UVA History PhD Candidate Brianna Kirk was recently awarded the best student paper award from the Virginia Forum's annual conference last week for her paper titled, "'No Safety for Union Men': The Norfolk Race Riot of 1866 and Military Occupation." The 2019 Virginia Forum was held from March 14-16 at Longwood University in Farmville. This year's theme was “crossroads."
Her talk, which she delivered on Friday, March 15, was based on her master’s thesis and examined a race riot in Norfolk, Virginia, on April 16, 1866, as a way to understand the dangers and political consequences of demobilization. It demonstrated how the Union military presence in Norfolk only provided tenuous protection for African Americans and their civil rights when faced with ex-Confederates’ paramilitary violence as ways to preempt further change during the early years of Reconstruction.