For anyone who owns a home or land, it has become common to receive a text or letter from a persistent real estate agent or investor offering to purchase their property. In most Black communities, where homeowners have labored long and hard to acquire a home for themselves or family members, the response to such predators is a polite — or not so polite — “no.”

So imagine the distress experienced by so many Black families when Christopher Newport University, propped up by the city of Newport News, came along several decades ago claiming eminent domain. In short, eminent domain is the power of the government to take private property and convert it to public use.

Last fall, journalist Brandi Kellam’s well-researched and well-written articles for the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism and ProPublica provided a stunning look at how CNU expanded its campus, increased student enrollment and grew its reputation on the backs of Newport News’ middle-class Black residents, who were forced from their homes by eminent domain some 60-plus years ago.

Over a two-year period, Ms. Kellam met with former residents of the Shoe Lane community, learning about their lives through interviews and decades-old photographs. Many of the community’s residents or their ancestors had owned property in the community since the early 1900s.

Ms. Kellam and her colleagues pored through countless land, legal and municipal documents and records, retracing the steps taken to expand CNU, which, in 1964, moved to its current location housed on a 75-acre tract of land. Today, CNU’s expansion has reduced the Shoe Lane neighborhood in Newport News to just five houses, Ms. Kellam noted.

Ms. Kellam’s VCIJ and ProPublica report garnered wide attention not just in Virginia, but in other Virginia cities and other states where similar actions occurred involving Black communities.

One result of Ms. Kellam’s probe came earlier this year when a Virginia commission was established to scrutinize four decades of CNU’s property acquisitions, probing the decisions that led to locating and expanding its campus in the midst of a once-thriving Black community.

In January, Delegate Delores McQuinn, 81st District, introduced legislation to establish the commission. It is to include 10 legislators, the state’s two top education officials and seven members of the public, according to news reports. The commission’s funding will be $28,760 per year for members’ expenses. Commission staff will be paid separately by the state Division of Legislative Services.

The Virginia legislature’s action represents a milestone for the budding national movement to seek compensation for families dispossessed by university expansion, Ms. Kellam’s subsequent reporting revealed.

Yet the fact that Black land and property were so willfully taken will never soothe the pain of Shoe Lane’s former homeowners.

In a recent interview, Delegate McQuinn said that after she read the VCIJ and ProPublica articles last fall, “it made my blood boil.”

Rather than let her anger fester, she was compelled to act.

“The bottom line is that land had been in the Black community forever,” she said. “The land was unfairly confiscated by Jim Crow tactics described by Blacks as being ‘slicked out of their land,’ by white people.

After exploring the matter further and speaking with a couple of attorneys, Delegate McQuinn quickly gained support in her efforts to find a way to repair some of the damage inflicted upon dozens of Black families. Ultimately, she was successful in introducing House Bill 1066.

The Bill reads: The Commission to Study the History of the Uprooting of Black Communities by Public Institutions of Higher Education in the Commonwealth establishes the 19-member legislative Commission to Study the History of the Uprooting of Black Communities by Public Institutions of Higher Education for the purpose of studying and determining (i) whether any public institution of higher education in the Commonwealth has purchased, expropriated, or otherwise taken possession of property owned by any individual within the boundaries of a community in which a majority of the residents are Black in order to establish or expand the institution’s campus and (ii) whether and what form of compensation or relief would be appropriate for any such individual or any of his lineal descendants.

“I was surprised that it happened the first time that it was introduced,” she said of the measure.

“I have to thank my colleagues, the appropriations chair (Delegate McQuinn just so happens to sit on that very committee) and the Speaker of the House (Don Scott, Virginia’s first Black Speaker of the House.)”

Delegate McQuinn’s relief for the support she gained is palpable.

“I’m grateful we were able to get this process done,” she said. “It’s imperative that we look at these issues because it still impacts us today.”