FRONT

NORFOLK 17 CELEBRATE 40 YEARS AFTER A CIVIL RIGHTS MILESTONE CLOSURE OF SIX PUBLIC SCHOOLS PUT CITY, STATE IN FEDERAL BATTLE.

TONY WHARTON, STAFF WRITER
1,855 words
3 January 1998
The Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star, Norfolk, VA
FINAL
A1
English
Copyright (c) 1998 Bell & Howell Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved.

At a friend's funeral in 1958, educator Hortense Wells and civil rights lawyer Hugo Madison started a little-known chapter of Norfolk history that would help hasten the death of segregation in the public schools.

"How is it going with the children?" asked Wells. Both knew which children she meant: the 17 black students who had applied to Norfolk's all-white public schools for admission.

"Well, they are getting restless," Wells recalls Madison saying. He was one of the NAACP's committed young lawyers hoping to break "massive resistance," Virginia's effort to keep the 17 out of Norfolk's white classrooms and maintain segregation by closing six public schools. "We need you to do something for us."

Madison - who died last July - needed books and teachers because he planned to set up a tiny, separate school for the Norfolk 17 at the church he attended, First Baptist Church on Bute Street.

The local leaders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, who knew they were under the eye of national civil rights leaders, didn't want to put the 17 students back into Norfolk's separate, all-black schools. That might relieve some of the pressure on the city and the state to open the white schools.

A school at First Baptist would keep up the spirits of the 17 students, continue their education and prepare them for the very difficult next step, their eventual admission into all-white schools.

Wells got the textbooks - she was an administrator then in the Norfolk schools - and the school succeeded, as did the integration of Norfolk's public schools.

Now, 40 years later, First Baptist (no connection to the one now on Kempsville Road) is celebrating its role in civil rights history. At 4 p.m. Sunday, the church is bringing back about half of the 17 students and their teachers to remember the year that changed so many lives.

The schools' closing, and what it meant, dawned slowly on Patricia Turner.

"At first I was happy," said Turner, who was then 14. "No school, yea! But by October I was a little worried. Then by November I was very worried. And by December I was in tears.

"I didn't see how I could close all these schools. I didn't think I was that brilliant."

She was a top student. She was also black.

Turner and 16 others were the wedge driven into Norfolk's schools by the NAACP to force the city to live up to the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision ordering the gradual desegregation of public schools across the country.

In the second week of June 1958, after U.S. District Judge Walter Hoffman made it clear that segregation had to end, black parents began attempting to enroll their children in Norfolk's white schools.

Turner's mother, Marjorie, had a pragmatic motive: She wanted her children to go to Norview High School because it was blocks away from their home on Johnston Avenue, where she still lives today, rather than the distant Booker T. Washington High that was set aside for black students.

"We just wanted them to attend schools that were near home," said Marjorie Turner. "I didn't see why they had to take the bus all the way to Booker T."

The NAACP's target was the city's six white schools - Granby, Maury and Norview High, and Blair, Northside and Norview Junior High.

It became clear how some whites felt about that. An effigy of a black man was hung in front of Norview High in mid-June, and white students threatened to start fights or walk out if black students were admitted.

On Sept. 29, Gov. J. Lindsay Almond Jr. closed the six schools, plunging the city and state into a drastic confrontation with federal officials and the NAACP. In addition to barring the 17 black students, the decision to close the schools turned away about 10,000 white students.

Norfolk became a national symbol of the battle over integration. President Dwight D. Eisenhower answered questions about the Norfolk crisis at a news conference, and renowned CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow focused an entire show on the city.

In the meantime, the education of the 17 black students quietly continued uninterrupted in several classrooms at First Baptist, an imposing stone structure that is one of the oldest churches in the city. Six teachers had volunteered, and Hortense Wells hauled the textbooks over to the church during two of her lunch hours.

Madison, Wells, and civil rights activist Robert D. Robertson "set it up just like the school system, with a School Board and a superintendent," recalled Charles S. Corprew Jr., one of the teachers.

With six teachers and just 17 students, all personally committed to the project, it was one of the most intensive educational experiences possible.

Patricia Turner, one of the students, said, "It was one on one, it was great. If you knew the answer to the question and raised your hand, you would be called on.

"But if you didn't know the answer, you would be called on anyway!"

Another student, Patricia Godbolt White, said the best part of the experience was "the outpouring of the community. They supported us in every way, educationally, emotionally and socially."

Corprew and the other teachers pressed the students hard, however, because they might face much worse in the white schools and would have to be accustomed to doing their best.

Corprew said years later one of the students told him, "Mr. Corprew, I thought you were the meanest, hardest teacher I ever had. But when I took the exams to be a social worker, I understood what you were driving at."

Massive resistance collapsed in January 1959.

More court decisions had gone against segregation, and many more businessmen and parents were calling for the black students to be admitted and permit Norfolk to return to normal.

On Feb. 2, the six schools reopened and the black students were allowed to enter along with the white students. Nothing happened.

No National Guard escort was present, only a few unmarked police cars and many reporters. There was name-calling, but no violence.

The goal, as when Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in baseball, was for these pioneering black students to have such a calm presence that no one could accuse them of provocation.

"These children were schooled and talked to about what they were up against," Marjorie Turner said. "They were to act with dignity and class.

"They were told, `You're going to be called names. But you know your name. If you hear someone call you something, you just keep walking. That's not your name.' "

The teachers at First Baptist continued tutoring the students in the evening, checking on how things were going at school and making themselves available.

"They would report to us any little incidents that went on, but it was nothing serious," Corprew said. "We let them know that if they needed us at any time they had our phone numbers."

Still, the black students were often alone in their classes, or even an entire school, and they were made to feel unwelcome.

Many of the white students, Patricia White said, "called us names and threw things at us, the things children do when they are taught by their parents to hate."

Patricia Turner said the experience changed her for years.

"I am a very outgoing person, as you can probably tell," she said. "It was very depressing for me. I couldn't understand why nobody liked me. It made me very withdrawn. For many years I became an introvert.

"For months no one made friends with me. But some of them began to realize I wasn't going away, and they also saw that I didn't smell funny, like they had always been told. Also, I'm gifted in math, so I began to make friends that way."

Geraldine Talley Hobby said, "It was lonely. I would just think about the end of the day coming, or pretend I was in another place."

As the year went on, white parents were able to shut the black students out of some activities, like the prom or school plays, by making them private events. Patricia White, despite multiple recommendations from teachers, couldn't get into the National Honor Society.

But the black students found that few teachers made any effort to discriminate, and certain white students did make overtures. In particular, several of the 17 found that children of Navy parents were less likely to be prejudiced.

"They sat and had lunch with me, and they would even come over to my house," White said. "I took a great deal of courage from them."

The 17 students were lucky, in some ways. Some Norfolk students never earned their high school diplomas because of massive resistance: It was estimated at the time that as many as 25 percent of the students didn't return, the so-called "lost class of 1959," although some of those went to private schools.

And the experience gave the black students and teachers involved a deep belief in education that many of them passed on to their own children in turn.

Corprew decided to go back to college for a master's degree in education. He found that the University of Virginia wouldn't admit him because he was black, he said, but the state was willing to pay out-of-state tuition. He went to New York University.

Four or five of the students became teachers or substitute teachers. And they have particular credibility when they talk to their children, or their students, about the importance of education.

Turner said, "When I see a child today who seems to be more interested in their dress and buying things than in education, I tell them, `Education did not come easy for me. And sometimes I fear that everything I did was in vain and I want to hang my head.'

"It's not important how much your shoes cost, it's how far you travel in the shoes you have."

Ultimately, from graduation through reunions and other family connections, Turner earned the ties to Norview her mother had sought.

Turner's niece became a majorette in Norview's marching band, which had excluded her aunt in 1959.

"The first time I saw her marching, tears came to my eyes," Turner said. "It really warmed my heart.

"We're a Norview family."

Photo Courtesy of Marjorie Turner In September 1958, six Norfolk public schools closed to resist federal integration laws. These 17 black students, and 10,000 white students, didn't return until February 1959. Color Photo BILL TIERNAN/The Virginian-Pilot Patricia Turner is one of the 17 students who studied at First Baptist Church on Bute Street while the schools were closed. They also tried to prepare for the prejudice they would face.

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