By Dionne WalkerAssociated Press
Sunday, February 11, 2007; A12
HAMPTON, Feb. 10 -- Beneath an oak tree on the campus of what is now Hampton University www.hamptonu.edu/, historians say, Virginia blacks heard a reading of the Emancipation Proclamation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emancipation_Proclamation and began to dream of a better life.
On Saturday, more than 8,000 people returned to the historically black Virginia university to chart how far they have come. They gathered for the State of the Black Union www.tavistalks.com/TTcom/tsp.html, an annual traveling town hall that is considered a barometer for black America's ills.
This year's conference, the eighth, coincides with the 400th anniversary of the nation's first permanent English settlement, Jamestown. Africans arriving in Virginia in the years after that milestone in American history faced enslavement........
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