Will Norfolk's Schools Stay Open?

THE ATLANTIC

BY FORREST P. WHITE, M.D.

FEBRUARY 2, 1959, was a day to remember in my city of Norfolk, Virginia. On that day six formerly all-white junior and senior high schools, closed since the previous summer, opened their doors to seventeen Negro students. As desegregation thus began amid the crumbling ruins of Virginia’s “massive resistance” program, reporters and photographers from over fifty different newspapers and wire services were on hand to record the event. They had a rather dull day. The students arrived, went to school, went home again, and that was that.

It all looked simple, yet those of us who had worked for six months to get the schools opened could see how amazing it was, and how close it came to not happening. We face now an even bigger question, and a longer struggle: Will our schools stay open, and will they continue to be good schools?

Norfolk citizens have experienced the tragedy and futility of closed schools. Is it possible that they would permit them to be closed again, or undermined by insufficient funds? Unbelievable as it seems, there is ample evidence that they may. Norfolk City Council is pursuing appeal of a federal court order which prevented it from closing all grades above the sixth. In March the council took such a hefty cut out of the school budget that some important school facilities will have to be eliminated. In April a council-sponsored bill was hurried through the state legislature to bring the school board — a supposedly independent body — under closer council control. No voice has been raised by Norfolk’s leading citizens to protest any of these actions.

To understand this strange turn of affairs, it is necessary to review the events of the past year. During the summer of 1958 it became evident to those who had studied the problem that several Norfolk schools would not open. The majority of citizens dismissed this idea as “scare talk.”

I joined an informal group which was quietly contacting respected and conservative citizens. We asked them to join us in forming an organization to work for preservation of the public schools. We did not propose to work either for integration or segregation, but for public schools.

Most of those we approached were sympathetic in general, but said they could not come forward publicly in such a cause at that particular time. Typical was the reaction of one well-known Norfolk figure who heads a large health foundation’s local chapter. “I’m with you a hundred per cent,” he Said. “ However, you know my position. If I place myself in the forefront, it might harm my organization. Come back when you have your first hundred business leaders and I’ll be glad to join.”

The reasons of others were similar. Independent business leaders and small businessmen feared economic reprisals against their firms. Employed persons feared loss of job or prestige. City and state employees feared pressure from the political organization. Doctors, lawyers, and other professional people feared the effect on their practices. Ministers faced divided congregations. All local citizens feared subtle social pressures. Naval officers could take no prominent part. Perhaps most amazing of all, personnel of the large U.S. Public Health Service Hospital were quietly passed the word from Health, Education and Welfare headquarters in Washington that this was a “local affair" and that they should not take a public part.

Who was left? A small group of people, respectable but carrying no great weight in the community, who felt that the issue was so great and the demands so pressing that they must expose themselves to the risks involved. We organized the Norfolk Committee for Public Schools, dedicated to “every legal and honorable means” of keeping schools open. Many of the community leaders we talked to had urged us to wait before making a public move. Some indicated that they might help us later, but they felt that the time was “not right.”

Did these leaders later come forward when schools actually closed? When the school board urged that they be opened in spite of minimum integration? When the city council declared that an emergency existed and asked Governor Almond to open these schools segregated? When the governor replied that he was unable to open them segregated? Their silence was profound. No bank president, only one owner of a large business, no person ever elected First Citizen of Norfolk, no former director of the United Community Fund, no past president of a hospital board of directors, only one person outstanding in city government —in short, almost no one of real prominence declared himself openly as favoring public schools under the only conditions in which they could be maintained: with such integration as the federal courts ordered.

WHAT was the nature of the opposition that cowed the prominent into silence? The organized opposition came — and still comes — from a group named the Defenders of State Sovereignty and Individual Liberty. This is no White Citizens Council, no hood-wearing organization, It tries to be respectable and respected. When one of its members was found to be distributing “hate sheet” literature, the local chapter of Defenders passed a resolution condemning such actions. A typical speech by a Defender will begin, “I consider no man a greater friend of the Negro race than myself, but . . .”

The “buts” fall into two categories. First is the argument that the Supreme Court has made an “unconstitutional” decision, politically inspired under pressure from the NAACP, constituting an invasion of states’ rights and personal freedom and substituting “judicial legislation” for legal processes of constitutional change. Since thirty-six chief justices of the forty-eight state supreme courts had joined in a resolution censuring recent Supreme Court trends, we have found we cannot directly counter these anti-Supreme-Court arguments. Many members of our Norfolk Committee for Public Schools find in them some validity. What we are still trying to make people realize is that “massive resistance” policies do not defy the court, they merely consist of one of the two methods of obeying it. Closing schools is just as much compliance as is opening them with integration, and we consider the latter much less destructive for the South.

The second main category of the Defenders’ argument is that segregation is the only right and natural way of life ordained by God and nature, while integration is bad for both white and colored races and will lead to mass intermarriage. This, so the reasoning goes, is all part of a Communist plot to weaken America by “mongrelization of the races.” (“Amalgamation” is the word now used by the more fastidious of the Defenders.) The arguments range from open fear and distrust of the Negro to the very best of Southern paternalism: “The Negroes don’t know what’s best for their own race. We’ve always had to look after them and we will now, in spite of what the NAACP and other radical Northern groups have brainwashed them into thinking they want.”

On these two basic arguments the Defenders ring a thousand changes. Some of them awaken echoes in every Southern heart. Like Americans elsewhere, Southerners tend to take liberty for granted and equate liberty with being able to do as they please without coercion to do otherwise. Since the idea has been thoroughly sold that the Supreme Court is forcing the will of “nine politicians" on an unwilling region, it has brought forth a bitter resentment and stubborn determination unmatched in America since the Dred Scott decision. Add to this the racial purity theme, which rings its echoes from such dim recesses of the mind as harbor the childish fear of the bogeyman, plus every person’s need to find a scapegoat for his own shortcomings. The sum of all this is a tremendous emotional appeal for the anti-integration position.

When schools actually closed, the Defenders were ready with the Tidewater Educational Foundation, a nonprofit organization which was supposed to have classes in churches and other buildings throughout the city. Directors of the TEF appeared before the assembled teachers from the closed schools, explained the program, and asked the teachers to teach for them. Tables were set up with registrars ready to sign them up after the meeting. The teachers slowly filed out past the tables. Only one stopped to sign!

Did this mean that the teachers desired integration? It emphatically did not. It simply meant that the teachers stood for public education. They would not associate, even in an emergency, with an organization which pretended that adequate schooling could be given under private auspices and which avowedly hoped to replace public schools. Various tutoring groups were then set up on a temporary basis by parents, and the city settled down for a long and restless stalemate.

It soon became evident that the school board and the city council disagreed on the issue. Every member of both groups preferred segregation, and the school board had done everything legally possible to avoid assigning the seventeen Negroes to white schools. The board then took the position that schools must be reopened, even though some integration was inevitable. The council, on the other hand, determined to resist racial mixing to the bitter end.

Under massive resistance laws, the council and school board could jointly petition the governor to return the schools to their control. They could then open them desegregated without state funds. In October the school board went to the council and requested that they join in such a petition. Word leaked that the board would make the request, so the council reversed its usual agenda and quickly voted to hold an “informational refercndum.” It then heard the board s icquest and replied that nothing could be done until the referendum was held.

The referendum question was whether or not the council should petition the governor to return the schools. Tied to it was the provision, to be printed on the ballot “for information only,”that parents of all children in public school might then have to pay substantial tuition to keep their children in school.

Now that the issue was coming before the public in such a distorted fashion, did the civic and business leaders finally speak out? They did not! On November 18 the referendum was held, and the petition idea was rejected by a three-to-two margin. Only 22,000 people in this city of 300,000 voted, attesting both to the smallness of the electorate and to the confusion in people’s minds. All except one of the many PTA’s that had voted on pro-public school resolutions had passed them by big majorities, but the median age of registered voters in Norfolk is over fifty. Thus those who were most vitally affected were powerless at the polls.

EVEN before Our committee officially organized, there had been talk of legal action to force the opening of schools. This action was delayed, however, because the state government in September had arranged a “friendly suit" to test the legality of the massive resistance laws under the state constitution. The Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals was to hear the case on November 24. As the weeks rolled by and the political leaders refused to budge from their massive resistance position, we decided that the issue should also be tested in federal court, without waiting for the state court’s decision. We could not sue as a group, but many individuals who wished to take legal action had contacted us. Now we suggested that they go ahead with litigation and informed them that the members of the Norfolk Committee for Public Schools would undertake to pay for it.

Here was an absolutely new wrinkle in school litigation. Up to this point, all suits in the integration controversy throughout the South had been brought in behalf of Negro plaintiffs. It was inevitable that the NAACP would soon enter suit to prove what James vs. Almond was expected to prove: that if a state is to have public schools, they must be available to all on an equal basis. Why bother with a suit by white litigants, if the NAACP would do the job anyway? Responsible persons felt that since all but seventeen of the ten thousand locked out of school were white students, the litigation should be in their behalf. The reaction to the eventual decision would be better throughout the state under these circumstances.

James vs. Almond was heard by a three-judge federal court on November 19. Five days later the Virginia Supreme Court heard the state’s friendly case. An uneasy quiet then prevailed as word of the decisions was awaited.

The city council was not entirely idle, however. Late in November, in passing the budget for 1959, they made funds available to the school board on a month-to-month basis. This was obviously a threat to close Negro schools, a move which Governor Almond had rejected at the state level as “recriminative.”

Opinion about Norfolk throughout the remainder of the state underwent a change during this period. It has often been said in the past that Norfolk is “not Virginian,” that it is run by a bunch of outsiders who are not interested in Virginia traditions and who are “soft on integration.”

Such statements were usually made by politicians from Southside Virginia, the area of high-percentage Negro population and the stronghold of die-hard segregationism. It was these politicians who had rammed the massive resistance statutes through the legislature. They had threatened dire reprisals if Norfolk did not hold the line against integration. After the referendum vote and the council’s get-tough policy, this belligerent attitude softened.

Weeks went by with no word from either court. Finally, at the turn of the year, both courts announced that they would render their decisions on January 19. On January 13, the city council by a six-to-one margin voted not to appropriate funds for any grades above the sixth for February and the succeeding months. That blew the lid off. Thousands more white and Negro students were to be locked out of school. Within forty-eight hours a new suit was filed in federal court with eighty-nine white litigants challenging this action. The suit was scheduled to be heard January 26.

On January 19 the long-awaited decisions came, and both state and federal courts demolished the massive resistance laws. Massive resistance as state policy still stood, however, and the next night Governor Almond made a highly emotional, violently segregationist radio and TV speech to the people, vowing that he had only begun to fight.

MEANWHILE, the business leaders of Norfolk, finally aroused by the council’s latest action and encouraged by the lone dissenting vote of councilman Roy Martin, came out with a well-publicized statement that public schools were essential to the economic life of Norfolk. It was signed by a hundred citizens, including almost all of the leaders we had been trying for months to get to take some action. It was almost too late, but they had finally spoken.

Next day, on January 26, federal district judge Walter Hoffman heard the case against the council’s ‘little massive resistance” move and twentyfour hours later issued a sweeping injunction to prevent the council from closing any schools.

Norfolk schools then stood scheduled to reopen integrated on February 2, but there was a final stumbling block in a special session of the state legislature called for January 28. New and disastrous delaying tactics were expected, for the Southside was adamant against racial mixing, and the Southside controlled the legislature.

This was the situation when Governor Almond addressed the convening joint session at 1 P.M., January 28. Expecting further plans of defiance, the lawmakers were stunned to hear the governor admit that he had no weapons left to prevent integration in Virginia. In bitter but realistic tones, he stated that in a direct conflict between state and federal government the federal power was bound to overcome the state’s right and authority. The Southside cried “traitor” and threw in a whole hopperful of bills to block reopening of schools. None of them passed. Control of the legislature had passed to the governor, and there it remained, by a razor-thin margin, through another emergency session in April.

No single key unlocked the door to Norfolk’s schools. In retrospect, certain things had to happen which seemed disastrous at the time. It was necessary, I believe, for the federal suit to be filed by white people; the reaction against another NAACP suit might have tipped the balance toward further defiance. Norfolk’s referendum vote and the council’s stringent anti-integration measures were probably essential in preventing a successful “stop-Norfolk” move by the Southside. On the other hand, without the courageous stand of the school board and the teachers, Norfolk might have found itself with only a disintegrating secondary school system to return to. Before the governor dared make his dramatic shift to publicschools, he had to be sure that the large body of Norfolk citizens would accept it peaceably. The demonstrations of size and strength of the Norfolk Committee for Public Schools, the attitude of Norfolk legislators, the work of local ministers, and finally the statement of the hundred business leaders convinced him that this was so. To be successful in his policy switch, it was essential for Governor Almond to have followed massive resistance down to a final resounding defeat, and the defeat had to occur in both state and federal courts. Finally, it was probably necessary for schools to be closed long enough for students to want to return and for the entire community to feel the economic noose begin to tighten. All people of Norfolk except the most bitter segregationists were anxious that school reopening should be peaceful. No attempt at creating a disturbance would have been tolerated, and none was made.

Schools are open now, and complacency reigns again. People refuse to believe that the council really plans to undermine the public schools, in spite of its budget cut and other policies. The latest example was appointment to the school board on June 30 of the former president of the segregationist Tidewater Educational Foundation.

On July 14 the Democratic primary election for the state legislature was held. Ardent segregationists attempted to replace many moderate legislators. Over the state as a whole, the vote failed to show a clear preference between moderates and massive resisters. However, a slight overall increase in strength for Governor Almond’s realistic approach apparently resulted. Norfolk voters gave their first clear-cut indication of a strong desire for public schools and a grudging acceptance of some integration as inevitable. All six moderate incumbents were re-elected. For two vacant seats in the lower house, the predominantly white precincts split their votes among three massive resisters, two liberal moderates, and two who attempted to get support from both sides. With the unsolicited help of the Negro vote, the two most liberal candidates were easily elected.

WHAT is the basis for Norfolk’s seemingly suicidal trend of events, for the complacency of the city that suffered with the“ Lost Class of’59”? The ghosts of massive resistance die hard. People seem to have the idea that if public schools are weakened, private schools will spring up to take over the job of education. Surplus public school buildings will be sold to private corporations, and all the “ nice” children will attend these segregated schools supported by state tuition grants.

It may take more years of litigation to dispel the tuition grant idea, but the final answer is already written for all who are not too blind to see it: what the state is forbidden by the federal Constitution to do directly, it cannot do indirectly. Just as the state’s whole public education system almost foundered on the refusal to admit a few Negroes to white schools, so will the entire tuition grant system inevitably founder when a federal judge finds that a Negro child has been barred for reasons of race from a private school where children are receiving any kind of tax-supported aid. Recognizing this fact, most of the established private schools of Norfolk have already refused to certify their pupils for purposes of state tuition grants.

Still, the private school illusion persists. It has snob appeal, and it postpones the facing of the ultimate issue: either to allow such integration as the federal courts order or to abandon tax-supported education altogether. The great fear of those of us who continue to work for public schools is that this issue will be postponed too long. Then, when the final legal denouement comes, we will find both public and private schools so weakened that the education of all our children will suffer. This will happen, I am convinced, unless the true leaders of the community speak out. They must force the people and the politicians to face the issue squarely before it is too late. They came out once in Norfolk, spoke briefly, and disappeared again. Now they must come out, stay out, and grapple with the problem on its own terms.

If non-Southerners can understand the difficulties and complexities that face us in Norfolk, they may be able to make more realistic decisions about what to expect of the South. The Supreme Court decision gives the pro-integration forces the responsibility of using such a powerful weapon with wisdom and caution, in spite of many advantages and the absence of physical violence, we have only partially succeeded in stemming the anti-publicschool tide in Norfolk. That tide could not be stemmed at all in many areas of the South.

From my activities as treasurer and later as president of the Norfolk Committee for Public Schools, I believe I can qualify as a working Southern moderate. A moderate in the South today is not one who works for school integration. Rather he is a person who works for reason and sanity and racial peace, no matter what his personal feelings arc about the wisdom or legality of integration. Speaking as such a moderate, I would say to the non-South: “Don’t expect too much of us. Our situation is precarious, and the forces ranged against moderation are great. Please don’t unwittingly aid those forces. With your help and patience, we will continue to work, within the framework of the law, for the best possible public schools for all children of the South.”

The South must learn, as Norfolk has learned, that the Supreme Court interpretation of federal law cannot be disobeyed. The business and civic leaders of the South must learn, as ours in Norfolk have only partially learned, that they cannot avoid the issue. To do so invites civic disaster. Although the decision may be a bitter one for many, they must stand firm for a logical and realistic approach to the dilemma. Failure to do so creates a vacuum which is soon filled by the emotional appeals of the bitter-end segregationists.

The price of leadership is dear, for to speak out against the prevailing emotional tide is to invite reprisals, from the cold snubs of old acquaintances to threats of physical violence. Vet those who lead in the other aspects of community life cannot avoid the responsibility of leading in this, the most important issue of our generation. This is true not only in Norfolk, but throughout Virginia and the entire South. The nation can only wait to see if the South’s true leaders accept the challenge of this responsibility.