The last elected black official of the post Civil War era was John Mercer Langston. He served only the last 161 days of his 1888-90 term, after finally overcoming objections and being seated officially.
Dumfries elected the first black municipal official of the modern era in 1961. John Wilmer Porter was elected to the town Council in 1961. He was well-known in the local community; Porter Brothers Garage was a key business in the small town, and it served both blacks and whites despite the segregation pattern of the times.
Lawrence Davies was elected to the City Council of Fredericksburg in 1966, and then became mayor. In 1970, Rev. Noel C. Taylor (minister of High Street Baptist Church) was elected to the Roanoke City Council. He became the Vice-Mayor in 1974, and then became the first black mayor in western Virginia when the incumbent died in 1975.
Virginia elected Douglas Wilder as lieutenant governor in 1985 and as governor in 1989. In 1994, Virginia elected its second black man to Congress, Representative Bobby Scott from Newport News. Virginia has never elected a black senator to the United States Congress.
When Irving L. Peddrew III arrived on the Virginia Tech campus in 1953, VPI "became the first historically-white, four-year, public institution in any of the eleven states of the former Confederacy to admit a black undergraduate." Tech desegregated before any court required it.
Peddrew did not remain at Tech for 4 years. Charlie Yates was, as the headline described it in 1958, VPI's First Negro Graduate. He never was able to sleep in a campus dorm himself - and was able to eat only one meal on campus while an undergraduate. (He was in the corps of cadets and once served on guard duty in the mealroom, where he ate by himself.)2