"School Desegregation: Learn, Preserve, and Empower" is a project to find, catalog, and encourage the preservation of records that tell the story of Virginia’s school desegregation. The project will include a traveling exhibit from April to June to gather personal accounts and artifacts from the 1940s to the 1980s. Locations include Hampton, Richmond, Farmville, Lynchburg, Alexandria and the Eastern Shore.

The project hopes to fill in "the missing piece of history’s puzzle ... the thousands of untold stories of the people who personally experienced integration. From segregation to massive resistance to desegregation, they bore witness to emerging social change. Their stories help us to understand the enormity of the struggle that brought about that change."

On Wednesday, March 14, 2012, a news conference was held in Richmond to kick off the project which is a collaboration of the DOVE Project (Desegregation of Virginia Education), AARP Virginia, Virginia State Conference NAACP, and the Urban League of Hampton Roads.

The DOVE project was created nearly four years ago by Sonia Yaco, ODU's Special Collections Librarian and University Archivist, as a collaboration among universities, libraries, and archives in Virginia to identify and preserve materials relating to school desegregation. A growing catalog and other information is available from the ODU Library Web site.