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San Antonio Express-News (Texas)
February 29, 2004, Sunday , METRO

Veteran recalls crossing color line at Virginia high school

BYLINE: Sonja Garza

SECTION: METRO / SOUTH TEXAS; Black History Month ; Fifth in a series ; Pg. 1B

LENGTH: 676 words

When Louis Cousins, an earnest 15-year-old with thick black-framed glasses, solemnly strode up the stone steps of a Norfolk, Va., high school on Feb. 2, 1959, he didn't simply enter his sophomore year.

He made history.

Cousins, now a military retiree living in San Antonio, became the first - and at that time the only - black student at Maury High School.

As part of a group dubbed the Norfolk 17, Cousins and 16 other black children integrated the public school system in Norfolk four years after the Supreme Court's landmark Brown vs. Board of Education decision struck down the practice of "separate but equal" public education.

"All of us throughout the Norfolk 17 had the same responsibility," Cousins recalled. "We were there for a purpose ... We were there to open the doors not only for ourselves, but for our race."

On that day in 1959, Cousins donned dark slacks, a white shirt, a tie and a tan jacket for the chilly morning.

Escorted by his mother, Cousins - described as "a serious-faced Negro boy" in news accounts - arrived at the school at 8:43 a.m.

An Associated Press reporter described that arrival:

"The moment Louis Cousins and his smiling mother rounded the corner of the school and started up the marble steps to the front entrance, silence fell upon the crowd of teen-agers congregated at the doors. Before them, the white students fell back to open a narrow aisle. There was no word of greeting. No hostile word. Only curious stares - and silence."

Cousins couldn't help but feel alone.

"This school was totally white, all white students," he said. "The only thing that might have been black was the staff that did the floors."

Aside from the isolation, Cousins - like the other Norfolk 17 children - also endured taunts. He recalled students would sit on the brick wall around the school before classes began and hurl insults as he walked by.

"We were called tar baby, nigger, Sambo in the hallways," recounted the 60-year-old Cousins.

At his home, tormenters broke out windows and once burned a cross in his front yard to "symbolize the KKK," he said.

The only time he lost his composure, Cousins recalled, was when a student spat on him. Cousins chased the classmate down the hall and into the principal's office. The student later was suspended.

Delores Johnson, another of the Norfolk 17, said Cousins' experience was unique in that he was all alone at his school. Johnson was among a half-dozen black students who integrated another local high school.

"Everybody should have equal rights to go to the school nearest your home, rather than get on two or three buses," she said.

Cousins spent an entire year as his school's sole black student, "trying not to let myself down or my race down."

For Cousins, it was a constant struggle keeping up with the curriculum at the white school, which varied vastly from his previous campus.

"I was a top student in the black school," he said. "I went to the white school, and I had to learn different books, different subjects, different everything."

Over time, Cousins did make a few friends "who were brave enough to go outside their little group." He also recalls a homeroom teacher he regarded as his anchor. And Cousins remembers a particularly kind upperclassman who joined him as he sat alone in the cafeteria one day.

Cousins went on to join the Air Force. He traveled, and was a combat medic in Vietnam. He and his wife, Deloris, married since 1963, have one son and one grandson.

Today, he is a medical technologist at Methodist Ambulatory Surgery Hospital and continues his lifelong quest for learning.

While Cousins acknowledges that de facto segregation exists today due to socioeconomic reasons, he said he doesn't believe the Norfolk 17's efforts were in vain. Cousins said black and Anglo students learned from each other.

"No, it wasn't for nothing," he said. "It definitely wasn't for nothing."

sgarza@express-news.net

LOAD-DATE: March 1, 2004

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

GRAPHIC: PHOTOS: 1) WILLIAM LUTHER/STAFF ; 2) VIRGINIAN-PILOT FILE PHOTO : 1) Louis Cousins talks about being one of the Norfolk 17, a group of black students who integrated Norfolk, Va., schools in 1959. In front of him is a scrapbook showing a picture of Cousins on his first day of class at his newly integrated school. ; 2) This 1959 photo shows Louis Cousins on his first day at Maury High School in Norfolk, Va., getting the cold shoulder from Anglo classmates in the auditorium.

TYPE: FEATURE