The New Deal Program that led to the development of Norfolk Botanical Gardens

Dr. Williams said her exploration into the subject of the NBG’s origins began when a group of students at  Norfolk’s Ruffner Middle School contacted the site’s leaders in 2003 about diversity. She said the school had formed a chapter of the Community Problems Solvers International, a group tasked with helping locales resolve problems related to race and income. “The students wanted to find out  initially why the workforce at gardens at that time was not adequately racially diversified,” said Williams, who is a former Director of Teacher Education at Hampton University. “All they saw were White people working there.”

“So in 2003, at the time, the Garden’s leaders created the Diversity Committee which included Blacks and Whites and people of all races at the site,” said Williams, who has served on that panel since its inception and on the NBG’s Board of Directors for five years. “This  is when we began digging into the  history of Black women who worked there from 1938 to 1941,” she continued.. “That was the untold story, which we wanted to reveal to the public..” Join us as she tells us this wonderful story about this great treasure.