James L. Rivers grew up in Norfolk in the 1950s and 1960s - a southern city with opportunities and obstacles for a young Black man.

Rivers was the first generation in his family to graduate from college, earning degrees in chemistry and mathematics from the Norfolk branch of Virginia State College, the predecessor to Norfolk State University. But, as Black man, he also had to pay a poll tax before he could vote for the first time in the early 1960s.

He became active in the civil rights movement as a student at Booker T. Washington High School. He met Martin Luther King Jr., joined sit-ins at segregated lunch counters, and fought to bring voting rights to Black Virginians.

His calling to civil rights continued through service in the Navy, a long career as a counselor in Virginia prisons and jails, and decades of work with the Norfolk chapter of the NAACP, where he served as president. He’s been a deacon at New Calvary Baptist Church in Norfolk for four decades.

Using gravity, and some rather strong mules, self-taught civil engineer Moncure Robinson moved a cart of coal along a set of rail tracks he designed in 1831. From a coal seam in Midlothian, Robinson guided his cargo 13 miles away to Manchester's wharves on the James River—making Virginia’s Chesterfield Railroad one of the first to operate in the United States and stoking Virginia’s economic engine.

Towns built on the rails became strings of small, economic dynamos stretching across the commonwealth, supporting good jobs - in transportation, manufacturing, extraction industries and even tourism.

For many of these hamlets, the hey-days are long past. What happened to Virginia’s railroad towns? Who lives by the tracks today? How deep is the poverty? Where are there signs of regrowth and hope? Have old dividing lines between the right and wrong sides of the track changed?

The state created a new recreational agency to breathe life into struggling Appalachian communities once dependent on coal for jobs. But has a sprawling ATV trail network ignored environmental rules and met its economic promise?

In the quiet, in-between moments, though, I could feel living history all around me, breathing on my neck. Every artifact, every shadow was whispering about the past, saying it was “present.” This little collection of images is my diary of those feelings. It is open to your interpretation - how do you see your place in the history we make today?