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HAMPTON, Va. (AP) - Beneath an oak tree on the campus of what is now Hampton University, historians say, Virginia blacks heard a reading of the Emancipation Proclamation and began to dream of a better life.
On Saturday, more than 8,000 people returned to the historically black university to chart how far they have come. They gathered for the "State of the Black Union," an annual traveling town hall that is considered a barometer for black America's ills.
This year's conference coincides with the 400th anniversary of the nation's first permanent English settlement, Jamestown. Africans arriving in Virginia in the years following that milestone in American history faced enslavement and entrenched racism.
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