On April 30, 1939, a very hot Sunday, the World's Fair had its grand opening in New York, N.Y. The April 30 date coincided with the 150th anniversary of George Washington's inauguration in lower Manhattan. Albert Einstein gave a speech and David Sarnoff introduced a new invention called television which broadcast President Franklin Roosevelt's opening speech in the New York metropolitan area.
And over in the Lagoon of Nations stood a large building known as the Belgium Pavilion. It was designed by Belgian architects Victor Bourgeois and Léon Stynen under Henry van de Velde, and is notable as an early example of Modernist architecture in the United States. Former President Herbert Hoover visited the Belgian Building when it was opened as a guest of the Belgian government/
The original plan was for the building to be shipped back to Belgium at the conclusion of the Fair, but six months after the grand opening, Nazi Germany invaded Belgium, and the United States confiscated the building to keep the Nazis from obtaining steel for the war effort.
In 1940 a contest was held among 23 historically black universities, with each HBCU making a case as to why the Belgian Building should be awarded to them. Virginia Union University made the case that the basketball team needed a home court and a library, and on November 4, 1940, the $700,000 structure was awarded to VUU.
On January 1, 1941, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in her newspaper column "It is not only a genture of international goodwill, but a gesture of interracial goodwill."
VUU then started a massive fund-raising campaign to move the building, starting with a benefit baseball game between the Homestead Grays and the Baltimore Elite Giants.
The fund-raising continued through March, 1941, when the Virginia Union's 1939 CIAA Champion "Dream Team" played the Harlem Globetrotters in Richmond on March 7, 1941.
Immediately after the game, the CIAA imposed a six-month "death penalty" upon VUU for playing a professional team. Roland McDaniel, the defending CIAA tennis champion, was stripped of his eligibility and prohibited from defending his title. He was profiled in a 2012 PBS documentary entitled "The Forgotten Champion" and remains VUU's only CIAA tennis champion to this day.
Groundbreaking for the building's relocation took place during May, 1941, with the cornerstone being laid on June 9, 1941.
Fate, however, would step in, as Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and all construction on the rebuilding came to a halt for the duration of the war.
Finally, the building was completed in 1946, and on January 11, 1947, Virginia Union defeated Hampton University 49-45 in the first basketball game played in the building.
The tower would be named the Robert L. Vann Memorial Tower in honor of the Virginia Union graduate who founded the Pittsburgh Courier newspaper.
In 1955, VUU won its first CIAA basketball title in 14 years. In the years that followed, the Belgian Building hosted commencements, boxing matches, fashion shows and even a sweet potato show.
In 1959, the gym was re-christened Barco-Stevens Hall, honoring John W. Barco and Dr. Wesley Stevens. Barco was one of the founders of the VUU Athletic Program and the CIAA while Stevens was a math professor who taught at Virginia Union for over 50 years.
In the years that followed, Barco-Stevens Hall became the premiere showplace for African-American talent. Count Basie, Lionel Hampton, William Warfield and Etta Moten all performed in the storied hall.
During the 1960s, African-American newsmakers made their way to Barco-Stevens. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Coretta Scott King, Muhammad Ali and Jackie Robinson all spoke at Barco-Stevens Hall.
In the 1970s, more dignitaries came to Barco-Stevens, including Julian Bond, Dick Gregory and Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman elected to the United States Congress.
In the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s, VUU became a basketball powerhouse in Barco-Stevens Hall. The Panthers won NCAA Championships in 1980, 1992 and 2005. The women's basketball team won the NCAA Championship in 1983. Dave Robbins would win 713 games as head coach en route to a place in the NCAA College Basketball Hall of Fame.
From 1955 to 2019, VUU men's and women's basketball teams would collect 25 CIAA championships.
1970, the Belgium Building was placed on the National Registry of Historic Buildings and is one of only two buildings still standing from the 1939 World's Fair.
Although the building celebrates its 80th birthday in 2019, the bones are still good, and much more history awaits to be written.
