Metro

A Personal History Lesson; Va. High School Classmates Face Their Own Legacy

Sue Anne Pressley and Bobbye Pratt
Washington Post Staff Writers
2,221 words
2 May 2004
The Washington Post
FINAL
C01
English
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved

Every year for the past quarter-century, Eleanor Shumaker has given her U.S. history classes a painfully personal lesson. She pulls out the invitation to the 1961 "private prom" at her Norfolk high school, designed to exclude the school's only black student. She talks, with regret, about how she was afraid to object, afraid to reach out to her classmate who had endured taunts and threats and isolation.

"I never spoke to her," Shumaker, 59, said one morning last week, as she related the story once again to a multicultural group of students at Annandale High School. "Even in my junior year -- she was in my government class -- I could've turned around and said something to her, but I never did."

"Were you afraid of being persecuted if you spoke to her?" a student asked.

"Yes, I was," Shumaker replied. "I was scared of losing my exalted position in school leadership. I was scared of my friends turning their backs on me. . . . My reasons were pretty shallow."

This month's 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education signifies a landmark in the nation's legal history. But the Supreme Court ruling that declared segregation in American public schools unconstitutional also spawned countless personal stories -- as young students in the 1950s and '60s navigated not only the usual perils of adolescence, but also the confusion and tensions that accompanied an era of profound change.

For decades now, Shumaker has been haunted by her own inaction and inspired by the bravery she witnessed from a distance, the bravery of Betty Jean Reed.

Back then, when it all was unfolding, Life magazine captured the image for an international audience: Betty Jean, a solitary figure in a tweed winter coat, walking toward the front doors of Norfolk's Granby High School, a crowd of white students glaring in her direction.

Jean Kea, as Betty Jean was known after her marriage, never showed the photograph to her only child. For 21/2 years, until her graduation, she was the only black student among Granby's nearly 3,000 whites. Yet, "I don't really remember having discussions with her about it," said Kevin Kea, 31, of Catonsville, Md. "She never wore it on her sleeve, I guess."

Jean Kea sat beside her son on a recent afternoon, smiling and silent. An aneurysm in 1987 left her with great difficulty in speaking and shortened a career that she had loved; like Shumaker, she became a social studies teacher. Now 60, Kea eventually recovered from the paralysis, but speech therapy proved useless, her son said, and she communicates largely with nods and facial expressions. But some words come through clearly.

Were they very difficult, those years at Granby? "Oh, yes," she was able to say, closing her eyes for a moment.

The Norfolk 17

It was 1958 when 15-year-old Betty Jean Reed was selected as one of the "Norfolk 17," a group of black students given the responsibility of integrating Norfolk's six previously all-white schools. Reed -- an honor student, well-spoken, tall and ladylike -- seemed a perfect candidate. It happened that she was the only member of the group who lived in Granby's district, and so she went to Granby alone.

"I remember I told her it was up to her," said her father, R E Reed, 81, a retired bridge-construction worker who lives in Baltimore. "And she said yes, she wanted to do it. She wanted a good education. Granby was a good school."

Reed, his wife, Ethel, and their two daughters had moved to Norfolk from rural Sardis, Miss., in 1946. Growing up in a farming community, his own schooling had been cut short. "They told me, 'You don't need an education to plow mules,' " he said. He wanted better opportunities for his daughters, who were bright and loved to read.

But in the fall of 1958, when Betty Jean, as a sophomore, was ready to enroll at Granby, the front doors of the school were padlocked. Faced with a federal mandate to desegregate, Virginia political leaders had instead launched a campaign of "massive resistance," and for a time, schools in Norfolk, Richmond and Prince Edward County were closed rather than comply with the order. In Norfolk alone, 10,000 students were affected, and whites such as Eleanor Shumaker, then known by her maiden name of Ricki Eleanor Gilbert, spent that fall semester in one of dozens of makeshift schools that had been set up.

Meanwhile, the Norfolk 17 huddled in the basement of Bute Street Baptist Church, studying math and Spanish with teachers picked by the NAACP, but also learning how to comport themselves in a hostile environment. Do not respond to name-calling or spitting, they were cautioned. Look straight ahead and keep walking, they were told. The advice would be used on Feb. 2, 1959, when the Norfolk schools reopened.

"They weren't that mean-spirited with her, but we could never take any chances," said Betty Jean's sister, Celestine Coleman, who is two years older and now is a guidance counselor at a D.C. public school. "It wasn't the school, really, it was the parents who were mean. They'd come up to say things to her, like, 'Go back to Black Town.'

"But we never took it personally because we were always church people," she said. "We learned early in life, not everybody has that understanding -- that the Lord made us all. We carried it like that. My dad would tell Jean not to fight, because she would fight in a minute."

Betty Jean Reed did not fight. She moved quietly through the hallways of Granby, still making her usual good grades. Since Granby was a strictly run school, she was not afraid most of the time, her sister said. But sometimes, in the school cafeteria, white students nearby would start softly singing a song then popular, "Charlie Brown, he's a clown," taunting Betty Jean with the words.

"She said it didn't bother her," Coleman said. "Her attitude was, 'As long as you don't touch me, you can do whatever you want.' "

Her father said she was not the type to cry. "Sometimes I would ask her, 'How did you make out today?' " Reed said. "And she'd say, 'It was kind of tough, but I made it.' "

Geraldine Talley Hobby, a younger member of the Norfolk 17 who integrated the city's Northside Junior High School, looked up to Betty Jean. Either her father or R E Reed always drove the two girls to their schools, watching them until they disappeared safely inside.

"I can't say we really hated going to school, but it was a traumatic experience," said Hobby, 58, a former art teacher in the D.C. school system. "It was a relatively lonely time, but thank God, our families and friends supported us, and we had a lot of outside activities -- coming home was always good. And overall, we knew it was for a greater cause."

Never Out of Fashion

Eleanor Shumaker, observing Reed from afar, wondered what the young black woman was like and how she could spend her high school years so alienated and alone. Shumaker had gone so far as to write a letter that was published in Life magazine in late 1958, insisting that the majority of students at Granby wanted to go to school "at any cost." But she still was afraid that one of her teachers might bring the letter up and expose her to classmates.

Later, as editor of the Comet, the Granby yearbook, she would quietly include Reed's senior picture, after some other students suggested leaving it out. She deliberately chose a slogan about courage to include under Reed's name: "Bravery never goes out of fashion."

"But I knew that I, myself, had done nothing courageous," Shumaker said. Years later, she would notice that the only extracurricular activity listed for Betty Jean was the school Bible Club.

At graduation, Reed collected her diploma and never looked back, enrolling at historically black Virginia State University in Petersburg. "We wanted her to go to an integrated college, but she said she had had enough," Coleman said. "She wanted to be among her peers."

At college, she met the music major she would marry, Henderson Kea, and became a teacher, employed in the Baltimore city schools. Her son was born. She divorced, received a master's degree and began work toward becoming a school principal. Once in a while, she would tell her history students at Northern High School in Baltimore a little about her past, but not much, her son said.

"She was known as the mean teacher in the school," Kevin Kea said with a laugh. "She was very strict, very strict, but the students loved her for it, because she gave them a sense of discipline."

She was equally tough on her son. "She always stayed on me," he said. "She was always telling me how much easier it was for me, because things were so different when I was growing up versus when she was growing up."

One day in 1987, she returned from a trip to Atlantic City complaining of a headache, stretched out on the sofa and lapsed into a coma that would last a week. At first, her doctors said she would not survive. She had to learn how to walk again, how to feed and dress herself, but making sense of words was a tougher challenge. Her sister said she can no longer read or write without difficulty.

But four years ago, she began to drive again, and she is able to live alone, in a townhouse in Columbia. Her days are spent in church work, shopping and playing with the delight of her life, her 8-month-old grandson, Nathan.

"That's what makes Mrs. Kea unique," said Angela Kea, 31, who was inspired by her mother-in-law to become a teacher, too. "She has overpowered segregation and she has also overpowered her sickness. She is a strong-willed woman."

Through the years, Jean Kea never attended a Granby reunion or a gathering of the Norfolk 17. Shumaker's attempts to locate her through old classmates failed.

A few years ago, when the Norfolk City Council honored the trailblazing group with a proclamation and a photograph in city hall, the former Betty Jean Reed was not there.

But her father sometimes takes a familiar drive.

"Every once in a while, when I have to run down to Norfolk for some occasion, I still drive by Granby," he said. "It reflects me right back to those days when I was driving Jean to school. Some things you don't forget."

Bravery and Cowardice

The faces in Eleanor Shumaker's U.S. history class at Annandale High School represent virtually every color under the sun, from the palest porcelain to dark chocolate brown. The students or their parents come from Turkey, Peru, India, Bolivia, Ethiopia, Lebanon, Sierra Leone, El Salvador and, of course, the United States. They listened to Shumaker's story the other morning with the naivete of young people who have never sat in a segregated classroom, who cannot imagine what it was like to be going to Granby High School in 1959.

"If you were me, would you have done better than I did?" Shumaker asked the students. "Are you disappointed in me?"

"Yeah, I can see where you were coming from," said one young man. "I don't think it was right, but I understand where you were coming from."

"I thought you were braver than that, Mrs. Shumaker," a young woman said.

They urged her to talk to Betty Jean.

"I'm sure she wouldn't remember me," Shumaker said. "What am I supposed to say, 'I'm the one who didn't talk to you, the one of 2,978 who never spoke to you?'"

Shumaker has been telling her students Reed's story since 1978, whenever the class gets to the section on the Supreme Court and its landmark rulings. They usually react the same way, she said.

After graduation from the University of Michigan, where she met her future husband, Gary, a career Army man, Shumaker taught in Department of Defense schools around the world. She raised two daughters and settled at Annandale High 14 years ago.

In certain ways, she said, she feels that Betty Jean has been a guiding light in her life. A few years ago, she became a foster parent to a young student from Somalia, who had been homeless. To atone for her high school behavior, she said, she got involved as an adult in a variety of causes.

Recently, Shumaker found a way to contact Jean Kea. After more than 40 years, she finally introduced herself in a letter.

"Every year," she read aloud to the class, "when teaching U.S. history students about the civil rights movement, I tell them about your bravery and my cowardice . . . ."

When Shumaker finished reading, the students clapped loudly -- both for their teacher and for Betty Jean.

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