In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

norfolk under the old dominion, 1938–1954 t certainly was unusual. On June 25, 1939, at St. John’s African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in Norfolk, Virginia, over 1,200 African Americans signed a petition requesting that the city’s school board rehire chemistry teacher Aline Black, who had recently been dismissed from her position at nearby Booker T. Washington High School. Just prior to the St. John’s meeting, “a large number of Negro children, led by a Negro Boy Scout Drum and Bugle Corps, marched from the Dunbar School into the church, carrying banners.” Their procession route took them from the western edges of the mainly black Huntersville neighborhood through “the Harlem of the South,” Norfolk’s vibrant Church Street business district. Their banners and placards skillfully alluded to current events—like the rise of dictatorships in Europe—to stress the significance of the plight of Black, who had lost her annual contract with the school board when she challenged the district’s policy of separate and unequal salary scales for white and black faculty members. Accordingly, the march to St. John’s, the largest and oldest African American church in Norfolk, made for powerfully and intentionally corrosive street theater as the children walked past with their signs that stated, among other things: “‘Dictators—Hitler, Mussolini, Norfolk School Board,’ . . . ‘The Right of Petition Ought Not To Be Denied American Citizens,’ ‘Our School Board Has Vetoed the Bill of Rights,’ . . . ‘The School Board’s Method of Dealing With Colored Teachers is UnAmerican .’”1 Framing the school board’s racism as foreign and totalitarian made for good politics, while having over 100 children demonstrate was an absolute stroke of genius on the part of the local organizers: insurance salesman David Longley, dentist Dr. Samuel F. Coppage, attorney P. B. Young Jr., and railway mail clerk Jerry O. Gilliam.2 Their casting of children in chapter one DISCRIMINATION AND DISSENT I discrimination and dissent | 9 the march either consciously or unconsciously mocked the prevailing white Virginian view of blacks as unwanted and perpetually immature wards who would never dare to criticize the white establishment that ran the state. Whatever its dramatic intentions, this children’s procession was quite a spectacle, as collective demonstrations of African Americans protesting injustices were only too rare in Jim Crow Virginia, which had long prided itself on ostensibly harmonious and, in the judicious phrasing of historian J. Douglas Smith, “managed racial relations.” In return for fewer lynchings and hate crimes, Virginia’s blacks were supposed to be grateful and to show their gratitude by not challenging the separate and unequal status quo.3 That certainly extended to the sphere of public education, where teachers were paid differently because of race and, to a lesser degree, because of gender. This institutional inequality had long been resented, if accepted, by nearly all black teachers who were eager to eke out some kind of professional career within the confines of Jim Crow. That was the case in Norfolk until the NAACP encouraged the impeccably qualified Black, a twelve-year veteran of the school system and an Ivy League graduate, to petition, in October 1938, and, then, in March 1939, to file suit against the Norfolk School Board. Backed by her team of lawyers that featured Thurgood Marshall, Black’s defiant courage weakened the precepts of local paternalism that had always denied African American agency. Although she lost her case on June 1, 1939, just bringing it publicly emboldened and inspired others, if only temporarily and dramatically at St. John’s later in the month. On the other hand, the school board’s subsequent mistreatment of Black lessened black deference to white leadership. The school board not only released her without legitimate cause two weeks before the actual court decision, but then it had the audacity to charge her $4.01 for the school day that she had spent in Judge Allan Reeves Hanckel’s circuit court. This overreaction was obviously crass and displayed a seemingly un-Virginian kind of pettiness, which did worry the devotees of “managed racial relations” as much as it seemed to galvanize the crowd at St. John’s.4 Historians have closely analyzed the immediate causes and consequences of the Aline Black lawsuit and its even more famous follow-up, Alston v. School Board of the City of Norfolk (1940), but they have never connected the themes, individuals, institutions, and strategies featured in these familiar landmark events with similar ones found in such dramas as...

Share