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135 VIRGINIA 22 What I Learned When Massive resistance Closed My School Richard J. Bonnie I grew up in Norfolk, Virginia, in the 1950s. With a population of three hundred thousand and a thriving naval base, Norfolk had become the largest city in Virginia. Mine was a typical 1950s upbringing—very quiet and stable, with a Leave-It-to-Beaver flavor. I lived an insular life with a highly predictable routine—walk to school, walk to Hebrew lessons, wait for Mom to pick me up to take me to baseball games and piano lessons, then perhaps to Toastmaster’s Club, Children’s Theater, and so on. (In fact, baseball should be at the beginning of the sentence, since that was the most important part of my life—I even had to hide my Wildcats baseball uniform in the garage when my mother forbade me to play because the practices left too little time for homework.) My life typified growing up in the white professional class of the urban postwar South. I hardly ever saw any black people except the maids and gardeners who worked at my house and elsewhere in my neighborhood. There were certainly no black people in Granby Elementary School. My father, a dentist, had some black patients whom I would see on Wednesday afternoons after piano lessons, and on Saturday mornings after piano theory class. Aside from these occasional exposures, though, it was a lily-white existence. It was worse than that, really. It was a socially blind existence. I was oblivious to the world outside my extended family and the Jewish community. I didn’t notice the signs Whites Only or Colored on the restroom doors, in the movies, or over the water fountains. I never thought about the fact that our maid, Elsie, and the other maids slept in the hot upper floors of my house and all the neighboring houses. I never rode a bus at all, so I never noticed the segregated seating patterns. I don’t remember hearing about the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education. (I was in the fourth grade at the time.) Time passed, and I graduated from Granby Elementary School in June 1958. Then I grew up. In the late summer of 1958, the governor of Virginia, J. Lindsay Almond Jr., closed the white secondary schools in Norfolk rather than succumb to the 136 De Jure States and the District of Columbia directives of the federal courts. One of the schools closed was Northside Junior High, which I was scheduled to attend as an eighth-grader in the fall. I was thrust into the maelstrom of Massive Resistance at the very time that I was opening my eyes to the world around me and becoming conscious of my own identity—and of my responsibilities to others and to my community. I was scheduled to become a Bar Mitzvah in October 1958, so I was engaging in the sort of introspection that becoming a Jewish adult is supposed to invite. I did not realize it then, but I was being transformed. No longer did I aspire to become Mickey Mantle’s successor in centerfield for the yankees. Now I wanted to become a lawyer. And I also wanted to leave the South. I now hated being a Southerner. How did this happen? Despite an initially muted response to the Brown decision by many of Virginia’s leading politicians, including Governor Thomas Stanley and then attorney general Almond, strong opposition eventually emerged after U.S. senator Harry F. Byrd Jr. condemned the Supreme Court for striking a “serious blow” against the rights of the states. In August of 1954, Governor Stanley appointed a thirty-two-member commission (all white members of the General Assembly), chaired by state senator Garland Gray, to recommend a course of action in response to Brown. In November of 1955, the Gray Commission proposed that the General Assembly enact a pupil placement statute vesting plenary authority in the local school boards to assign pupils in a manner consistent with local welfare, providing that no child should be required to attend an integrated school, and authorizing tuition grants for parents who enrolled children in private schools to avoid integration. In the fall of 1956, a Special Session of the Virginia General Assembly rejected the Gray Commission’s approach—which would have allowed local school boards to adopt integration plans while allowing white parents to opt out of them—in favor of what became...

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