Bruce Monroe of Orange to share recollections of Jim Crow Era

Juneteenth special events set for Friday afternoon at the African American Commemorative Park in Orange

Hilary Holladay

Jun 18, 2026

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James Bruce Monroe III grew up in Orange and has lived here almost his entire life. After high school, Monroe enlisted in the U.S. Air Force and spent five years on active duty, mostly at Dover Air Force Base. During a phone interview on Monday (June 15), he told me of his time at the Delaware base, “That’s where I discovered equal opportunity and equal treatment.”

Before joining the Air Force, Monroe, who goes by Bruce, witnessed plenty of unequal opportunity and unequal treatment in his hometown. When he was growing up, for instance, real estate agents would not allow Black people to buy property outside the county’s Black neighborhoods, many of which started out as Freedmen’s communities during Reconstruction—Freetown, Jacksontown, Tibbstown and Little Petersburg, among others.

Monroe will present a talk about his life in Orange in the 1960s, “Growing Up During Jim Crow and the Transition to Integration,” as part of the Juneteenth celebration hosted by the Orange County African American Historical Society (OCAAHS) on Friday, June 19, at the African American Commemorative Park at the corner of Church and Chapman streets in Orange. Activities will run from 3-6 p.m.

As a young man, he witnessed civil rights history being made, slowly and belatedly, in Orange. “When I left in 1974, there were no Blacks living anywhere in the Town of Orange other than the Church Street area, and across the street where Orange Tire is, and all the way back to the old Rosenwald School, that was an all-Black community,” Monroe told me.

“It didn’t change until the late 1970s. When I came back to Orange, I noticed that Blacks were starting to rent apartments and so forth. Very few owned homes. But when they put the bypass through [a development that permanently displaced many Black residents], some of them started branching outside of the town. One place that I know of is just past Preddy’s on the left, those houses set in that bottom. Some of those people moved into that area, but they were kind of scattered throughout the county,” he said.

Upon his return to Orange, Monroe earned an associate’s degree from Piedmont Virginia Community College and then worked for a couple years in the accounting department at Germanna Community College. His next step was to reenlist in the military, this time in the Air National Guard, where he was soon hired full-time. He started out as an aircraft mechanic and then became an aircraft crew chief.

He said, “I performed maintenance and for about seven or eight years, I took care of one airplane—it was my airplane to manage. And then for most of my career, I was a supervisor. I supervised up to 16 airplanes at one time, and I supervised 41, 42 airmen. I trained most of the crew chiefs who enlisted at the Virginia Air Guard, and I led most deployments as maintenance supervisor.”

Before his retirement in 2005, Monroe commuted every day from Orange to Richmond International Airport, where the Air National Guard aircraft were based.

Today, many people in and around Orange know him mainly as a longtime leader of OCAAHS, where he has served as president and continues to serve as a member of the board of directors.

“If you tell history as it is, then everything else takes care of itself”

When I talked to him, Monroe was gearing up to give his talk. He stressed that “there’s nothing political about my speech. I intentionally wrote it in a way that it would not be political, but just factual. If you tell history as it is, then everything else takes care of itself, just presented as it is.”

He continued, “My whole involvement with the Orange County African American Historical Society is from the perspective of my own personal history. I’m not a historian, and I’m not a scholar. I just grew up through part of that history and my whole involvement started with me just taking a walk with a couple people through town and telling them some of my memories of growing up during the Civil Rights movement and what the town was like. And I tried to share that as much as possible. I find that it is interesting to people when I start talking about it, and I’m very surprised at the number of people who really don’t know or understand that history,” he said.

Monroe’s presentation will be the finale of a full afternoon. Juneteenth participants in Orange will have the chance to tour a community tent full of historical displays, enjoy live music and take part in a street art project sponsored by The Arts Center in Orange. There also will be games for both adults and children, and local authors will be on hand to talk about their books.

“Hidden Figures, Living Legacy”

The theme of the OCAAHS celebration is “Hidden Figures, Living Legacy,” with a focus on four African American citizens who contributed to the betterment of Orange County: Gussie Taylor, educator and civic leader; Nanny Helen Burroughs, educator and founder of the National Training School for Women and Girls; Dr. Isaiah Jackson, founder of Jacksontown and community leader; and Dr. Henry Potter Cobbs, general practice physician.

Juneteenth pays tribute to the date—June 19, 1865—when enslaved Black people of Galveston, Texas, learned from Union troops that they were free. This life-changing news arrived more than two years after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Juneteenth has been a federal holiday since 2021.

Monroe told me that this year’s OCAAHS Juneteenth celebration, falling during the year of our country’s 250th anniversary, will help “to tell the complete story of America. We live in Orange in the South, and there are a lot of people who came into Orange who really don’t know the history. I grew up in Orange. and I didn’t know the history growing up because a lot of the history was not taught, and there are a lot of people in Orange of a certain age who never received that history.

“And I think that when you tell history, it really promotes a lot of understanding, and it also brings unity. It helps people understand one another. It inspires people, especially the young, but not only that, it preserves our local history also. So when you look at our history, it really helps us understand the present.”

He added, “One of the main things that I want [the Juneteenth celebration] to do is to honor the contributions of African Americans to Orange and to the founding of this country because that place for them is there, but we have to let people be aware of that history.”