In the 1950s, rather than integrate its public schools, Virginia closed them
Not long after Patricia Turner and a handful of Black students desegregated Norview junior high school in Norfolk, Virginia, she realized a big difference between her new white school and her former Black school. That February of 1959, she didn’t have to wear a coat in class to stay warm, because Norview was heated.
She hadn’t noticed the difference earlier because of the steady volley of racism directed at her, Turner said. A teacher put her papers in a separate box and returned them wearing rubber gloves. (He later wrote her an apology letter.) And her fellow students spat on her.
“I had my mother, my dad, my church, my pastor, my God,” Turner said, explaining how she survived the daily assaults on her body and spirit.
Turner and 16 other Black students who attended six white schools under court-ordered desegregation were called the Norfolk 17, the young foot soldiers in the campaign against Virginia’s “Massive Resistance”, a state policy to oppose school desegregation. Rather than desegregate public schools after the 1954 US supreme court decision in Brown v Board of Education, which declared segregated education unconstitutional, Virginia officials closed some of them.
Massive Resistance was in place from 1956 to 1959. But in some places, schools weren’t desegregated until a decade after the Brown decision, longer than in any other state in the US south, making Virginia notorious, at the time, among civil rights advocates. The period is so seminal to its history that public school students are required to learn about it beginning in the fourth grade.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/27/integration-public-schools-massive-resistance-virginia-1950s
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I knew about this in Wisconsin at the time. RepubliQans don't want children to know about it.
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