Race, Policy, and K-12 Education: Segregated Schooling in Jim Crow Virginia, 1870-1950

Good evening. My thanks for your coming out tonight.

I was born not so very long ago—during World War II. Folks generally take me for Caucasian . . . but let’s say I’m born, the year I was, African American in Virginia. No way could I aspire to attend Virginia Tech, or teach here. No way could I attend grade school or high school with so much as one white classmate. Maybe that’s not a big deal, . . . but what is a big deal is that my personal preference would have nothing whatever to do with where I went to school, the racial identities of my classmates. Nor would the personal preference of any other child, black or white.

Jim Crow (the personification of racial segregation)—Jim Crow ruled . . . in Virginia and across the South. Throughout the region, from birth to death, Jim Crow governed—he determined what hospital you might be born in, what cemetery you might be buried in. In between, . . . where you could eat, where you could sit, whom you could marry . . . and where you went to school. Jim Crow went to kindergarten and medical school—to grade school, high school, undergraduate and grad school. Every decision in life, large or small—for white folks and black; but especially for black folks—had to take into consideration: What would Jim Crow say?

The ideas I bring you this evening apply to much of the nation, and particularly the South, but the specific facts will emphasize Virginia. In terms of chronology, I will focus on the century between the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement. Call it from 1866 and 1966—the hundred years of Christiansburg Institute, about the early part of which we will shortly be hearing from our next speaker. Or between 1872 and 1953, the time during which Virginia Tech was a segregated land-grant school, a place no African American could attend.

Or, and these are the dates in my title for this talk—between 1870 and 1950, when racial segregation was the absolute policy, at every level, from kindergarten through graduate school. According to that explicit policy, black students attended one set of public institutions; white students, another set. No exceptions.

I’ll talk this evening about the beginnings of that segregation policy; then about the policy in practice for several generations; and, finally, the late stages when the traditional system came under assault and began to change, in ways we’ll need to explore. First, however, I’ll go back to a time before Jim Crow, before 1870, before education in the time of so-called "separate-but-equal."

"Before We Were Jim-Crowed"

One of Virginia’s great African American civil rights lawyers of this century, Samuel W. Tucker, often said about his lifelong motivation to destroy Jim Crow, that his father always spoke of a golden age, of a time, as the senior Tucker put it, "before they Jim Crowed us." The younger Tucker was born in 1913, so he had never known that world, but his father had. He could be referring to political disfranchisement, which took place under the Virginia Constitution of 1902. Or he could have had in mind transportation segregation (the "back of the bus" and all that), which originated at virtually the same time.

For a generation, the last third of the nineteenth century, segregation did not yet govern, Jim Crow had not yet ascended to the power that soon became his. Jim Crow had not yet closed his fist, tightened his grip on black southerners, squeezed out much of the black freedom that had flourished for a time.

And yet that golden age, a time before segregation—a time, as Tucker’s father said, "before they Jim-Crowed us"—has no place in Virginia’s educational history. Public education for black Virginians was born Jim Crowed. It had no other history, no golden age prior to Tucker’s lifetime.

Segregated schooling replaced a regime of no schooling at all. And it is to that earlier era that I wish to take us for a few minutes, so we have a backdrop to the story of segregated schools . . . so we can see how much changed for the better in the 1860s, when a very different regime came to power.

Black Schooling under Slavery (I):

Margaret Douglass

What were schools for black Virginians like under slavery? Margaret Douglass found out when she ran one, in Norfolk, in the 1850s. A later generation would see segregation’s enormous power to blight hopes, contort behavior, repress aspirations, limit opportunity, curtail freedom. Margaret Douglass, would-be schoolteacher, found to her chagrin, discomfort, bewilderment . . . that, in her time, slavery had even greater power.

Margaret Douglass was a white woman, a free person in slavery times. Her students were black children, also free people in slavery times. Approximately one in ten black Virginians in the 1850s was free. But black freedom could not, in some respects, be distinguished from black slavery. Virginia’s educational laws provide a powerful example of this pre-Civil War equation of black freedom with black slavery.

For a time, Margaret Douglass taught her school. Soon, she faced criminal charges for doing so. Convicted of violating a state law (passed in 1831) that criminalized holding a school for black Virginians, regardless of whether they were slave or free, she spent one month (it could have been two months, the maximum jail sentence under the law) in 1854 in the Norfolk city jail. After serving her sentence, she might have stayed in Virginia and returned to her other occupation, seamstress. Instead she, a white woman, fled slavery, fled the South, fled a world in which not one black child could attend school.

Margaret Douglass’s experience raises for us the matter of motivation behind the kind of law that sent her to jail: Did white Virginians enact such laws, and enforce them, out of a belief that educating black children was futile? or because they thought it dangerous?

If African Americans had little capacity to learn—a thesis, whatever we may think of it, entirely consistent with self-serving talk in the 1850s about an improvident people best supervised by a more capable race—then it is hard to see why anyone would think it necessary to enact a public law to ban what could not be accomplished anyway. But let us say, instead, that Margaret Douglass had failed to notice that her charges were making no progress in their studies. Let us say that the problem lay in how much progress, not how little, they were making.

We move, then, to an alternative thesis—that black schooling appeared dangerous rather than futile. Let’s suppose that the danger went beyond African Americans’ potential to compete effectively under favorable conditions, on an even playing field—conditions to be extirpated in a slaveholding society. Let’s suppose that there is no mystery why laws against slave literacy tended to come immediately after slave uprisings.

Two stories will do here. One is from Susan Broaddus, a slave serving in her master’s dining room, who reported her recollections in an interview in the 1930s (the language is presented here as it appears in the transcription of that interview). The master would spell out things he didn’t want her to understand, but one evening it was "G-A-B-E" and "R-U-F-U-S," the names of two slaves who were to be sold the next morning. "‘Course I stood dere," she later recounted, "without battin’ an eye, an’ makin’ believe I didn’t even hear him, but I was packin’ dem letters up in my haid all de time. An’ soon’s I finished dishes I rushed down to my father an’ say ‘em to him jus’ like Marsa say ‘em. Father say quiet-like: ‘Gabe an’ Rufus,’ an’ tol’ me to go on back to de house . . . . De next day Gabe and Rufus was gone—dey had run away. Marsa nearly died, got to cussin’ an’ ravin’ so he took sick. Missus went to town an’ tol’ de sheriff, but dey never could fin’ dose two slaves. Was gone to free land. An’ I spec’ [Marsa and Missus] wondered many times how [Gabe and Rufus] knew dey was goin’ to be sol’."

The other story is from William I. Johnson Jr., who told a story about "one smart slave on our plantation [in Albemarle County], Joe Sutherland, who was master’s coachman" and "hung around the courthouse with master. He went on business trips with him, and through this way, Joe learned to read and write unbeknown to master. In fact [Johnson continued], Joe got so good that he learned how to write passes for the slave." Several slaves used those passes "to escape to free states"—Johnson named "App Seldom, who carried his wife, Moses Bollock and Daniel Prosser." Joe Sutherland "was finally caught and sold way down south, . . . put in shackles until he was sold to a man in Mississippi."

Black Schooling under Slavery (II):

John Mercer Langston;

Ex-Slaves Remember

Former slave Cornelius Garner tells us the effect of a slaveholding society’s ban on black education for most black southerners. "We won’t ‘lowed to read and write. Dar won’t no schools you know, in dem days like ‘tis now[,] and no matter how we yearned fer knowing how to read and write we had no way on earth" to learn how.

John Mercer Langston offers a variant of this kind of testimony. His father, a white man named Ralph Quarles, had once owned Langston’s mother, Lucy Langston, but they fell in love. Ralph Quarles freed Lucy Langston, but, under Virginia law, they could not marry. Nonetheless they lived more or less as husband and wife for the rest of their lives, and John Mercer Langston was the youngest of their three sons.

The parents would not live forever, and regardless, the children of black mothers could hardly hope to go to school in Virginia, let alone find much else of use under the Virginia definition of black freedom. So before the parents died, they arranged for their three sons to move to Ohio. In 1834, both parents did die, and five-year-old John Mercer Langston left his native Louisa County and journeyed with his older brothers and a white family friend to Ohio, a land where black freedom had its own restrictions, but where there was no slavery, and black freedom did not get equated with black slavery.

In Ohio, John Mercer Langston went to school. And he went to college, Oberlin College, where, in 1849, he earned an undergraduate degree. He earned a master’s degree, too, and then became a lawyer—in 1854, the same year Margaret Douglass, back in Virginia, went to jail for teaching black children even to read and write. He ran for public office, and gained election as town clerk. He published letters and articles in newspapers. He lived the kind of black freedom he never could have experienced during those years anywhere in the South.

The Civil War came. John Mercer Langston recruited black soldiers for the Union army and thus helped make a difference in the war’s outcome. And he returned east. After the war ended, and slavery ended too, he visited Louisa County . . . where there was no more black slavery, and thus black freedom might mean, must amount to, more than black slavery had. He inspected Freedmen’s Bureau schools across the South—schools for African Americans, a measure of how much was changing in the mid-to-late 1860s.

John Mercer Langston moved for a time to Washington, D.C., to help build up a new school, Howard University, where he organized a law department and became the law school dean . . . at a place that other black Virginians could now accomplish, nearby, what he had done in Ohio. Looking ahead to the 1880s, we can find Langston again, this time in Virginia, where he presided over an all-black school near Petersburg—Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute, established in the 1880s as a public institution of higher education for black Virginians—a place where black men and black women could train to become teachers in public schools where black children learned to read and write, and more.

For more testimony regarding nineteenth-century schools for black Virginians, let’s listen to some who, before 1865, were slaves but, after that date, free. Many years later, William Yager told an interviewer about black schooling in Virginia and how it had changed during his long life, how different it had been for him and for his children. Asked whether he had ever gone to school, he replied (at first in sorrow, and then with pride): "No’m, slave people jus’ got somethin’ in their stummicks an’ somethin’ on their backs. . . . but I schooled ever’ one o’ mine. I sure did."

Other former slaves recounted similar denial of access to education during slavery. Liza McCoy declared: "If you pick up a piece of paper and look lak you gonna read dey act lak dey gonna beat you to death." In other words, the limited access to literacy resulted in part from extralegal threats, not just a law that prevented opening a school.

Yet some learning did occur. Israel Massie reported about his childhood in Southside Virginia: "Dar was no gwine to school. Nuthin’ of dat sort. De ole mistess started learnin’ us slave chillun" though, he said, but, "As soon as ole marster foun’ hit tout, he stopped her." Similarly, Candis Goodwin recalled her childhood: "An’ de white chillun dey learn me to read too. Cose de white foks didn’ want you to learn. Ah ‘member jes’ as clare as yestidy how one dem chillun learn me how to read ‘compress-i-bility.’ Thought I’s suppin den! I kin read de Bible a lil now but I can’ write; never [did] learn to write."

War, Emancipation, and the

Beginning of Schools for Black Southerners—

The Freedmen’s Bureau Schools of the 1860s;

The Christiansburg Institute

Late in the Civil War—with Union victory looking more and more likely, and soon—Congress approved what became the Thirteenth Amendment, and it also passed the Freedmen’s Bureau Act. By mid-1866, it had extended the life of the Freedmen’s Bureau a few more years and had enlarged its responsibilities to monitor change in the postwar, post-slavery South (and it was the Freedmen’s Bureau, recall, that sent John Mercer Langston out to survey the Bureau’s programs and operations). That year, in Montgomery County, in western Virginia, a school was established that later became known as the Christiansburg Institute.

The summer of 1865 had brought the first new crop of schools for black southerners (not quite the first, but the first postwar schools, and the first in large numbers—some schools had been organized during the war in places, among them islands off the coast of South Carolina, that the Union army came to early). By no means were these public schools, in the sense that the state and local governments had authorized them and supplied them funds. But they were schools.

And they provided a foundation on which, as a consequence of political Reconstruction in the late 1860s and early 1870s, every southern state established a system of public schools, a system from which black children could not be excluded, though almost everywhere and at all times, those schools would be racially segregated. Such was the case with Virginia, where they were segregated from day one.

Octavia Featherstone reported about her childhood in Petersburg that, when the Civil War ended, she was nearly six years old, and soon she got to go to school, which was held in her own church. "De first school after de war was in Third [Baptist] Church. I went dare to school an’ was taught by a white northern woman." Such schools served, in part, as bridges to a new educational world. "Dis school din’ last long fo’ de public schools was opened. At dat time de ole an’ de young folks flocked to de public school tryin’ to learn to read an’ write."

Jim Crow Goes to School:

The Virginia Constitution of 1870 and the Public School Law

Virginia’s Reconstruction constitution went into effect in 1870. Its educational provisions committed the state to a public system of schools. Acting under those provisions, the legislature created such a system—and committed the state to segregation; the 1870 law declared that "white and colored persons shall not be taught in the same school but in separate schools."

Without segregation, there could have been no sustained commitment. Virginia displayed difficulty enough simply maintaining schools for whites in the next few years. Schools for blacks were more problematic. Tax supported, integrated schools—public schools that children of both races might attend—were out of the question.

George Lewis’s history of his own family captured both the world before Jim Crow education and the thoroughgoing nature of segregation in that new era. Born free and black in Richmond about 1859, he would have come of school age at a time when black Virginians could not attend schools. "Immediately after the War," he recounted, however, "the Yankees from the New England states sent teachers down to the South to teach the children of ex-slaves. Such schools were opened" in various black churches in the city, First Baptist, Ebenezer Baptist, and so on. He went on beyond elementary school, and in 1878 he became a teacher in a black school in Henrico County.

After eight years of public school teaching and independent learning, he entered Howard University Law School. After graduation he became a lawyer in Richmond, a profession he still followed a half century later, when he reported that he and his wife had "two daughters, Leah and Lucille. One teaches at Virginia Union University," he said, a private institution there in Richmond, "and the other at Virginia State"—the black teachers’ college in nearby Petersburg (where John Mercer Langston had once presided) and, by that time, Virginia’s black land-grant school, Virginia Tech’s counterpart.

Educational institutions in Virginia from top to bottom, from first grade through college, were segregated, with black teachers and black students in one set of schools, white teachers and white students in a parallel universe. At first, as George Lewis reported about his own experience beginning in 1865, white teachers taught black students. By about the time he himself began teaching in 1878, black teachers were beginning to take the place of white teachers. That did not happen all at once. Lewis himself could not teach in Richmond in 1878, so he found a place outside the city.

During Lewis’s eight years of teaching, however, black Richmonders pushed successfully to get teaching positions for black Virginians. So did black residents of Petersburg and elsewhere. Also during his time as a teacher, Virginia established what is now Virginia State University, so that two black institutions in eastern Virginia—Hampton Institute and Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institution—both were training black teachers for black public elementary schools.

White authorities had several reasons for acceding to black wishes that black teachers teach black children. In the early 1880s (during the brief "Readjuster" interlude), black voters gave voice to African American wishes in Virginia. Though that soon changed, as disfranchisement quieted that voice, the policy initiative would persist. A second explanation for the shift to black teachers helps explain why the initiative stayed in place long after black political power receded. You could pay black teachers less than white teachers cost.

Default or Intent?

Costs and Benefits of Segregation—

Schooling in Black and White, Divided Three Ways:

Appalachia and the East

Let’s take a look at some of the realities of public funding of public education in Virginia—and across the South—in the age of segregation. When Alabama reported spending $23 for schooling each white child, compared to just under $1 per black child, Booker T. Washington observed: "This is [perhaps] too high a compliment to pay to our natural intelligence."

Draw a sample from any year in any state during the reign of King Color—1900, '15, '30, '45—and you find enormous disparity in public funding of public schools. White schools obtained far more money than did black schools. With separate schools, you could discriminate—a whole lot.

Virginia’s constitution of 1902—at the same time that it greatly cut back on the numbers of black voters—incorporated the segregation language of the 1870 law: "white and colored persons shall not be taught in the same school but in separate schools." In the next quarter-century, the state hugely increased the amount of money going to public schools, and it hugely increased the disparity between expenditures on black schools and white ones.

Across the South, and across Virginia, the degree of disparity ranged widely. In Mississippi and South Carolina, per capita student expenditures ran about ten-to-one, white over black. In Kentucky and Virginia, it was more like three-to-one. Most southern states fell between those extremes.

Even in Virginia, many counties showed ratios of the sort that Mississippi paraded. In 1915, while Powhatan County paid, in teachers’ salaries, only (!) five times as much per white child as per black, Surry County paid ten-to-one, Amelia County twelve-to-one. You can achieve disparities like that by holding shorter terms for black students, reducing black teachers’ pay by even more, and then putting black teachers in classrooms with far more students.

Why the disparity? When inquiring about slavery times, we considered futility and danger. We saw danger then and ought to maintain that option. We discounted futility then but might reconsider it now. What else?—convenience? stinginess? For starters, let’s call it grand theft, education: White parents—white communities—found a way to guarantee that their children would be favored with a hefty handicap in life’s race. We might hypothesize that they set out deliberately to handicap black children, black communities.

If black Virginians were to be excluded from most non-laboring jobs, then why train them for roles closed to them? Save money, reduce resentment. Retain privilege and security. Maintain a black secondary school that you call a "training school" as opposed to the white "high school." Do it as recently as the 1940s and after.

State money for public schools was distributed to local jurisdictions on a per capita basis. The more school children enumerated in a county or city, the more money went there. Once it arrived there, white hands apportioned the money between black schools and white. Not surprisingly, far more money went to white schools than black. At the state level, the distribution was evenhanded. At the local level, it was anything but. We can assume, of course, that state authorities would have been amazed to learn this.

Thus black families subsidized white families—particularly in the areas where most black families lived. There—with what they understood as much to gain and much to lose—whites were most intent on maintaining political power, economic dominance, and social segregation.

In heavily white areas, the disparity was far smaller. Too few black families lived there to make much difference. In white counties, taking all the money apportioned on the basis of the local black population could not do much to raise the level of funding for white schools. The story in largely black counties proved very different. Appalachian Virginia could not redistribute the kind of bounty that came to the more heavily black counties to the east.

In Virginia in a typical school year (1914-15), this is what we find if we compare teachers’ salaries in the city of Richmond: The average black salary was $59, the average white salary $91 or more than half again as much. Go to majority-black Prince Edward County, and you find the black salaries averaging $28, white salaries $60 or more than twice as much. Now go to largely-white Bland County, and you find black salaries averaging $34 and white salaries $37—white incomes in Bland were higher than black, but not by much.

Comparing these sample counties—one eastern and black, one western and white, though with both races present in both counties but in very different proportions—we find little to distinguish the salaries of black teachers, east or west, or, in fact, even white teachers in the west. But white teachers in the east—that is another matter. Western whites, together with blacks all over the state, subsidized eastern whites. White supremacy? Racial solidarity? White solidarity forever, indeed—purest poltroonery: some whites used blacks as weapons against other whites.

The disparity between black and white began to come under attack, under effective attack, by black Virginians. The attack could not take place in the state legislature—there were simply too few black voters in Virginia: black Virginians were a minority, a declining minority, across the state, and widespread disfranchisement further eroded black political power. But a contest could and did take place in the federal courts.

Seizing the "Equal" in Separate but Equal, 1939-1950:

Salaries; Buses; Facilities; Curricula

In the 1930s, black Virginians began to seek more aggressively and through new means to seize more of the "equal" in the tired old formula "separate-but-equal." It was time to diminish white deceit about equal opportunity, time to show the prattle for what it was, time to make segregation bring greater cost to whites and greater benefit to blacks. The rhetoric of race wasn’t twaddle—silly idle talk—for it had real consequences, and the time had come to change those consequences.

However you wish to see or say it regarding the world of "separate-and-highly-unequal," black Virginians displayed determination to get higher salaries for black teachers, better facilities for black students, more of everything—to diminish the disparity in public spending, narrow the gap between tax dollars that went to black education and tax dollars that went to white schooling.

Black teachers and black attorneys in Virginia and elsewhere attacked "separate but equal" on the question of equality within segregation, not, as would come later, of segregation itself. They began with teachers' salaries. A system of separate salary schedules, one for white teachers, another for black teachers—specified far higher salaries for one group than for the other, as we have seen.

The dual schedules served multiple purposes: Not only did they have the substantive consequence of a smaller flow of public funds into black communities and black families than into white ones; they symbolized the racial inequity that Jim Crow was designed to bolster. In Richmond, the maximum salary for any black teacher, no matter how experienced or how well qualified, was one dollar less than the lowest salary of any white teacher.

Aline Elizabeth Black, a teacher at Norfolk’s Booker T. Washington High School, initiated a case in state court in 1939 to achieve salary equalization. At trial, the city took the position that "we will employ you and we'll pay you so much and no more; you can take it or leave it." Her lead lawyer, Thurgood Marshall, countered that "the entire discretion of the School Board of the City of Norfolk goes no further than the 14th Amendment allows it to go, and that amendment allows no discrimination on account of race." Aline Black lost, and, before her case could be appealed, the school board let her go—declined to renew her contract, would not let her teach as long as she was in litigation.

Aline Black’s colleague at BTW, Melvin Alston, took her place. His lawyers—pretty much the same people as Aline Black's—took the case into federal court, and though they lost in district court, they won on appeal, and in October 1940 the U.S. Supreme Court let the decision stand. Eventually, the Norfolk School Board and the black teachers agreed to a three-year, phased-in salary adjustment to eliminate race as a criterion for teachers’ pay.

The Alston case led to litigation designed to achieve progress on other fronts, too, in the public schools of the South—equal busing, equal facilities, and equal curricula. And black Virginians achieved victories regarding each of those in the 1940s. But first, a challenge to race-based unequal salaries soon took place in Richmond. The black teachers' proposal called for equalization within five years; the school board wanted ten to fifteen years. Eventually, the black teachers got their way. Much was beginning to change.

Much of the story of the 1940s can be told in terms of a single law firm, the firm Hill, Martin, and Robinson, three graduates of Howard University Law School. Oliver Hill, civil rights attorney extraordinaire, had graduated in 1933 with Thurgood Marshall at Howard—the school that John Mercer Langston had served as dean. Still a young lawyer in 1940, he helped out on Melvin Alston’s team; today, sixty years later, he is still going strong—fairly strong—in Richmond (though I can't say, as I could just a few years ago, that he still goes to the office every day).

In Norfolk County (outside Norfolk City), the school board responded to black teachers' petition for salary equalization by firing three black principals. Taken to court by Oliver Hill, the school superintendent said: "We have always tried to be fair with the Negro children of Norfolk County," and "We believe that the colored schools of Norfolk County will measure up to any in Virginia."

Hill retorted: "That's not saying anything." He let that sink in, then elaborated. For him, the appropriate measure of the quality of the black schools in a Virginia county was the white schools there, and certainly not the black schools in some other county. "I have visited the colored schools in practically every county of the state," he explained, "and none of them compares in any way with the white schools."

The struggle in Norfolk County dragged on for many months. Oliver Hill took direct action to dramatize the inadequacies of public school funding in the county. On one occasion, he led a group of black students to the white high school, Churchland High, where they attempted to register for subjects unavailable at any black school in the county. On another occasion, he accompanied students who stopped a white school bus and sought rides when none was available for black students. Both efforts, of course, were rebuffed, but each generated further evidence against local practices, which Hill explained as "laying ground work" for possible legal action.

Busing . . . what a narrative you could weave around school busing over the years! In the 1940s, yellow buses took white children to white schools. Why not black children to black schools? In Greensville County, for example, fifteen buses took white children to school, but none was available to black children, and civil rights lawyers went to court to seek change. That and other litigation across the state—in Nottoway County, in Fauquier County—led to a change in policy in Virginia.

The continuing struggle for change reveals how much there was to change with segregated schooling in Jim Crow Virginia.

In a case in 1948, Federal District Judge Sterling Hutcheson determined that the school board in Surry County was discriminating in teachers' salaries, bus transportation, and physical facilities. Moreover, black children there were being denied an accredited high school and an equal curriculum. Judge Hutcheson demanded that Surry County school officials demonstrate progress in narrowing the disparities between the opportunities of black and white children to obtain a high school education.

The firm of Hill, Martin, and Robinson was on a roll. The Surry decision proved as important in the postwar surge as the Alston decision had just before World War II. It supplied a precedent to build on, to take to other school boards, and it energized teachers and other black Virginians to take action to redress ancient inequities. The next month, Hill and his partners gained another major victory in Judge Hutcheson's District Court in a decision that governed cases from Chesterfield, King George, and Gloucester counties.

But, even in victory, the returns could be mixed. The King George High School, a white school, offered a number of courses unavailable at the King George Training School, its black counterpart. Under court order to remedy the deficiency, the county school board sought to comply by dropping four courses at King George High: chemistry, physics, biology, and geometry. White high school students and their parents found themselves protesting the actions of local authorities. Next came such considerations as extracurricular activities, where equalization would force either the termination of such activities at white schools or the expansion of opportunities at black schools.

On the Cusp of Desegregation:

Virginia Schools in the 1950s—

1950; 1951; 1954-55; 1959

Having fought so long to secure greater equality of opportunity within the framework of "separate but equal" public schools, black Virginians began in 1950 to tackle school segregation itself, directly. Much would be lost as well as gained, as black teachers lost their jobs; black students integrated white schools, rarely the other way around; and a key institution in many black communities faded into the past. In retrospect, segregated schools brought to black communities strengths as well as weakness—great strength, great weakness. Jim Crow education left an ambiguous legacy.

Did desegregation begin at the start of the 1950s, or at the end of the decade? Not until 1959, as you will hear next week, did the first elementary or high school in Virginia enroll black as well as white children. Years after 1959, the schools that were in any way integrated remained few and far between; complete segregation in most schools persisted well into the 1960s. But I will end my account at a somewhat earlier date.

Already in 1954 and 1955, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decisions—its unanimous decisions—in the school segregation cases we know as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. Brown overturned what had long been the prevailing interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment and its "equal protection" clause, as decided in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson. As we have seen, segregated schools in Virginia antedated Plessy by a full quarter-century, but the language in Plessy of "equal but separate" governed the constitutional status of segregated schools for more than a half century, into the 1950s.

Actually the Supreme Court ruled on a package of cases in its decisions in Brown. One case came from Kansas (a northern state), another from Prince Edward County in Southside Virginia. Despite the Court’s rulings, it was five years, as events turned out in Virginia, before any public elementary or secondary school underwent any desegregation at all, in 1959.

Prince Edward County—for five years, also beginning in 1959—simply closed its public schools rather than permit them to desegregate. Thus we have an ambiguous ending to the century that—mostly covering the era of Jim Crow schools—stretched from 1859, when George Lewis was born into a world in which schools for black Virginians were still banned, until 1959, when Virginia’s educational history split, as some public schools desegregrated and other schools closed their doors.

But let’s move back to the beginning of the decade of the 1950s, where I’ll end this talk with three sightings of change on the horizon.

One of these three sightings comes from public higher education in Virginia. In 1950 Gregory Hayes Swanson applied for admission to the University of Virginia Law School. Turned down because of his race, he went to federal court. Under court order, he enrolled in September 1950—49 years ago this month. The day Gregory Swanson registered for classes at UVA, Jim Crow shuddered on this throne. The absolute segregation that had characterized public schools at every level, top to bottom, was suddenly not quite absolute. A black student had enrolled in a white school.

Another of the three sightings comes from the so-called Battle Plan—named not so much to suggest a military metaphor (though that works too) as after the state governor at the time (John Stewart Battle, 1950-54). At mid-century, the Virginia legislature began to put a whole lot more money into schooling, with the intent that a higher than usual amount of the new funds be put toward upgrading black schools.

The hope was that, if "separate-but-equal" could be shown to be more or less equal, it might survive the constitutional challenge that looked more and more likely in the federal courts. Might black Virginians be satisfied with separate schools—if those schools had equal funding, equal facilities, equal curricula? Maybe Jim Crow, dressed up some, could live and rule a while longer, even a lot longer. Then again, maybe substantial equalization could not be achieved anyway—the dollars could not be found in the cities and the more heavily black counties, and the logistics could not be overcome in the largely white counties.

And the third sighting connects two narratives, two histories, one of Christiansburg Institute, the other of Prince Edward County. The families of black students from Pulaski County, including young Mahatma N. Corbin, challenged the concept of a regional high school for black students that required someone from that far away to take a bus every day, each way, to school in Christiansburg. Why couldn’t black youngsters go to nearer-by schools, the ones that whites attended? Time to go to court.

Busing—itself—could be unconstitutional if students had to travel sixty miles each day to segregated schools. Youngsters’ health, safety, and time for recreation and study all were compromised. For black residents of Pulaski County, the problem with Christiansburg Institute was not low teachers’ salaries, nor was it the poor quality of a black school—its facilities or curriculum—but, rather, the imposition of such a long commute to reach the school. The problem was not a lack of busing, but the reliance on long-distance busing to achieve segregation.

Meantime, a high school sophomore, Barbara Johns, led her classmates out on strike to protest the hyper-crowded, third-rate facilities at her black high school in Farmville. She contacted Oliver Hill in Richmond (Oliver Hill—who had argued teacher salary, busing, and other cases about "separate-and-unequal" schools back in the 1940s; whose law firm Gregory Swanson was working at in 1950 when he applied to attend UVA; and who is still living in Richmond, the grand old man of the crusade for educational equality, who remembers how relatively short a time ago it was that, unchallenged, Jim Crow ruled Virginia, and separate was anything but equal).

Planning anyway to drive west along US-460 from Richmond to Roanoke and the New River Valley, to look after the Pulaski case, Oliver Hill agreed to stop off in Farmville. He stopped off again on his way back. Thus there emerged the Prince Edward case, which made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court as part of what we know as Brown v. Board of Education. From there, you could look out to the horizon and maybe, just maybe, see change, real change, beneficial change. Whether, how much, how soon . . . all of that remained to be seen.

But that’s all for me, tonight. Thank you.

For Further Reading

Anderson, James D. The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

Bullock, Henry Allen. A History of Negro Education in the South: From 1619 to the Present. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967).

Cecelski, David S. Along Freedom Road: Hyde County, North Carolina, and the Fate of Black Schools in the South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994.

Guild, June Purcell. Black Laws of Virginia. 1936; New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969.

Harlan, Louis R. Separate and Unequal: Public School Campaigns and Racism in the Southern Seaboard States, 1901-1915. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1958.

Kluger, Richard. Simple Justice: The History of Brown versus Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976.

Link, William A. A Hard Country and a Lonely Place: Schooling, Society, and Reform in Rural Virginia, 1870-1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986.

Litwack, Leon F. Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow. New York: Knopf, 1998.

Martin, Tracy A. "Black Education in Montgomery County, Virginia, 1939-1966." M.A. thesis, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State Univ., 1996.

Perdue, Charles L. Jr. et al. Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia Ex-Slaves. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976.

Swain, Ann. "Christiansburg Institute: From Freedmen’s Bureau Enterprise to Public High School." M.A. thesis, Radford University, 1975.

Tushnet, Mark V. Making Civil Rights Law: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court, 1936-1961. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Tushnet, Mark V. The NAACP's Legal Strategy against Segregated Education, 1925-1950. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987.

Wallenstein, Peter. Virginia Tech, Land-Grant University, 1872-1997: History of a School, a State, a Nation. Blacksburg: Pocahontas Press, 1997.

Wilkerson, Doxey A. "The Negro School Movement in Virginia: From ‘Equalization’ to ‘Integration.’" Reprinted in August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, eds., The Making of Black America, vol. 2, The Black Community in Modern America (New York: Atheneum, 1969), 259-73.

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