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149 24 Urgent Conversations Earl C. Dudley Jr. I have been thinking about the significance of Brown v. Board of Education for most of my life. I was in the ninth grade at Herndon High School in Fairfax County, Virginia, when Brown was decided. Difficult as it may be to imagine today, that part of Fairfax County—now a populous, high-tech corridor—was then very rural and very Southern. As was the case in most of the rural South, there was little or no residential segregation. White folks and black folks lived right next to each other, for the most part quite amicably. But everything else was segregated—not just the schools, but the restaurants, the lunch counters, the theaters, and for the most part, even the stores. When the decision came down, it immediately became the only topic of conversation. As far as I ever discovered, I was the only student at Herndon High whose parents told him that the Supreme Court got it right. This was itself quietly remarkable, for both my parents had been born and raised in poor white families in Tidewater, Virginia. Indeed, I believe on the basis of anecdotal evidence that, at least before World War II, my father shared all the typical prejudices of his time and class. Three years in a Japanese internment camp during the war changed all that. I can honestly say that I never heard my father disparage any person or group on the basis of race, religion, or ethnicity. And before Brown there had been no occasion in my family to confront racial issues directly. So when we discussed the Supreme Court decision over dinner that first night, my parents explained to me that slavery had been a terrible thing, and that Negroes had been oppressed and mistreated even after slavery was abolished. All people were equal, Negroes had a right to the same education I was getting, and there was no reason that white and black children should not go to school together. What my parents said seemed unassailably logical and reasonable to me. What is more, it accorded with my own limited experience. Prior to the eighth grade I had attended a private school in Washington, D.C., that catered to the children of foreign diplomats, and thus I had gone to school with children of all racial backgrounds. And I had made friends with many American black children on the public buses that I rode each day to and from school. I was 150 De Jure States and the District of Columbia therefore profoundly shocked the next morning when my expression of support for the Court’s decision brought down on my head a great deal of abuse from my schoolmates, most of it verbal but some of it physical as well. I had a wonderful civics teacher that year, Patricia Alger, who decided to seize the moment to do a little educating. She spoke in quiet and reasoned tones about the decision and announced that she would hold a debate in class the following week on whether the Supreme Court was right or wrong. When she asked for volunteers for the debate, there were many for the prosegregation side, but initially I was the only one who stepped forward to support the decision. Mrs. Alger said she needed another volunteer because she wanted to have two-person debating teams. Finally, a very pretty and lively girl with an innate sense of fairness and the marvelous name of Dixie Lou Simpson volunteered to join me in defending the Court. Dixie’s parents, who had just moved to Northern Virginia from Alabama, certainly had not told her the Supreme Court got it right, and I am quite sure Dixie didn’t think so either. But she and I worked diligently together to prepare our arguments. After the debate was over, Mrs. Alger asked for a vote of who had won, and Dixie and I garnered a solid majority . I don’t mean we made converts, but at least Mrs. Alger got us talking in civilized tones, and Dixie and I gave the others something to think about. The next few years in Virginia were filled with not very civil arguments about race. Often the air was blue with racial epithets. Politicians in the state, led by then attorney general J. Lindsay Almond, made heated speeches and swore to resist integration to the end. Liberal and moderate voices were hard to hear in the din. A...

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