Elusive Equality: Desegregation and Resegregation in Norfolk's Public Schools

Introduction

he most popular vignettes in the history of Norfolk, Virginia, usually consist of the yellow fever disaster of 1855, Civil War and world war tributes, urban renewal, and, of course, the school closures crisis of 1958–59. These stories are the first to be related to newcomers and tourists, and, thankfully for the historian, all have been analyzed from a variety of perspectives by the area’s primary local newspaper, the Virginian-Pilot. In this tradition, reporter Denise Watson Batts recently provided an in-depth look at the school closures timed to come out on the fiftieth anniversary of those fateful events. In five parts, we revisited once again the impact of Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the state’s closure of six public schools in Norfolk to prevent desegregation, and the nearly 10,000 displaced students. Undermining that tradition, however, was Batts’s especially adept narrative style that brought to life the experiences of the students and their families. She did not simply rehash the familiar sequence of high politics in Richmond and at city hall that had manufactured the crisis; instead, she focused on the children and families as they experienced the crisis. The responses to Batts’s narrative, however, were mixed. Some online readers welcomed her fresh approach to an important epoch, but many more questioned the timing of the series during the historic candidacy of African American Barack Obama for the presidency of the United States. In this vein of commentary, Batts’s coverage was part of the liberal media’s politically motivated effort to galvanize black voters and disrupt hard-won racial harmony. The vehemence of the negative responses was unexpected by the reporter herself, who happens to be a longtime resident and native of the port city.1 Batts’s series was embraced, however, by Norfolk’s official establishment, which had set up a civic commission of notables to commemorate the event. The commission’s ostensible charge was to present all aspects of the crisis, but its title—the End of Massive Resistance—consciously or unconsciously fed into the confines of the long-held view of the school closures as an unfortunate detour in the port city’s inevitable progress toward prosperity, equity, INTRODUCTION T 2 | elusive equality and inclusion for everyone. This came out in the most minute of details. For example, the official Martin Luther King, Jr. Unity March and Program on January 19, 2009, took hundreds of folks, both white and black, past the official End of Massive Resistance sites: the Virginian-Pilot office of Pulitzer Prize–winning editor Lenoir Chambers, Judge Walter E. Hoffman’s federal courthouse, the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, and the Bute Street Baptist Church. Special guests—city officials, the Norfolk 17, and members of the white “Lost Class of ’59”—were given laminated parking passes, which featured a facsimile of the front page of the Virginian-Pilot of February 3, 1959. The headline read: “Schools Desegregated Peacefully: All Norfolk Classes Again Open; Negroes Pass Quiet Crowds.” Above the facsimile was a February 1, 2008, quotation from Mayor Paul Fraim declaring that the separate and unequal Norfolk of fifty years earlier was “gone forever.” The official story of the city moving forever upward had been captured here concisely in this souvenir for the VIPs.2 Beginning with the Unity March and Program, the consequent commemoration spawned a rich array of events, including a well-attended community forum with nationally known pundit Juan Williams as moderator, and chief justice of the Virginia Supreme Court Leroy Rountree Hassell Sr., William and Mary’s Arthur B. Hanson Professor of Law Davison M. Douglas, and Charles H. Ford himself as the panelists. Good and important changes did come from these events; the cowardice, noted by Attorney General Eric Holder Jr., of Americans in reference to race seemingly started to dissipate, at least in the port city, according to the Norfolk Historical Society’s Louis Guy, a member of the commission. Accordingly, the living members of the Norfolk 17, the first cohort of African American transfers to previously all-white schools, effusively thanked the commission and its collaborators; in turn, the commission, local universities, and others showered them with long-withheld attention and reverence. Members of the 17 and members of their longtime nemesis, the white “Lost Class of ’59,” began real friendships, with fifty-year-old ice finally starting to melt. Most unlikely was the scene of an elderly and repentant Judge Hal Bonney Jr., who was the most...