Republished from 2003 profiles

Francis Foster was born in Richmond's historic Jackson Ward on Feb. 28, 1921.

He grew up in an era when Jackson Ward was one of the most vibrant African-American neighborhoods in America. Restaurants and banks and retail establishments of every description did a booming business.

It was a time of Jim Crow laws and segregation, but it also was a time when black families tended to look after one another, he said, and a strong sense of community pervaded nearly every block of Jackson Ward.

TIMES-DISPATCH, 2000

"A lot of us hung out at the corner of Brook [Road] and Clay Street at May's Drug Store," Foster said. "Upstairs over the drugstore was the dental office of Dr. James Chiles. James Chiles' grandfather was the man who came up and tapped [Confederate President] Jefferson Davis on the shoulder at St. Paul's Church and gave him a note that they would have to evacuate the city of Richmond."

Being able to spontaneously serve up such choice morsels of African-American history - a history that had largely been ignored until the late 20th century - has become one of Foster's endearing trademarks.

He has become the city's most widely quoted authority on black history.

For example, on Jan. 13, 1990, when L. Douglas Wilder was inaugurated as America's first elected black governor, it was Foster who gave the event a Richmond perspective.

"Something has come into fruition, the seed of which had been laid down many years ago," Foster said then.

He recalled that Wilder's father, Robert, had worked at the Richmond-based Southern Aid Insurance Co., the oldest black-owned insurance company in the United States.

Robert Wilder's boss, James Oliver West, filed a lawsuit in 1928 that led to black participation in the state's Democratic primary, he said. And more than half a century later, L. Douglas Wilder, running on the Democratic ticket, made history.

Through the years, Foster has been a prolific letter writer to Richmond's newspapers, correcting errors of fact about black history.

After serving in World War II and rising to the rank of captain, Foster spent his working life as a dentist and later as a professor of dentistry at Virginia Commonwealth University's Medical College of Virginia.

He is a graduate of Virginia Union University and of the Howard University College of Dentistry.

Foster has turned down frequent entreaties that he run for public office. Instead, he has devoted himself to community affairs.

He has served on the Richmond School Board and on the boards of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Richmond Public Library and the Historic Richmond Foundation, among others.