Meeting on the grounds of the former Confederate Capitol, the Virginia General Assembly unanimously voted to pass a measure of apology. Sponsors of the apology said they knew of no other state that had passed such a measure.

"This session will be remembered for a lot of things, but 20 years hence I suspect one of those things will be the fact that we came together and passed this resolution," said Donald McEachin, a Democrat who sponsored it in the House of Delegates. Mr McEachin, 45, is the great-grandson of a North Carolina slave who moved to Virginia after the Civil War. He added: "What we had was people with a shared history - those who may have been the descendants of slaves, those who may have been descendants of slave owners - they're all here in the General Assembly and we were able to come together for this."

The resolution said government-sanctioned slavery "ranks as the most horrendous of all depredations of human rights and violations of our founding ideals in our nation's history. The abolition of slavery was followed by systematic discrimination, enforced segregation, and other insidious institutions and practices toward Americans of African descent rooted in racism, racial bias, and racial misunderstanding."

The apology comes ahead of commemorations in May to mark the 400th anniversary of the first permanent English settlement in America, at Jamestown in 1607. The first Africans arrived in 1619.

The resolution was the latest step in a series of moves that Virginia has made to address its segregationist past. In 1989 it became the first state to elect a black governor when Douglas Wilder won election.