Black Communities of Fairfax: A History

The story of Black Fairfax has long been untold. The free Black population of Fairfax Court House dates to at least the 1820s. After the Civil War, newly freed Black citizens expanded the hamlet of Jermantown dramatically. Additional segregated neighborhoods, including School Street, which overlapped today's George Mason University, and Ilda, off Guinea Road, grew and thrived. In the second half of the nineteenth century residents built schools, churches, and a cemetery. These families pers...