In the nearly 60 years that he has lived in Charlottesville, University of Virginia history professor George Gilliam has had a long career spanning multiple areas of public service and politics. Now, he is retiring after giving his final lecture last week.
From 1972 to 1976, Gilliam served on the Charlottesville City Council, helping to pass monumental legislation. During his tenure, councilors approved the creation of the Downtown Mall and McGuffey Art Center, as well as the city’s public and school bus systems. In 1974, Gilliam also ran as the Democratic candidate for Virginia’s 7th Congressional District.
After being active in local politics and working as a lawyer in Charlottesville for 25 years, Gilliam—who received his law degree from UVA in 1968, after graduating from Columbia University in 1965—decided in his late 50s that he wanted to return to academia, heading back to UVA to earn his master’s degree in history. He taught classes at Piedmont Virginia Community College and Washington and Lee University, before joining UVA’s history department in 1999.
The longtime professor often tells his students how much more rewarding teaching is than practicing law.
“The feeling that I developed of lawyering was that every single day when I would get up, I knew I was going to be angry,” says Gilliam. “I was gonna be fighting over something with somebody. I just finally got to the point where I said, ‘I just don’t find this any fun.’ And that’s when I decided to start exploring seriously what I would need to do in order to go back to school.”
While earning his Ph.D. in history from UVA, Gilliam ran the Miller Center Forum—a public affairs program inviting world-class speakers for a one-hour conversation—and worked to get the program on PBS stations, hosting 400 guests over eight years. He’s also served as the center’s senior fellow for national engagement, and assistant director for public programs.
At the age of 71, Gilliam finally received his Ph.D. in 2013—he says that it is one of the most difficult things he has ever done, but that he loved every minute of it.
Gilliam’s own family history coincided with the major historical events he teaches in class. He was born around the time the U.S. entered into World War II. All of his grandparents were born in the 1880s in Petersburg, Virginia, while his great-grandparents fought in the Civil War. Although Gilliam stands on a different side of the Civil War from them, he grew up with a respect for history, and wanted to tell the truth about what happened in the past.
“One of the things that I find the most interesting and challenging about history is that so much of what I learned growing up is wrong,” says Gilliam. ”Textbooks were wrong. The people who were teaching, they weren’t particularly well prepared [so] I’ve tried to spend time sort of untangling things.”
After retiring, Gilliam will continue working on a project examining Virginia’s response to massive resistance, when white schools across the state, including Venable Elementary and Lane High schools, closed to prevent desegregation in the 1950s. He is in the process of interviewing around 60 people who were students during that turbulent era.
He also plans to travel around the country for a few years with his wife, but has no plans to move away from Charlottesville. He says he loves the city mainly for the students, some of whom he has remained in touch with over the past two decades. He also enjoys watching UVA basketball and football games—he taught all but one member of the school’s basketball team that won the national championship in 2019.
“Charlottesville is just a wonderful place to live. The longer we’re here, the more we like it,” says Gilliam. “It would take something very, very powerful to get us to leave Charlottesville.”