OUR MILLENNIUM

"MASSIVE RESISTANCE" DEEPENS A RACIAL WOUND VIRGINIA DEFIES FEDERALLY MANDATED DESEGRATION BY CLOSING ITS SCHOOLS

STEVE STONE, STAFF WRITER
1,768 words
29 August 1999
The Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star, Norfolk, VA
FINAL
M4
English
Copyright (c) 1999 Bell & Howell Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved.

It was not the South's, or Virginia's, finest hour.

In a clear, defiant voice, the message - often put in so many hurtful words - was: "We don't want no coloreds in our white schools."

Defiance of the 1954 Supreme Court mandate to integrate public schools peaked in 1958 in Virginia. But instead of a governor blocking the school doors, the commonwealth opted for a padlock. It was called "Massive Resistance."

On the surface, Virginia in general and Norfolk in particular seemed an odd place for racial confrontation over schools in the 1950s.

Virginia was "perhaps the most harmonious state in the South," V.O. Key wrote in his book, "Southern Politics." And Norfolk, by Virginia standards, was a cosmopolitan power house, in many respects at its zenith.

It was among the busiest East Coast ports; home to the world's largest naval base; the fastest-growing city in the state and one of the top 10 fastest-growing markets nationally; it had an international flair, owing to NATO's presence; it was connected to the nation by nine major railroads. Race relations in the city, which had a 30 percent black population, seemed calm.

The city's legislative delegation had supported efforts to end segregation in public transit; the daily newspaper, The Virginian- Pilot, had earned a reputation for championing better race relations; and the Journal and Guide, a weekly black paper and the most widely read in the South - even reaching the hands of many enlighted whites, including Eleanor Roosevelt - encouraged blacks to seek friendships with whites and pursue economic advances and accommodation rather than to purusue a more confrontational agenda espoused by others.

The Virginian-Pilot, under editor Lenoir Chambers, stood alone among Virginia's powerful white press, however.

Chambers, who in 1960 would win a Pulitzer Prize for his school- desegregation editorials, encouraged "reason, moderation and lawfulness" in addressing racial issues, wrote Alexander Leidholdt in "Standing Before the Shouting Mob." But moderation did not always mean integration.

"For all their liberality and advocacy of minority betterment," Leidholdt said, the paper's editors "still operated essentially within traditional patterns of segregation." In essense, there was envisioned a kinder, gentler, fairer - but still segregated - society.

As for public education, Norfolk's schools for blacks and whites were the embodiment of the hypocracy of the "separate but equal" standard. In every fashion from facilities to supplies - save for the dedication of the teachers - Norfolk's black schools were inferior.

The teachers at black schools, for instance, were paid but a fraction of their white counterparts. Underlining the disparity, a white janitor assigned to Booker T. Washington High School made more money than any black principal.

The Supreme Court's order for school integration initially drew a cautious response in Virginia.

Gov. Thomas B. Stanley called for "cool heads, calm, steady and sound judgment." Norfolk School Superintendent J.J. Brewbaker proposed "an intellectual rather than an emotional" response.

"Somewhere in the South," Chambers wrote in the Pilot, "a state will rise to leadership in this probably long and difficult duty. We hope it will be Virginia."

It wasn't.

U.S. Sen. Harry F. Byrd, who as governor in the 1920s signed the nation's toughest anti-lynching law, headed a Democratic machine that for 40 years had been all-powerful in Virginia. He continued to pull the strings from Washington.

Thus, when a legislative committee emerged with a plan that would have implemented, if not embraced, integration, Byrd had an under- the-table veto. He used it.

Instead of complying with the court order, the General Assembly required that any public school with both black and white students be closed.

The battle lumbered on in the courts until June 7, 1958, when Federal District Court Judge Walter E. Hoffman directed Norfolk's School Board to assign 151 black applicants to all-white schools.

The School Board, caught between the court order and the state law, rebuffed the judge. It rejected all 151 applications, citing the health and safety of the students, their ability to adapt or their place of residence.

The board's opposition to integration was shared by many in the community. At Norview High School, an effigy of a black man was hung in front of the building. Many white students threatened a walkout or violence if students with dark skin were allowed in.

Judge Hoffman was undeterred. He set a deadline of Aug. 19 for the board to review its stance. Backs to the wall, the board decided it had no choice. While still rejecting 88 percent of the applicants, it did agree to admit 17 of them.

Ten days later, however, Gov. J. Lindsay Almond Jr., following a path he taken weeks earlier in Warren County and Charlottesville, seized Norfolk's schools and ordered them shuttered. Few were happy. Segregationists felt victimized by the "uppity" NAACP; those who had hailed Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kan., felt cheated. In the middle were 10,000 children.

"There is no moral justification for the harsh punishment of the state's largest city," wrote Chambers in The Pilot. "Surely there is greater wisdom in Virginia than this would imply."

There were other voices of moderation in the white community.

The Norfolk Committee for Public Schools, in letters and petitions, called for the schools to reopen. In October, it filed suit against Almond.

The Norfolk Education Association, the Women's Council for Interracial Cooperation, numerous ministers and even the Junior Chamber of Commerce came out in support of reopening the schools.

With white schools padlocked, some parents sought alternate venues for their children.

Locked-out teachers formed tutorial groups. Other students went to neighboring schools or moved out of state and lived with relatives.

Thousands never returned to class.

The black schools remained open, since no whites had applied to them. But that didn't help the "Norfolk 17." Their NAACP lawyers feared that if the group went to the segregated schools, their lawsuit might be weakened.

"At first I was happy," Patricia Turner, then 14, said at a 1998 reunion. But "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."

One of their attorneys, civil rights lawyer Hugo Madison, set up a makeshift school for them in First Baptist Church on Bute Street.

As court decisions came down against segregation, increasing numbers of businessmen and parents urged that the black students be admitted so the schools could open, despite the state law.

Norfolk city leaders were intransigent, however.

Mayor Duckworth and the City Council hit upon a simple idea: if the city had no public school system, then there was nothing for the federal courts to order opened to blacks. They moved to cut off tax dollars for all public education.

Navy morale, already suffering because of closed schools, dropped lower. Local business leaders, noting that new businesses were bypassing Norfolk in favor of North Carolina where schools were open, feared the federal cash cow might bolt.

Duckworth, unmoved, also became tactless. He publicly belittled blacks for fomenting the school closures and chided them as "ungrateful" to "the best city in Virginia in regard to its colored population." Having opened a wound, he shoveled in salt, charging that blacks made up 75 percent of the city's jail population but paid less than 5 percent of its taxes.

After winning a referendum in which few blacks could vote, Duckworth and the council set about to close the black schools and "spread" the misery by denying classes to another 7,000 students.

It was a huge miscalculation.

At The Pilot, Chambers' typewriter was nearly ablaze. Duckworth's efforts, he wrote, were "little and mean in spirit and dictatorial in action." Even Gov. Almond called the tactic "a vicious and retaliatory blow against the Negro race."

Events then escalated. Five years of Massive Resistance crumbled in two weeks.

On Jan. 19, 1959, dual federal and state court rulings labeled Massive Resistance unconstitutional.

Two days later, Norfolk faced the mirror of television and didn't like its reflection. "The Lost Class of '59," broadcast by CBS and reported by Edward R. Murrow, one of the nation's most respected journalists, was matter-of-fact and non-judgmental. That made it all the more powerful.

"Norfolkians squirmed at what seemed to be their status as pariahs, their city a den of extremists who drowned out the thin, small voice of moderation," Thomas C. Parramore wrote in "Norfolk, the First Four Centuries."

On Jan. 26, 100 prominent business leaders took out a full-page advertisement in The Pilot urging the reopening of the schools. In a nod to tradition, it professed preference for segregation, but urged acceptance of the new reality.

The Pilot and even the pro-segregation Norfolk Ledger-Dispatch matched the ad with editorial endorsements. Duckworth became a flag- bearer without an army.

On Feb. 2, the six schools reopened and the black students walked in. There were no federal troops, as in Arkansas. Reporters outnumbered police. Racial slurs were thrown, but not bricks.

It was not easy for the vanguard of blacks in the integrated schools. "It was lonely. I would just think about the end of the day coming, or pretend I was in another place," Geraldine Talley Hobby recalled 40 years later.

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

There were some bright spots. While some white parents shut blacks out of activities like the prom or school plays by making them private, few teachers discriminated. And the children of many military families, already used to integration, were more welcoming of their black classmates.

"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."

On his first day at Maury High School, Louis Cousins - the only black student at that school - was shunned. In the auditorium, white students sat far from him.

"The struggle is not over," he wrote. "It is just another chapter in this life."

Caption: The padlocked doors of Granby High School In 1959, Louis Cousins was the only black student at Norfolk's Maury High School. At first, his white classmates refused to even sit near him during an assembly in the auditorium.

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