood plain and the old building, weakened by flood damage, collapsed in 1886. The congregation divided over where to rebuild, on this site or at a new site.
• (Fredericksburg's 1st black Mayor) After a court decision, about half the church members remained to rebuild the church in 1890, calling their church Shiloh Old Site Baptist Church. Baptisms of church members were conducted in the river until the early twentieth century. Its minister, Lawrence A. Davies, was the first black mayor of Fredericksburg, elected in 1976; and serving the longest term to date - 20 years as mayor! 
• (Famous freed-black De Baptiste family) During the late 1700's Sophia Street extended northward for several blocks. One of the area residents was a black man, John De Baptiste from St. Kitts, who ran the ferry to Falmouth. At various times, his children owned a sea-going ship, were fishermen, contractors, plasterers and land speculators. They were considered to be among the aristocracy of Fredericksburg blacks and owned at least two slaves themselves. The De Baptiste family, a family of free blacks, owned most of the east side of Charles Street from William to Amelia Streets in the first half of the nineteenth century. The De Baptiste family lived at the southeast corner of Amelia and Charles and held a secret school for black youth in their house. The female students pretended to sew and the male students pretended to make matches out of sticks and sulphur in case the Fredericksburg policeman, stationed outside, tried to catch them in their illegal school
• (Fredericksburg fire station; former school site) On the northeast corner of Princess Anne and Wolfe Streets is the Fredericksburg Fire Station, built on the site of the Colored School of Fredericksburg, built in 1884.
• (Fredericksburg's Walker-Grant School) Another school for the black children was built near lower Charles Street in 1935 and named Walker-Grant School after Joseph Walker and Jason Grant. Joseph Walker was a former slave, born in Spotsylvania in 1854, who worked as a custodian at the National Bank and at St. George's Episcopal Church. Jason Grant, son of a Kentucky slave who escaped to Canada, came to Fredericksburg in the 1880's to teach. Both were active in establishing higher education for black children.  Parts of school now house local Boys & Girls Club.
• Shiloh New Site Baptist Church, 214 Wolfe Street, was built in 1890 after the division of the Shiloh Baptist congregation on Sophia Street. In 1905, a black high school began in the basement of Shiloh New Site. Called Fredericksburg Normal and Industrial Institute (FNII), it was the only black high school in the area. Students from surrounding counties attended it. In 1906 the high school moved to an area known as Mayfield, south of Fredericksburg and the school became known as Mayfield High School. Later it merged with the elementary school near lower Charles Street. 
• 
  Pitt and Charles Streets downtown. Free blacks lived in this area before the Civil War, and it remains a black residential area. Many moved here to work on the canal built in the 1830's to transport produce from the mountain area and interior to Fredericksburg and then on to the seacoast. Although the canal failed, many blacks remained. During the Civil War bombardments, they hid in warehouses built for canal trade.

The battles of Fredericksburg were fought in this area in 1862 and 1863. Blacks were active in the Civil War as body servants for confederate officers, loading and unloading supply wagons for troops, digging trenches and other activities. After the war, blacks were employed buying Union soldiers in the national cemetery at the end of Sunken Road.

• The first black officer to be buried in the National Cemetery was Urbane Bass, a black Fredericksburg doctor who died in 1918 while serving in World War I in France.

The RICH history of African-Americans and their impact in Fredericksburg goes on and on and on......!!!

**Information from Fredericksburg's archival materials..