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PIONEERS OF PROGRESS. FIFTY YEARS AGO, THE U.S. SUPREME COURT ; RULED THAT THE DOCTRINE OF "SEPARATE, BUT EQUAL"; WAS FUNDAMENTALLY FLAWED... Series: BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION: 1954-2004 First in an occasional series

MIKE GRUSS AND PHILIP WALZER THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
4,039 words
1 February 2004
The Virginian-Pilot & The Ledger-Star
FINAL
A1
English
Copyright (c) 2004 Bell & Howell Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved.

... Then on Feb. 2 1959, 17 Norfolk students fought fear and prejudice to integrate city schools. Their sacrifice made history, but lasting change has proved elusive.

A half-century ago, the Supreme Court said a black welder from Topeka, Kan., was right: His children shouldn't have to walk through railroad switching yards, ride a bus for 30 minutes, then wait outside an all-black school for another half-hour before the doors opened.

Especially when an all-white school was a six-block walk from home.

In 1954, in the solidly segregated South, not a single black child attended a white school. Then the court weighed in. To separate black children "solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone."

Chief Justice Earl Warren, writing for a unanimous bench, deliberately crafted a simple verdict - one of the shortest in the court's history - so that every American could understand: "Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal."

Times were changing and the stubborn South - with its "whites only" restaurants, water fountains, theaters and schools - had to change with them.

In Little Rock, Ark., Confederate flags waved, riots broke out and National Guardsmen with helmets and rifles protected Central High School students during integration.

Virginia met the feds with the Massive Resistance movement. Norfolk joined a handful of cities that pushed the idea to its extreme: If black students had to attend white schools, then white schools would close. In Norfolk in 1958, 10,000 students, black and white, were shut out of school for five months. The buildings didn't reopen until 45 years ago tomorrow.

When the chains and padlocks were removed from school doors, the burden of desegregation bore down on 17 black children who were greeted at white schools with isolation and ignorance.

In the days after, even they claimed the whole thing went off smoothly, despite being robbed of what every child wants - to fit in.

The efforts of the Norfolk 17 did not spark immediate change. Fifteen years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, integration was little more than tokenism at most schools.

Then in 1971, the Supreme Court intervened to force busing. Parents picketed. Protests and student boycotts followed. Schools were desegregated by the next year.

Fifteen years later, in the mid-1980s, courts would rule that schools nationwide were no longer separate and inherently unequal. Court-ordered busing was struck down, and Norfolk children returned to neighborhood elementary schools.

Today, nearly 50 years after the groundbreaking Supreme Court decision, 12,000 black students are largely segregated from white counterparts in South Hampton Roads public schools.

An additional 2,300 white students attend almost exclusively white public schools.

This quiet resegregation could be evidence of healing - proof, almost, that court orders are no longer needed to transcend the cultural gap. Or it could be the pendulum swinging toward a haunting past.

Two of the Norfolk 17 - who as children stood on the front lines of integration, who were nearly crushed by racist hate, who paid a steep price to secure an equal education for those who followed - wonder themselves.

Facing racism head on

Andrew Heidelberg and Patricia Turner dressed smartly on Feb. 2, 1959.

Heidelberg borrowed one of his father's jackets - a leather vest with wool sleeves. He thought it made him look cool.

Turner wore a white, waist-length leather coat that her parents had bought after she dropped a few hints.

It was a bright but brisk day - their first day of school with white students. They awoke excited but scared. The kind of scared that makes you forget how to breathe and turns the younger brother who yanked the head off your doll into your best friend.

Turner, then 14, grabbed tight to her brother James' hand on one side and her friend LaVera Forbes' on the other as they walked the 1.3 miles to Norview Junior High School in Norfolk.

Heidelberg, 15, hoped he would arrive at Norview High School and fade into the mob of students unnoticed and unharmed.

That didn't happen for either of them.

After Turner and her younger charges crossed Widgeon Road, the neighborhood boundary separating black from white, the assault began.

On both sides of the street, white adults and teenagers queued up, spewing insults - "Nigger!" "Tar baby!" "Aunt Jemima!" Hecklers brandished sticks, while police practiced selective enforcement, allowing them to toss only the smaller ones.

As sticks rained down on them, Turner plowed on, eyes straight ahead. She was almost two people in one - the scared girl who stopped breathing, but also the girl in the bubble, protected by the face of God, seeing, but not feeling, blocking it all out.

The bubble was punctured when Turner reached Norview Junior High. Outside the entrance, her brother and friend went one way, toward seventh grade, while she went another, to eighth grade.

For the first time that day, she was alone.

Andrew Heidelberg felt ready for the start of school. When his parents first approached him about entering Norview High, he agreed, because he believed the chances of it happening were zilch.

Now, standing in front of Norview before the first bell, flashbulbs popped. Journalists from across the country and Europe sprayed him with questions about whether he was scared. He laughed nervously and tried to fit in.

Heidelberg always dreamed his first day of high school would be about girls - girls and football. But now, at the eye of the storm, lessons learned in a church basement kept running through his head.

Don't talk back.

If they spit, don't move.

Don't look around.

Heidelberg stared straight ahead, the noise overwhelming him.

When the school doors opened, Heidelberg had no idea where he was supposed to go. He had been told what to say and how to act, but not where to go.

Now, there was no one to talk to.

Heidelberg followed classmates into the auditorium and learned his first rule of survival in an environment that would become increasingly ferocious.

He would never arrive early for school again, timing his trips so he would slip in just as the first bell rang.

Socially, Heidelberg and Turner were beginning a journey that would shape their lives. Academically, the toughest tests had come months before.

In the basement of the Bute Street Baptist Church, the Norfolk 17 started the school year in September 1958 sequestered with their teachers - carefully selected by the NAACP - preparing for the challenges of integration. They changed classes, went on field trips, and once CBS News correspondent Edward R. Murrow visited the makeshift school and brought the national spotlight to Norfolk.

Teachers drilled the students on reading, math and Spanish. Most importantly, students prepared for their first days in Norfolk's all- white schools. Every day, the 17 were told how arduous a task they faced, lessons meant to callous their emotions.

"It was a kind of brainwashing," Heidelberg said. "We were doing something for our race. They kept telling you: 'We need you to take it easy. You can't fight.' "

Turner's teachers could not have prepared her for what awaited her in homeroom at Norview.

When she walked in, she saw a dreadfully familiar face. The teacher, who also would be her history teacher, was the man she had seen on the TV news the night before, blustering, red-faced, into the camera: If you put one of those "Nigras" in my class, I'm going to fix it so you never see it again.

As he shut the door to start the day, she was certain he was going to kill her.

Heidelberg tried to stay close to teachers as he walked to the front of the auditorium for his class assignments. If he was near the teachers, he reasoned, at least they would prevent a lynching. The students began singing, "Fee fee, fi fi, fo fo, fum, I smell a nigger in the auditorium." The taunts echoed off the walls as Heidelberg took in his surroundings.

"Norview was so pretty. Velvet blue drapes. It was beautiful. Clean and beautiful," Heidelberg said. "It was like, 'Look at this place. God, they got it all.' "

The books at Norview were new. At his old school, they had been used and torn, eroded from years of use by white students.

From the looks of the place, Norview was heaven.

Turner chose to sit in the front row, near the door, the quickest escape route in case her teacher attacked. She didn't have to worry. He wouldn't touch her - or her schoolwork.

Whenever she handed in a paper, whenever he returned a test, he'd first put on a pair of white plastic gloves to avoid contact with Turner.

"He never acknowledged my existence," Turner said. "He wrote me down as not participating in class, but when I raised my hand, he didn't call on me."

White classmates also tried to ignore her - clustering their desks away from hers, taking circuitous routes to avoid breathing her air.

Outside class, they showed an ugly interest in Turner, taunting her virtually every day.

They smeared feces on her locker. Stuck gum in her hair. Threw pennies at her. Spat saliva and curses. Overturned her cafeteria table.

Back in her neighborhood, she found little comfort. Friends would turn their backs when she approached, terrified that the troubles clinging to her would rub off.

The bubble had turned to cold metal, numbing her pain. "I was a robot," she said. "I was dead by then. All your feelings were gone. You're nothing."

When Turner moved up to Norview High School later in 1959, she encountered new possibilities, and new barriers.

Turner made the first team in field hockey. But she never played a single game: "The other schools said they wouldn't play if I came."

She was told if she went to the prom, it would get shut down.

"I didn't get the opportunity to have a crush in high school," she said. "Who was there to have a crush on? I never learned how to date. You know that thing about black people knowing how to dance? Not me. How was I going to dance when nobody ever danced with me?"

For a while, the janitor was Turner's only white friend at Norview High. He'd scrub her locker so she wouldn't have to smell the feces or see the scrawls every day.

She began regaining her feelings in 11th grade, when she began to attract white friends, partly with her prowess in field hockey and math. But the friendships had limits: "Once they got outside school they couldn't talk to me because their parents wouldn't let them."

At Norview High, Heidelberg would catch himself in the hallway, staring at photographs of the school's football teams. The faces staring back were all white.

"What you looking at, nigger?" Other students promised that his photo would never be on the wall, that Heidelberg, a star tailback in Norfolk's intramural leagues, would never put on a clean Norview Pilot uniform and know the acceptance that being a football player in a football-proud school brings.

Day after day, Heidelberg heard the slurs telling him to get out and go home.

As a senior in the fall of 1961, Heidelberg made the football team. When he pulled on his No.?33 jersey, the beautiful white uniform with classic blue bars, he no longer felt shunned.

He scored seven touchdowns that year. White fans would cheer for the coach to "give the ball to the black boy."

"The football part was easy," he said. "The names, the punching, the hits - that goes with football."

Football provided a quick bond with his teammates, but there were others to remind him he was different. Waiting for dinner before a game in Prince Edward County - where the schools remained closed to avoid integration - an assistant coach met Heidelberg at the restaurant.

"He says, 'Andy ?'?" and in retelling the story Heidelberg himself takes a deep breath, bites his thumb and fights his watering eyes before starting again. "They're not gonna feed us with you in here."

That moment washed away the two touchdowns from the week before, the cheering, the status of school hero.

"I had forgot I was black," he said. The restaurant was quick to remind him.

So Heidelberg dragged himself to the kitchen. There he was welcomed by two black members of the staff who had prepared him a meal better than all the rest.

"They were proud just that I was there," he said. Proud that a black teenager was on the football team at a white high school. "I was feeling just the opposite."

A few minutes later, two of Heidelberg's teammates walked into the kitchen.

"If you're eating in the kitchen, we're eating in the kitchen," they told him.

From desegregation

to resegregation

Like most of the Norfolk 17, Turner and Heidelberg left the city not long after high school, fleeing the pain and the past. Turner went first to Richmond and then to Philadelphia, attending business college and, later, nursing school. Heidelberg moved to Rhode Island.

Other black students took their places, but the vision of Brown v. Board of Education remained elusive. Communities remained largely separate, and so did more than half of the schools in Norfolk.

To expedite integration, judges nationwide began mandating busing - white students were sent to black schools and vice versa. Widespread busing came to South Hampton Roads in 1971.

"I learned a lot about people," said Diana Fehlhaber, now 45, who as a white teenager was bused from the northern part of Norfolk across the city to Campostella Junior High. "Just because somebody is different or lives in a different neighborhood doesn't mean they're bad."

To others, who felt wrenched from their neighborhoods and thrust into not-always-welcoming worlds, busing cut childhoods short and brought lasting pain.

Kathy Freudenberg, also white, lived in the South Bayview section of Norfolk and, in the seventh grade, began riding the bus - more than six miles and one hour - to Campostella.

At Campostella, which remained mostly black, she got into fights almost daily with black students. Once, a girl cornered her in the bathroom and cut off her hair with a pair of scissors.

"I felt they were saying, 'This is our territory, and you aren't welcome here,'?" said Freudenberg, now 41. "Maybe they were as scared as we were."

Freudenberg vowed never to let her daughters repeat her experience. As an adult, she testified in public hearings against busing.

Voices of protest joined hers. Black and white. Eventually, courts came to the opinion that cities had done what they could to eliminate the vestiges of segregation, that they no longer had to spend millions busing children. In 1986, Norfolk became the first city in the nation to be released from the order to bus for integration.

That year, the city scrapped elementary school busing. Middle school busing ended in 2001. Despite increasing pressure, high school busing continues today.

Similar decisions brought the return of "neighborhood schools" across the country, schools that sometimes reflect the very isolation that the Supreme Court had outlawed.

In 1977, at the height of busing, just three of 137 schools in Norfolk, Portsmouth and Chesapeake were more than 90 percent one race. By 2002-03, that figure had jumped to 22 of 119 schools. Five other schools in Suffolk and Virginia Beach also were predominantly one race.

Each of the predominantly black schools serves communities plagued by poverty. And many struggle academically. Only one-third have earned full accreditation from the Virginia Department of Education.

Fifty years ago, NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall warned against this, telling the Supreme Court, "They can build an exact duplicate, but if it is segregated, it is unequal."

Shades of progress

Forty-five years ago, Patricia Turner helped integrate a middle school. Now she sees the fruits of her labors firsthand.

She returned to Norfolk in 1976 to continue her work as a pediatric nurse. But she found more satisfaction in keeping children busy with counting games while waiting for the doctor.

So in 1990, she switched to teaching. For the past 11 years, she has been at Blair Middle School, which has shifted from an evenly mixed student body to two-thirds black, a change caused by the drift of whites out of Norfolk and the abolition of busing.

Like those who championed integration in the '50s, Turner voices resignation about the turnaround in statistics and court orders.

Though she supported busing, she said: "You can bus all day and all night, and it's not going to happen. Norfolk is predominantly black. You're not going to integrate what you don't have, and you can't make people move because they're happy where they are."

She sees progress in the interaction among races at Blair. Children still get picked on. But it's because they didn't brush their teeth or they're not wearing name-brand shoes.

"I don't really think they see the color of each other's skin," said Turner, who is 59. "If they don't like you, they don't like you, and they don't care what color you are."

With a trembling voice and looks that demand instant quiet, Turner can strike a forbidding presence. "Are you going to do something today or are you going to wait till next week?" she prodded a lazy student in class.

Underneath her prickly hide lies a caring spirit that doesn't stay hidden for long. In the hall after school one Wednesday last month, she greeted a white girl - "Joy, I don't see you anymore" - and bent to touch their heads together. "That's our thing," Turner explained.

A minute later, she caught up with a black student and walked hand in hand with him for several steps. "Chris, be good, you hear?"

"I get hugs and kisses from children of all classes and backgrounds," Turner said. "I call them my rainbow children. After the storm the Norfolk 17 went through, when you look into the sky and you see that beautiful rainbow, you know it was all worth it."

But her early experiences exacted a personal toll. Twice divorced, Turner doesn't expect to marry again.

"I know I'm missing part of my childhood," she said. "I don't think I knew love until 20 years ago. I don't think I was capable of love until then."

Andrew Heidelberg carried a football and decades of prejudice into the end zone for Norview High School. Today he is Hampton's chief deputy treasurer. On the wall of his office hangs a resolution from Norfolk's City Council honoring him as a pioneer of integration.

When city representatives called - 43 years after he first walked into Norview - he wanted to tell them to go to hell.

For years, Heidelberg was irritated that Andrew Heidelberg was always remembered publicly as an athlete, not as the child who toiled to improve his English so he wouldn't be laughed at in class, not as the student who earned good grades.

But it was football, not his passive resistance in the hallways or classrooms, that he now believes helped forge a path to greater racial understanding. Football forced students and parents - black and white - to come together, to rally behind Norview and behind Heidelberg.

Heidelberg's two daughters graduated from Norview in the early 1980s - a distinctly different school from the one their father attended. Norview is now two-thirds black.

Heidelberg sees racial isolation creeping into other South Hampton Roads schools.

And he thinks out loud.

"I wonder, sometimes, was all of it worth it?"

n Reach Mike Gruss at 222-5133 or mike.gruss@pilotonline.com.

n Reach Philip Walzer at 222-5105 or phil.walzer@pilotonline.com.

Caption: Photo VIRGINIAN-PILOT file photo Louis Cousins was the first and only black student at Norfolk's Maury High School in 1959. Graphic SEGREGATION Black children were taught in inferior schools, sometimes miles from their homes, with used books handed down from all-white schools. DESEGREGATION Two years after the Brown decision, in 1956, the NAACP filed suit to end segregation in Norfolk, the first such suit in the region. But later that year, the General Assembly approved Massive Resistance, cutting off state funds to any school that integrated. Massive Resistance was struck down by the state Supreme Court in January 1959, and the next month, the Norfolk 17 integrated city schools. Twelve years later, Norfolk began full-scale busing to help achieve integration. RESEGREGATION In 1975, a federal court ruled that Norfolk had fulfilled its requirement to eliminate segregation, opening the way for the end of busing. After 11 years and much debate, the city stopped elementary school busing. Middle school busing ended in 2001. The question of ending high school busing was raised last November by the City Council, but the School Board has not embraced the idea. With the end of busing, many schools around the region now draw students from close by, so school populations reflect their communities. Twenty-three local schools are now predominantly black, while four are predominantly white. Graphic The Harvard Civil Rights Project defines "intensely segregated schools" as those buildings where students of a single race make up more than 90 percent - or less than 10 percent - of the student body. ChesapeakeBlack White Thurgood Marshall Elem. 93% 7% Camelot E.76%10% Butts Road Int.6%91% Norfolk Roberts Park E.100%0% Young Park E.100%0% Tidewater Park E.100%0% St. Helena E.99%0% Bowling Park E.99%0% James Monroe E.99%1% Jacox E.99%1% Campostella E.98%2% Chesterfield Heights E.98%2% Lindenwood E.95%3% Ruffner Middle90%8% Portsmouth Emily Spong E.100%0% Lakeview E.100%0% Brighton E.99%1% Mount Hermon E.98%0% Douglass Park E.98%1% I.C. Norcom High96%3% S.H. Clarke Academy E.96%4% Park View E.90%8% Suffolk Booker T. Washington E.90%8% Virginia Beach Williams E.86%8% Red Mill E.6%90% Creeds E.4%94% Kingston E.2%93% Source: Virginia Department of Education. Percentages are rounded off. Photo THE NORFOLK 17 1. Andrew Heidelberg 2. Louis Cousins 3. Patricia Godbolt 4. Carol Wellington 5. Reginald Young 6. Alvarez Frederick Gonsouland 7. Edward Jordan 8. Olivia Driver Lindsay 9. Betty Jean Reed 10. Johnnie Rouse 11. Delores Johnson Brown 12. LaVera Forbes 13. James Turner Jr. 14. Lolita Portis 15. Patricia Turner 16. Claudia Wellington 17. Geraldine Talley Hobby Photos Patricia Turner, center, teaches math to sixth-graders, including Darsey Renz, left, and Jaccarri Williams, at Blair Middle School. She says today's students look beyond skin color in forming friendships. Photos GENEVIEVE PROSS/THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT ABOVE: Patricia Turner stands along the path on Johnstons Road that she used to walk along to and from Norview Junior High School when she and 16 other black students led the local integration in 1959. RIGHT: Turner, center, on her first day at the previously all-white school in Norfolk. Photos Courtesy Andrew Heidelberg Andrew Heidelberg was the first black student to play on Norview High School's football team, when he was a senior in 1961. He scored seven touchdowns that year, earning the respect of white teammates and the team's fans. GENEVIEVE ROSS/THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT ABOVE: Andrew Heidelberg stands in the hallways of Norview High School where, in 1959, he dreamed of becoming a member of the football team. He got his chance in 1961, his senior year, right.

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