James L. Virgil never set out to become a legend. He set out to survive. That he ended up doing both, surviving and becoming one of Atlanta’s most beloved entrepreneurial icons, is the kind of story that reminds you what the phrase “self-made” was actually built to describe.
Virgil, known across generations of Atlanta nightlife and business simply as “Mr. V,” passed away on September 7, 2026, at 85. On September 19, family, friends, and decades of the people whose lives he touched gathered at Antioch Baptist Church North to celebrate a life that began in the red dirt of Hazlehurst, Mississippi, and ended as a defining chapter in the story of Black entrepreneurship in the South.
He was born October 27, 1940, to sharecroppers, the second youngest of six children. There was no electricity in the home, no guarantee of school past whatever grade the fields allowed. His parents grew fruits and vegetables on land that wasn’t theirs, and when harvest came, the landowner set the prices and kept the lion’s share, handing back only enough to survive on. James was working the rows beside his father before he was old enough to understand what unfairness meant. He’d understand it soon enough. When he was eight, his father died, and childhood ended with him. There was no time to grieve into adulthood, he was thrust there, expected to help carry a family that Jim Crow Mississippi had already decided didn’t have much room to fall…