Spring 2011
One
Virginia’s Resistance to Desegregation
In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Brown v. Board of Education, declared that schools could not be considered “separate but equal” but must integrate. Two years later, Virginia governor Harry S. Byrd called for “massive resistance” to desegregation. He ordered that state funds be cut off to any schools that agreed to integrate and provided tuition grants to white students who opposed integrated schools. Although massive resistance officially ended in 1959, by 1964 only 5% of African American students in Virginia were attending integrated schools.
Two
Three
Photo Descriptions & Credits —
One
White parents and children picketing at Grace Arents School in Richmond, Virginia to protest the conversion of the "neighborhood school" to a "learning center" under the new desegregation plan.
Credit — Richmond Times-Dispatch Collection, The Valentine
Two
An anti-busing group gathered at Manchester Community Center. A car in the foreground has a sign on it reading "Daddy is Cussing / Mama is Fussing / About – Busing." The adults are members of the Petersburg Pike and J. S. Francis School anti-busing committee.
Credit — Richmond Times-Dispatch Photograph Collection, The Valentine
Three
People preparing for an anti-busing demonstration outside the Richmond Coliseum in Richmond, Virginia.
Credit — Don Long, photographer, Richmond Times-Dispatch Photograph Collection, The Valentine
Anti-busing demonstrators, mostly women and children, marching along Franklin Street near Virginia Commonwealth University on August 16, 1970.
Credit — Richmond Times-Dispatch Collection, The Valentine
Featured
These are digital stories created by students in this class.
01
Class
This course focused on living history—the ways that we can understand a historic event, like massive resistance, through gathering information from a wide variety of sources and perspectives, including interview transcripts, newspaper articles, archival photographs and scholarly monographs. This was the first class we ever taught together, and we titled it “Massive Resistance: A Documentary Theater Project.” As it turned out, none of our students had ever heard the term “massive resistance”; they all thought they were signing up for a class about protest.
In addition to our archival research, we tracked down people who had been involved in the desegregation of schools. Two of these people, Mark Person and Elizabeth Salim, served on our post-performance discussion panel. We stayed closely connected to them, and eight years later, they participated in the exhibition “Growing Up in Civil Rights Richmond. Our partners also included Tee Turner and Cricket White of Hope for the Cities, who provided cultural-awareness training for our students; we would stay connected to Cricket and Tee for many projects after this.
As part of our work, we performed a scene from our play at Henderson Middle School. After the performance, students held a talk-back with the audience of middle schoolers. When one asked them if they knew what segregation was, a middle schooler raised his hand and explained that “it was something bad that happened in the past.” Our student Katherine Schmidt was so shocked by this answer—given that every student in the auditorium was African American, that she spent the next semester leading a small group of Henderson students in a project focused on civil rights in their neighborhood.
Panelists
Rev. Dr. Sylvester “Tee” Turner
Moderator
Hope in the Cities
Lewis Booker
Former Richmond Public Schools
School Board Member
Dr. Carmen Foster
Thomas Jefferson High School Alumna
Mark Person
George Wythe High School Alumnus
Elizabeth Salim
George Wythe High School Alumna
02
Archival Research
Our archival research for this class included a visit to the African-American Life in Richmond archive, held in the VCU Libraries Special Collections. We also visited the Library of Virginia to look at letters written by Richmonders to the school board, in support of and resistance to desegregation. The Valentine archives held a treasure trove of protest images from the period, as well as an inflammatory coloring book that had purportedly been produced by the Black Panther Party, but was actually a creation of the FBI, as part of its COINTELPRO program to discredit civil rights movements.
Top
Letters both for and against desegregation and busing in Richmond.
Bottom
A revised summary of explanation of the policies for school desegregation plans under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
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Both sets of images are courtesy of James Branch Cabell Library Special Collections and Archives
Click above to play the performance and post-performance videos.
03
Docudrama
Our students performed the play Schooled: Racism, Resistance & Education in the gallery of University of Richmond Downtown—a cramped space whose pillars obstructed the view of some spectators. On the discussion panel afterwards, former school board president Lewis Booker remembered how his decision to back court-ordered school busing had led to death threats against him and his family as well as his dog being shot. Booker was proud of his decision to send all four of his children to Richmond Public Schools.