Virginia Beach Installs Historical Marker for First Black Man Elected in Princess Anne County

The story of Willis Augustus Hodges, an abolitionist as well as social and political trailblazer during the post-Civil-War Reconstruction Era, is being shared on a new state historical marker in Kempsville.  

He was a journalist, a minister and the first Black man elected to public office in Princess Anne County. What makes that achievement particularly significant is the fact that after Reconstruction, it would be more than a century before another African American was elected to public office in Princess Anne County/Virginia Beach. John Perry was elected to the City Council in 1986.  

Hodges was born to a free family in what is present-day Virginia Beach in 1815. His family moved back and forth between Virginia and New York due to the racial persecution they faced in the south.  

He channeled his horror at the brutalization of Black Americans into political activism. He co-founded a weekly antislavery newspaper called the Ram’s Horn in Brooklyn in 1847 and, after moving back to Princess Anne after the Civil War, he opened a school for local children.  
 
Hodges was elected to represent Princess Anne County in Richmond at the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1867-1868. He served in the Kempsville magisterial district and was a vocal advocate for racial equality as one of just 24 Black delegates. Hodges also served on the Princess Anne County Board of Supervisors starting in 1870, and he fulfilled two terms. That same year, he was hired as the first African American lighthouse keeper at the Cape Henry Lighthouse. 

Hodges died on Sept. 24,1890, at the age of 75 and is buried in New York. The application for Hodges’ marker was successfully submitted by local historian Edna Hawkins-Hendrix. The marker was dedicated on Feb. 8 and funded by the Historic Preservation Commission through their research grant program