2026 SESSION
ENROLLED
HOUSE JOINT RESOLUTION NO. 112
Celebrating the life of Charles Wright Sydnor, Jr.
Agreed to by the House of Delegates, February 9, 2026
Agreed to by the Senate, February 12, 2026
WHEREAS, Charles Wright Sydnor, Jr., a highly admired scholar who served as president of Emory & Henry University and executive director of the Virginia Holocaust Museum during his distinguished career, died on November 28, 2025; and
WHEREAS, Charles “Charlie” Wright Sydnor, Jr., was born in Jefferson, Tennessee, in 1943 and moved to the Richmond area with his family around 1950; and
WHEREAS, Charlie Sydnor graduated from Emory & Henry University in 1965 and was awarded a fellowship to study at Vanderbilt University, from which he earned master's and doctoral degrees in Holocaust history; and
WHEREAS, Charlie Sydnor pursued a career in higher education at The Ohio State University and what is now Longwood University and authored Soldiers of Destruction: A History of the SS Death's Head Division, 1933–1945 , for which he received the 1979 James Harvey Robinson Prize from the American Historical Association; and
WHEREAS, in recognition of his breadth of knowledge on the Holocaust, Charlie Sydnor served as an expert witness for the Office of Special Investigations in the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice from 1982 to 2006 and testified in denaturalization cases against former Nazi concentration camp guards; and